Typographic Conventions

Like the spatial and organizational principles we're looked at so far, these conventions straddle aesthetics and syntax. They're part form, part grammar. We'll start by looking at line breaks. Ideally, each line should break in a place that doesn't interrupt its rhythm. If a word needs to be broken with a hyphen, it should be broken between syllables and it should never be broken into a chunk smaller than three letters long. One or two-letter words shouldn't be left hanging at the end of a line because visually our eyes will tend to dissociate them from the rest of the text. So they should be dropped down to the next line.

Similarly, single words or parts of words shouldn't left on their own at the bottom of a paragraph. You can fix this issue by playing with the line breaks in the proceeding lines. Nor should single lines of a paragraph be left stranded on their own. The first line of a paragraph alone at the bottom of a page is called an orphan. The last line of paragraph alone at the top of a page is a widow.

As you'll remember the right uneven side of a block of left-aligned text is called a rag. It's uneven by nature, but it's most pleasing visually when it's uneven in an even way, like a cone.

A rag that is too even is distracting because it's almost straight but not quite. And a rag that is to uneven is distracting because it makes distinctive shapes. In a design you can try to achieve a good rag by tweaking the hyphenation settings and line length. But usually you'll end up as designers say doing the rag, manually creating line breaks with soft returns and hyphens. If you are setting justified text, the same rules regarding line breaks apply. In fact, justify text is even trickier to line break because of the danger of creating rivers of white space.

Besides breaking words to create line breaks, hyphens are also used in compound words like left-wing or pre-owned. Other kinds of dashes serve other functions. En dashes are longer than hyphens. Their one end long which is half an M. And they're used to signal a range and if you're anywhere you might use the word to. For example July to August or six to seven feet. Dashes are longer still. One long. These dashes are used like commas to set a phrase apart in text.

Dashes are also used to attribute a quote to a speaker. Incorrect use of dashes is one of those common typographic errors designers love to point out. Another is the confusion of foot and inch marks with quotation marks. As you can see, they are actually quite different. Foot and inch marks are wedge shaped. Single and double quotation marks are curved and come in left right pairs. In design, there's an option to turn on smart quotes, which automatically puts the correct marks around quotations.

Numbers and Figures

Most contemporary text typefaces have four different kinds of numbers or figures. The figures were used to seeing our lining figures. Like uppercase letters, lining figures start at the baseline and end at the cap height metric. A more traditional form of figures are old style figures like lowercase letters, these figures have ascenders and descenders. It's easy to remember when to use which kind of figures. Lining figures should be used whenever uppercase letters are used such as in titles. And old style figures wherever lowercase letters are used like in text.

Figures also often come in both proportional and tabular versions. Proportional figures are spaced like any other character but some characters taking up more space and others less. By contrast, tabular figures are mono-spaced, meaning that each figure takes up the same horizontal space as the next. Tabular figures are useful in charts and mathematical equations where you need the figures to line up vertically.

Capital Letters

Just as figures come in a version for text and a version for titling so to do capital letters. Capital letters meant for setting in text are called small caps. They have the shape of normal capitals, but their height is close to the x height of the lowercase. You use small caps anywhere all capitals appear in text, such as in acronyms.

The exception is peoples' initials, which always appear in uppercase capitals. Another set of characters designed to give text a smooth appearance are ligatures. Two letter forms that are linked together as one character. Most typefaces include these basic ligatures. But some also include others.

All of these conventions may seem esoteric. But when combined with the spacial and organizational principles we discussed in the last few videos, they'll add a final degree of professional polish to your typography.