I'm going to show you how professional designers use fonts so that when you use fonts, it will look good.
My name is Tim Brown, and I'm Head of Typography here at Adobe.
I've been making websites and practicing typography for 20 years, even wrote a book about it.
Typography is how text looks, and how text looks can totally change how it feels.
Typography can seem trustworthy, exciting, official, casual, elegant, really, however you want it to seem.
Typography can also make text feel appropriate and familiar, which can be like what you'd expect, or a little unexpected, which can be memorable.
Typography is a vital part of how we talk to each other, how we learn, how we find our way, and how we decide which products and services to use every day.
In this series Typography Basics, we'll build a personal system, simple repeatable exercises you can use to improve any project with typography even if you're not a designer.
The key is it will break typography down into jobs.
Typography does all sorts of jobs.
Calling our attention on storefronts and marketing messages, helping us read comfortably, helping us process and understand information and lots more.
Now that can be a little overwhelming when it's time to decide how you want something you're making to feel.
So it helps to focus on parts of typography to identify the job, the text is doing in those parts, and make decisions that help the text do that job well.
And often, a single project will have several pieces of text doing different jobs that's normal, like a birthday invitation, for example.
They might catch your attention with a big piece of typography and then give you information or an article that helps you read comfortably, but also scan for information.
Websites and apps, they benefit from legible text, and clear navigation.
Typography is one of the most important skills you can develop to help yourself succeed and to create more impactful, authentic work.
That's a big topic.
So let's get started.
First, we'll look at text for reading.
After that, we'll talk about getting people's attention.
Then we'll cover guiding people through information.
And finally, we'll consider how to evoke the right feeling for any project And with this basic typography knowledge you can improve whatever you're working on.
Each section we'll go through focuses on an exercise that you can repeat again and again to build your skills and it comes with an example project.
So first, I'll show you how to do it and then you try.
As you'll see throughout the series, typography is very straightforward.
We'll take it step by step. -
