Learn about basic type language.
- [Instructor] Typography is the word used to describe the artist selecting and arranging type to make his display legible, easy to consume, and appealing. It's an essential component of the graphic design skillset, and you're going to need to develop an understanding of at least the essential typographic terms and conventions. You'll discover it has a language all of its own that's evolved over centuries, and it's still in use today even in our digital world when we're talking about type. You don't have to learn it all at once, though.
In this chapter, we'll be covering the essentials, and you can learn more as you progress. And I can highly recommend the courses by Anna Schultz and Charles Nicks as further viewing when you're ready to dive a little more deeper into the topic later. But for now, we're going to cover some of the most basic terms, some of which you may well know already. So, let's see what your basic typographic knowledge is like. In the word on the screen now, I have one uppercase glyph, or character, at the start of this word.
We often call these caps, or capitals, too. The remainder of the type is in lowercase. And they actually get these names from the days of compositing when the type, made of metal, would be kept in wooden cases in upper and lower rows, just in case, no pun intended, you were wondering. Type sits along a line called the baseline. It's invisible to us most of the time, and I say that because some applications like Illustrator display it when you're adding or moving type around.
And this is perhaps the most important line for us to be aware of, as it forms the basis of other measurements, as you'll see later in this chapter. Above the baseline is our second most important line, properly known as the meanline. But most people refer to it as the X-height in practice. And it's the line that determines the height relationship between the upper and lowercase characters. Now, there are other lines, but they're used in the construction of the type by the type designer, and we don't need to concern ourselves with those, really.
For now, you've just discovered the ones you mainly need to be concerned with.
Author
Released
2/27/2018- The creative process
- Layout and composition
- Grids
- Typography
- Color
- Transforming images and assets in Photoshop
- Drawing logos in Illustrator
- Designing graphics and documents in InDesign
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
Views
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Introduction
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Welcome1m 52s
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What is graphic design?1m 40s
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1. The Creative Process
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The creative brief1m 35s
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Research54s
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Ideation2m 41s
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Production2m 21s
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2. Layout and Composition
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The design space2m 50s
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Principles of layout2m 30s
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Grids1m 57s
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Exercise: Layout analysis1m 16s
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3. Typography
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The language of type2m 18s
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Type terminology3m 4s
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Type anatomy4m 41s
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Basic type classifications4m 47s
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Ligatures2m 17s
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Type measurement1m 59s
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Text elements: Character8m 4s
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Text elements: Paragraph6m 32s
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Selecting type4m 35s
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Basic typography guidelines6m 41s
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Type crimes4m 59s
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4. Color
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Color components3m 32s
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Monochrome and temperature3m 24s
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Color harmonies4m 23s
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RGB and CMYK4m 48s
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Process and spot colors4m 37s
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Color associations1m 19s
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Color blindness2m 51s
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5. Photoshop
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Photoshop quick start tour4m 14s
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Selectively changing colors4m 45s
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Cropping an image3m 24s
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6. Illustrator
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Illustrator quick start3m 18s
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Importing a rough sketch6m 7s
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Drawing the logo6m 20s
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Creating a color theme5m 44s
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Using the Touch Type tool3m 32s
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Creative Cloud libraries6m 40s
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7. InDesign
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InDesign quick start tour1m 54s
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Creating a new document1m 43s
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Working with master pages6m 53s
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Importing text into InDesign5m 58s
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Creating tables in InDesign7m 58s
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Finalizing the design5m 37s
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Conclusion
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Recommended courses1m 10s
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Video: The language of type