Typography is one of those words that you hear banded about by graphic designers. It’s all about the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols used to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed.
The typefaces you choose as part of your visual design for your e-learning have as big an impact on your learning design, as the images, colours or layout you use. As instructional designers we pull out the content we need from our SME’s, and determine how to communicate it to our learners. Getting our visual design right on top of this, creates a compelling case for learning to take place and ultimately, change to occur.
To use typefaces well, it’s important to understand the various styles, and then how these styles go together.
But first, what’s the difference between a typeface and a font?
- A typeface is the design of the collection. The look, style and feel.
- A font is the embodiment of a collection of letters, numbers, symbols, etc. It’s referred to as a font whether it’s a case of metal pieces to be used in a printing machine, or a true type font (.TTF) computer file.
For example, Arial is a typeface, but Arial Black, Arial Narrow and Arial Rounded MT Bold are fonts.
The style of a typeface is the first thing we need to understand before we can effectively use them in our design. By understanding the various styles, it makes it easier to mix and match them and make the type in our designs look good.
This is just a snippet from our free eBook! Designing for Non Designers – Typography. Download it here.
Matt Blackstock shares helpful tips on how to use Typography to help you design better eLearning. Find out about a number of different styles to use, where to get fonts, some general rules of thumb, and how to combine fonts for a better design.