Typography – The artistic arrangement of type in a readable and visually appealing way. Typography usually concerns the design and use of various typefaces in a way that helps to better visually communicate ideas.

• Body Copy – Type that is designed with the objective of attracting attention. Think of movie titles on posters, article titles in magazines, newspaper headlines, etc.
• Hierarchy – The visual arrangement of design elements in a way that signifies importance. For example, you might make a title big and bold to ensure it attracts more attention than a small, lightly colored image caption.
• Kerning – The adjustment of space between two characters in your type. Kerning usually aims to achieve a more proportional and pleasing balance of space between each character.
• Leading – Pronounced ‘ledding’, leading refers to the space between lines of type. Overly tight leading can cause tension and overlap, making the content unreadable, and too-loose leading can equally make the type appear disjointed, so we usually try to find a nice balance between the two.
• Tracking – Tracking concerns the space between letters. When we track bodies of text, we are adjusting space between every letter in a word in order to change the density or appearance of a large block of type (i.e. body copy). Tracking shouldn’t be confused with kerning, which concerns the adjustment of space between individual pairs of letters.
• Ascenders – The part of a lowercase letter that extends above the x-height. Some common examples of this are ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘f’, etc.
• Decenders – The part of a lowercase letter that extends below the x-height. Some common examples of this are ‘g’, ‘j’, ‘p’, etc.
• Orphans & Widows – The words or short lines that appear by themselves at the top or bottom of a column of type. It’s always a good (and easy) idea to check over your body copy before finishing up, and manually removing these when they appear.
• Serif – A typeface with small decorative strokes (called ‘serifs’) found at the end of horizontal and vertical lines. Serif typefaces tend to look professional, authoritative, and traditional in appearance.
• San-Serif – A typeface without the small decorative serif strokes. Sans serifs tend to look more modern, stylish, and cleaner than their serif counterparts.
• Script – A typeface that mimics cursive handwriting. Script typefaces tend to look elegant, personal, and/or more casual, depending on how embellished they are.
• Slab face – A typeface with thicker, blockier serifs, very commonly used in headlines and titles, but rarely in body copy. Slab serifs tend to look sturdier, stronger, and bolder.
• Legibility – The measure of how easy it is to distinguish one letter from the next. Legibility has a lot to do with your choice of typeface and how you use it, i.e. simpler serif or sans serif typefaces are generally better for smaller body copy.
• Alignment – The lining up of elements to achieve balance, order, and a more logical layout. There are also four common types of typographical alignment – center, left, right, and justified, each with their own time and place for application.