From the course: Type Tips
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Optical type sizing
- [Instructor] This week's type tip is about sizing type and how confusing that can sometimes be. What we have here on screen are three different typefaces, I serif, I sans serif and I script. And they are all at the same size. Obviously, visually, they look very different. So the point here is that the point size doesn't necessarily tell the whole story. It can sometimes be misleading. But you'll see that each of these pieces of type is at 12 points. So why do they look so different? And here you see those three different fonts overlapped at the same type size. Well, partly it's a legacy of the days of metal type, when the point size actually referred to the amount of the type block that was occupied by the letter. And that has been carried through into digital time. And here we have a couple of screen shots from an application called FontLab. And FontLab is used to create typefaces and here I'm comparing a G from Helvetica, with a G from Bickham Script. And we see that each of these…
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