Typography Principles You Need to Know Part One

Before you become famous for creating the next best typeface, you have to learn the basics of type design. The first step to perfecting any new font is adjusting the leading, kerning and tracking, which affect the line spacing, letter spacing, and text to make it proportional and readable.

What are these essential elements of typographic design? Well, here’s a fairly comprehensive breakdown of each term and how you can adjust them in Photoshop and Illustrator.

Maybe you've heard terms like kerning, leading, tracking, and hierarchy. For those with more experience, these concepts are essential for creating professional-looking designs.

As a beginner, you don't need to know everything about these terms. just enough to inform your work and help you talk about design with more confidence. 

Leading 

The distance between lines in a body of text. The word ‘leading’ originates from the strips of lead. hand-typesetters used to space out lines of text evenly. The word leading has stuck, but essentially it’s a typographer’s term for line spacing. 

If you have any type of paragraph or anything with multiple lines of text, you have to really pay attention to the leading. 

Too tight and your text will appear cramped and require the reader to squint in order to read it. Too loose and it gets hard to read as the reader gets lost due to the large gaps in between where it’s too spread out to keep track as you read along. 

Leading is one of the quickest and simplest tweaks you can do to make your text look instantly better. Increasing the leading allows the text to breathe and makes it appear instantly more attractive for your invitation card.