Typography Misconceptions

Like most people, I have an intuitive conception of typography from my experience with reading and writing. But in my quest to rethink document technologies, I’ve been learning more about the different layers of document design. I just finished reading Robert Bringhurst’s excellent book, The Elements of Typographic Style. I wanted to share a few of my biggest misconceptions that were clarified by the book.

Kerning is not letterspacing

I used to believe that kerning meant the spacing between letters. That is incorrect – letterspacing is the spacing between letters. (…Of course.)

Bringhurst recommends letterspacing for full-caps titles, like above, as well as for small-caps abbreviations like HTML or CSS. By contrast, kerning is more specific: it refers to special cases where pairs of adjacent characters are pushed towards each other.

Observe that with kerning disabled, you could draw a vertical line in the middle of each pair without intersecting either letter. Also note that kerning is distinct from ligatures, where sequences of characters are replaced by an entirely bespoke glyph.

If you dig around your font face, you can find some fun ligatures!

Title figures are not text figures

I used to think of numerals as not having a case like letters. That is incorrect – numerals (or figures in typography-speak) can be lower-case (text figures) or upper-case (title figures).

The vast majority of modern fonts will render title figures by default, so I suspect most people (myself included) assumed that title figures were the canonical way of displaying numerals. The only common exception I know is the font Georgia, and I always assumed its numerals were a stylistic flourish.

Bringhurst considers this a tragedy, since he recommends using text figures in body text. The aesthetic argument is that lower-case numerals fit more naturally in a flow of lower-case letters. Or as Bringhurst puts it (pp 47):

[Text figures] are basic parts of typographic speech, and they are a sign of civilization: a sign that dollars are not really twice as important as ideas, and numbers are not afraid to consort on an equal footing with words.

Part of the confusion is that unlike letters, the Unicode does not contain separate characters for upper-case and lower-case numerals. Fonts represent text and title figures as different variants of the same character. If you want to try using text figures on your web page, you can use the font-variant-numeric property with the value oldstyle-nums (a loaded term that Bringhurst also disdains).

Italic is not oblique

I used to think of italic as the slanted style of a font. That is… not wholly incorrect, but it misses some subtleties. In the common case, sans serif fonts and capital letters have an oblique style where the standard letterforms are slanted to the right. Oblique is distinct from italic, which is designed to mimic cursive writing and can therefore substantially change certain letterforms.

Observe that fa looks quite different in the italics serif than the normal serif. In the other fonts and variants, the oblique fa is just a slanted version of the original. Most font faces only provide either oblique or italic style. See the Oblique type Wikipedia page for an example of a font that contains both.

Display font is not fancy font

I used to think that display fonts were the fancy fonts, that is, unusual-looking fonts intended for stylistic flourish. I thought this because many font websites like Google Fonts categorize eccentric fonts under Display. But really, display just means appropriate for headings and not body text.

In particular, a single font family can include both standard and display variants. If you want to show a font at a large size (e.g., for headings or logos), then you should use the display variant.

Observe that the normal variant is thicker than the display variant. The normal variant is less elegant — notice the chunky serifs. The extra thickness is desirable at small font sizes like 18pt (i.e., body text) so the serifs remain legible, but it is undesirable at larger sizes.