The use of terms like leading, baseline, kerning, ascender, tail, and many others in type design can be intimidating to some people. The good news is that there are eight fundamental, universal elements of typographical design: typeface, hierarchy, contrast, consistency, alignment, white space, and color.
Any design project can be completely transformed by even a fundamental comprehension of each of these components. Typographical principles aren’t just arbitrary aesthetic philosophies some pretentious design student made up, they are techniques to help you present your ideas to viewers and get the most out of each word. The principles, that address each of these elements, revolve around one central idea: good communication. Notice the small embellishments at the ends of the lines on the serif font, circled in red. Good typography is essential for any situation where you want to convey an idea to another person through text, such as a website, blog post, magazine ad, interface, billboard, or newsletter. Those are actually referred to as “serifs,” hence the category’s name. Since “sans” means “without,” all fonts without serifs are known as “sans-serif.” Decorative fonts are those that don’t really fit into either of those categories. They are often used for titles and are creative, elaborate fonts. When working on a design project, two fonts are frequently preferable to the maximum of three. It keeps your design simple and free of clutter. Try to pair serif fonts with sans-serif fonts, such as using a serif font for the body text and a sans-serif font for the title, or vice versa. Because they frequently have poor readability and simply won’t look right most of the time, use decorative fonts sparingly and almost never for main-body text.
