You’re missing the forest for the trees, and you come away with the wrong impression entirely.įrank isn’t the only person writing about this. Paying attention to the shape of individual letters without paying attention to how the font works in the whole of the design work is sort of like picking a partner based on their eye colour and BMI. Basis’s oddities become less noticeable when typeset smaller, and the proportions of Avenir (it’s roundness, it’s size contrast between upper- and lowercase letters) go further in establishing the typeface’s fingerprint and impacting the text’s atmosphere. The typeface with traditional letter shapes (Avenir) reads more distinctively than the typeface with quirks in its design (Basis). My bet is that most people would identify Avenir as the more “flavorful” typeface in a paragraph context. It’s the opposite of what a reasonable person would expect. But then he shows them each in paragraphs. He concludes that a reasonable person would presume, based on the letterforms alone, that Avenir is less quirky than Basis Grotesque. At one point, Frank demonstrates the differences between Basis Grotesque and Avenir by examining the detail in their letterforms. It’s a great introduction to picking typefaces. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Frank Chimero wrote a great primer as part of his redesign series. We have been lucky in the design community to have some great writing on this recently. You have to see it rendered in paragraphs. ![]() Letterforms can be deceiving context is necessary to understand how type looks. Sometimes, it’s just about the tone of the text. This makes typeface selection a fickle thing. They can determine whether your website feels editorial, authoritative, strong, modern, friendly, casual, or cold. The typefaces, or fonts, or whatever you want to call them – it doesn’t really matter – impact the “voice” people read your words in. Selecting a typeface has a larger long-term impact than almost any other design decision. To the annoyance of some of my clients, I am obsessive about this at the beginning of any project. They have the single largest impact on the overall vibe of a design. ![]() The atomic units at the heart of every block of text are the letter shapes – the forms they take.
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