The Hoggblog: a freelance creative's blog

Designers know all about typography. (Well, some at least). But some typography techniques that I’m sure a few of us were taught are now often sadly neglected. Maybe the digital age is slightly to blame for this, but I suspect that budgets and deadlines are more of a factor. A lack of time does lead to a lack of craft. And if anyone thinks I am being a bit grumpy old man about this, well, I probably am. Er, Sorry. I have just listed 6. I am sure there are more………..

1) Hung Punctuation. Body copy just looks so much better with hung punctuation. Indesign even provides an optical margin alignment feature, so all you have to do is tick a box. There’s no excuse not to do it really.

2) Getting rid of the rivers. More a print problem than a digital one – but still something to consider with fixed type online. Rivers are tricky to get rid of, and take some careful tinkering. Sorting your H+Js properly usually goes along way to solving the issue, be brave, H+Js seem complex, but actually they’re fairly simple.

3) Avoiding ligatures. A simple matter of correct kerning, but I bet we’ve all seen lots of squashed fi’s around. Unforgivable in headlines.

4) Avoiding ascender and descender clashes. Sometimes hard to avoid. But correct leading solves this, and careful use of the line-height declaration in web design.

5) Sorting the 1 and 0 kerning pair. Marketing is full of prices, they can’t be avoided, with 1′s and 0′s always appearing together. It’s really simple to apply the correct kerning here, not sure why it is done so infrequently.

6) Hyphens, en dash and em dash. Is this one a little picky? Well yes, but so what, it all has to be right, doesn’t it? I must admit, I often neglect this one, but I try, I try….