[MUSIC] So, Zach, it's been a wonderful, fascinating ride through visual. Why should I spend any time as a content strategist thinking about type and typefaces, and all of those things? >> Well typefaces actually say quite a bit. I mean, if we look at the history of the written word or the typed word, they have pictorial links. They have links to the past, we used to make images to convey messages. But now that those got abstracted out to actual sounds, we still like to emphasize things by using things like bold. Or italicize thing to make sure that it's differentiated from the rest of the type. So there are lots of things that we still need type to do and it can actually bring a lot of character to the message that you're trying to tell. So I should talk a little bit about typography, which is the art of setting type, and typography conveys meaning. Let me go over some of the basics for you. The most basic thing to know about typography are there are two major categories of typefaces, Serif and Sans Serif. And a lot of you are probably familiar with these or at least the different typefaces that fall under these two categories. The first one is Serif. So Serif means it has these little flares, these little pieces of character that really differentiate the letters from one another. The typefaces you probably know, Times New Roman, Garamond, there are numerous Serif fonts out there. Sans Serif means without the Serif. They're more modern, they're more clean, most of you probably know Helvetica, Ariel. So these are typefaces that don't have Serifs on them. Moving on from the typefaces, one way that you can differentiate type from one another is by size, size to add emphasis, size to add prominence. You can also use weight. Size and weight are really strong ways of differentiating some pieces of type from another. Which can really help clarify your message as to what's important and what's not as important, thinking about the hierarchy of things and the hierarchy of your message. Well, here we have the word friendly. Friendly is in a really light weight. It seems very friendly. It's conveying meaning. We think about war, it's a lot heavier. It's got a lot more weight to it. If we just take a moment and look at these two words and the way the type treatment is played out on them, one really does feel friendly and one does really feel like war. It's amazing what weight and size can do when we're thinking about typography. The next thing I want to talk about is Kerning. And so Kerning is actually the space between letters. Kerning can help you make something breathe or you can suffocate it. You can bring it together tightly. So you're starting to see that there's a lot of different ways in which you can convey meaning just through how you space out letters, how much weight you give it, how much size you give it. It can actually say a lot about the content that's contained within it. Leading, so leading is an old term that actually has to do with lead, which type used to be set with. But it's the space between lines. This actually has a lot to do with the readability of your content. So if you think about type that has really tight leading, it can be really hard to get through because your eye gets lost on the way back to find the next line. But if you have a good amount of leading, it's really easy for your eye to differentiate between the lines, coming back to this Questa idea of continuation. It becomes really easy for your eye to follow a line to its end and then pick up on the next line. So leading really adds to the readability of your type. Padding, padding is important in that it can be abused, and it can make things hard to read. Padding is important when dealing with a background with type. Well, here we have an example, which is kind of hard to read, in which the type has no padding to the background, there's no space around it so it's kind of hard to distinguish the letter from the background and where to start. It sort of runs in to everything else. But if you add a little more padding into it, it becomes a lot more graceful. It's really easy for your eye to move into that first line. It's got space to navigate. You have to think about eye flow. Capitalization, something as simple as making matters capital can actually convey a great deal of meaning. Here we have an example, friend and foe. Friend feels like friend because it's all lower case, it's not imposing. Foe feels a little more imposing. It's all capital letters, it's louder and you see people do this on the Internet all the time. Typing in all caps is like yelling on the Internet. And here, if we also use weight in addition to capitalization, friend feels even friendlier, it's a light weight. Foe feels a lot more imposing, it's got a lot more weight and it's yelling. It wants to make sure that you know that this is a foe. So there are lots of ways in which you can add a little bit of meaning to typography. Obviously there's a lot more to the art of typography, but these basics should help get you going. [MUSIC]
