Type crimes

- [Instructor] Hi, Detective Serif here. In this movie, we're going to take a look at some of the things that are considered crimes in the world of typography, and that you should try and avoid at all costs. First offender is the common amateur crime of distorted type, which has been scaled horizontally or vertically. Usually perpetrated because offenders think it will fill the space better and it looks fine. It doesn't, and it doesn't. Another common offender is a double space following a period or a full stop.

This practice goes back to the days of typewriters that required monospaced characters for mechanical reasons, and since the advent of proportional type in digital fonts, it's an outlaw, avoid it. Next up is the double hyphen to indicate a break in a sentence. This is acceptable if you're typing a thank you letter to your grandmother, but if you're setting text inside of a proper document for printing or display, it's another crime.

You should instead use an M dash in its place. Now some applications will automatically substitute that for you if you type a double hyphen, but otherwise, you'll need to type it manually. On a Mac, that's SHIFT + OPTION + HYPHEN. And on Windows you can try one of these two things. ALT + CONTROL + MINUS, or hold down the ALT key and type 0151, and that will get you the correct character.

Here's the next crime, in some places, you may decide to use Roman type in a vertical orientation. And these characters were never designed to be stacked. Now if you're typing in Chinese that's fine because the characters are designed to support that pretty much, but if you feel you must do it, then use caps or small caps, as that at least makes it look more solid. The last one is what I like to call ATFATT, all the fonts, all the time.

Unless you're creating retro gig or vintage theatrical posters, limit your usage to three fonts at most in a project, and ideally two. As mentioned elsewhere in this chapter, it's best to use font families that support a range of weights to add variation, than switch fonts. Now there are a host of other things considered transgressions by serious type aficionados, but you'll get to those as you learn more and get deeper into the topic.

Just try and stay clear of those type crimes for now. Alright, now while we're on the subject of crimes, I would like just to take a moment to talk about font licensing and where you get fonts from, as it's a very important concern, and you could potentially end up on the wrong side of the actual law. The best advice I can give you in regards to obtaining fonts is purchase them from a reputable source, such as MyFonts, FontShop, LinerType, and others.

Be very wary of cheap and free websites. We should all know that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and what you might be getting may be more than you bargained for. Often wrongdoers use fonts to hide malicious code that could wreak havoc with your computer, and possibly even worse. They may also be redistributing software that actually belongs to someone else. Fonts are always licensed, you do not own them, and they are a piece of software with an end-user license agreement.

And you might be surprised to know that in certain countries, illegally sharing fonts is actually a criminal act with severe penalties. It's so important that when you package a document from the Adobe Creative Cloud applications, you'll get this warning just to remind you of your obligations in law, and Adobe don't want to be your unwitting accomplice. If you are a Creative Cloud subscriber, then you'll have access to thousands of fonts that sync to your desktop, and you can have quite a large number, I think it's about 100, and just un-sync the ones you're not using, all via Typekit.

That's great news for your pocket, and for your peace of mind, especially if you're just starting out and money is tight. Creative Cloud will always ask you if you don't have a font installed, and if it's from Typekit, to automatically sync it for you too. So you don't need to keep quite so many synced all the time. Just be very careful what you do with things from sites that say they're free, or also from accepting font software for other people if you're not processing the document.