Hot answers tagged font-size
10
I've worked on a lot of financial documents over the years (fund fact sheets, performance updates, brochures, announcement postcards, bond-issue ads) and 95% of them had footnotes and legal disclaimers at 8 pt (with body copy at 11 pt). Occasionally legalese might get reduced to 7, or in a serious pinch 6, but we usually yelled about that.
Fonts can make a ...
9
Robert Bringhurst's Elements of Typographic Style is a through and wonderful reference for things like this. It's long but very valuable. http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1294176315&sr=8-1
A lot of designers recommend a standard grid of lines so that a line+padding will always ...
7
Pixel Fonts. These are fonts designed to not use or rely on anti-aliasing and be clear and legible at very small sizes. Most of the fonts have a range of 1 or 2 sizes they can be used at specifically.
A great place for pixel fonts is fontsforflash.com
When using a pixel font, you want to turn off all anti-aliasing within Photoshop for the text.
7
Your basic question is whether to create your type at its final size the turn it into outlines, or create it at an arbitrary size, outline that, and scale to suit. The answer to that question, especially if you're creating SVG for on-screen viewing, is that it doesn't make much practical difference if all you're using are TrueType fonts.
The Metafont ...
6
Joe Gillespie did some great micro screen font work under the MiniFonts moniker.
These are still available via MyFonts.
Silkscreen is a related design by Jason Kottke.
6
The most basic reason points are still around is there's nothing metric that can usefully replace them. Note that word, "usefully." There are a couple of reasons why: (1) as Lauren points out (pun hard to avoid... or resist), 6-12-72 has many more even divisors than decimal, so it's easier to work with, just as 60 is much more practical for angles and time ...
5
There was some dabbling in the 90s with Multiple Master fonts. These were dynamically generated typefaces which would scale serifs, counters, and other type data based on type size. Multiple Masters were popular for a few years, but then died due to issues with other software. Today Multiple Masters aren't very common and actually can create problems for ...
5
I can't cite anything in particular, but from my U.S. perspective, the 6-12-72 base is very flexible (that is, it's easy to divide and get round numbers), and since we've been measuring and defining type this way for 150+ years, the industry is unlikely to make a wholesale change on its own. Inertia is pretty powerful.
To change points to mm, you'd wind up ...
5
Hyperlinks are to the internet as highways are to cities. You see a sign to a place to want to go and follow it.
They are what allows you to go from on page to another, without them the internet would be one page, the whole world would look at with nowhere to go.
When deciding on colors for your hyperlinks, I'd suggest using a different color than your ...
5
In the analog days, typefaces came in specific sizes for the simple reason that manufacturing of type in metal and wood required it.
In the digital age, you can pick any sizes you want. You can set your fonts to 512.34492 points if you'd like.
The size is really a visual design issue. Use the size appropriate for the design. The actual numeric size is ...
4
Helvetica is very closely related to (in fact derived from) Clarendon. I'd try that route.
Clarendon:
Akzidenz Grotesk (see comments):
Helvetica:
4
You could use a technique popular in North Korea.
Whenever leader Kim Jong-un is mentioned, his name is automatically displayed ever so slightly bigger than the text around it. Not by much, but just enough to make it stand out.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20445632
It's a great way to add emphasis for Dear Leader, or any text you desire.
3
It depends on what DPI you use for the print. With a high resolution, ie. high DPI, you can print very small sizes.
Human eyes cannot read much details beyond 300 DPI so for readability there is little point of using higher DPIs than that. Higher resolutions above 300 DPI are typically used for technical reasons such to overcome ink-bleeding (or if I may, ...
3
You have to look closer. The standard text on Mathematics SE is in Georgia (then Times New Roman), but the maths are rendered using special mathematics/science fonts (you can right-click on the maths to get help.)
MathJax uses the STIX font family if installed on the user's computer. It's very close to Georgia and Times New Roman, the traditional kind of ...
3
body { font-family:Georgia,"Times New Roman",Times,serif; }
textarea{ font-family:Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, Lucida Console, Liberation Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Courier New, monospace, serif; }
And then a mix of Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neu, and other sans serif fonts are used for reputation numbers, tables, counts, etc.
3
The benefit of that particular set of numbers, and so presumably why those particular numbers became the standard for physical type and persevered as the standard even when it was no longer needed, is that mathematically they share lots of common factors. Choose numbers from this set, and there will be numbers they are all divisible by.
DA01 is right that ...
3
Kyle has a pretty good answer, so I'll just add that Six Revisions has a pretty good article - Designing Hyperlinks: Tips and Best Practices - about this topic.
I'll also note that it's becoming something of a standard to have some sort of notation if a link takes you to another site (typically a box with an arrow pointing north east). Where I work we have ...
3
It's slightly tricky if you didn't start with centered text (which will increase from the center point when you increase the point size). You can work around this, though.
Set the transform proxy on the control panel to the bottom, right or left center depending on how the scaling needs to go and which center you need to lock in.
Increase the width and ...
3
It is important to keep in mind that font size and legibility are loosely coupled. Font size is not a measurement of what the average person would consider to be the size of a font. Or to put it another way, “Remember that long ascenders and descenders are factored into the font size.” If you don’t know much about typography there is a fair bit of ...
2
6pt should be your rock bottom.
It is important to take into consideration the size of the piece. As you have stated, it is for a small post card. So taking that into account, it will be held close and read at a much closer distance than poster or 8.5 x 11.
A majority of the information on business cards for example is typically in 6pt type. Check out this ...
2
Just use this awesome tool to upload it and find out!
http://new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont
If that image is transparent, as it appears to be, you might have to put a black background behind the text and resave so there is more contrast for the tool to figure it out.
Style is a gradient drop-shadow and white text color.
2
I find basing layout measurements on line-height (or leading, for print design) gives better results than using whatever number you've set the font size.
Depending on your typeface's proportions and the way the font was created, the actual rendered glyphs are going to have only a loose relationship to the number designating that font size. As such, if you ...
2
I would simply use a different face of Helvetica. For example, if text is set in Helvetica Regular, I would use Helvetica Black for emphasis. I tend to avoid "bold" weights in favor of "black" weights. The black weights simply supply more visual contrast.
I always default to font family weight changes before I'll even consider looking outside the family. ...
2
Going on the assumption that readability has been tossed in the can and we're focusing on "can I make that character out or not" ...
Caps are more open, "plug-resistant" glyphs. That is, a capital glyph is made up of larger shapes that can be reduced more dramatically. This can make for big savings in line height (thus, vertical space). I mention line ...
2
Ink traps are a device to compensate for over-absorbent papers and metal type in letterpress printing. They are mostly irrelevant for offset presses. James Felici has an excellent summary in "The Complete Manual of Typography" (highly recommended for anyone working with type). They are mostly irrelevant today, unless you are working on a letterpress project.
...
2
The general problem is pretty much answered by What does the size of the font translate to exactly? - i.e. the size doesn't really mean anything very specific.
But given that you are working with a known specific font, you should indeed be able to translate a pixel count on your mockup to its nominal pixel size - you'd need to do a bit of experimentation ...
2
10 point can be perfectly readable, but make sure you validate your design choices by printing your CV. Test on both an inkjet and a laser printer is possible. The kind of printer you're using (inkjet vs laser) can have a big impact on how well smaller type sizes are rendered.
I realize that a printed CV is used less frequently these days, but printing is a ...
1
At typical text sizes, most fonts have anywhere from 1 to 4 pixels of 'buffer' top to bottom.
You can usually directly apply the pixel size you used when comping to your CSS. IOW, if Photoshop/Illustrator says 14px on 130% leading, your CSS would say
font-size:14px
line-height:1.3em
1
If I'm working on something large (like an A3 poster) I need much larger fonts. I'm always tempted to keep these as powers of 2 (e.g. 128, 256, or 512). But why? Am I just being superstitious!
Short answer: you're just being superstitious.
The reasons for old type being available only in set sizes is historical. Modern fonts can reproduce typefaces in ...
1
“Concerned” – not so much… “Aware” – definately. The fact is really good fonts should have shapes matched to their physical size. Simple scaling can't always do the trick, or rather: rarely can. Take, for example, Computer Modern. This font has variants intended for use at, among others, 6 and 11 points (AFAICR). Glyph shapes (especially proportion wise) are ...
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