WHY TYPOGRAPHY MATTERS

When it comes to design, there are a few things that need to stand out or work together in order for it to be effective.

First, you have the actual main artwork, image, or design. This is the focal point, for example, if you are creating a poster. Then you also have the color scheme for the design. Don’t go overboard with this as a lot of colors together can clash and take away from the main design, unless that is your intended style. Last but not least, we have typography. This also has to stand out and not get lost in the design. However, you don’t want to necessarily allow it to swamp the whole piece.

This tutorial shows you how to can use type as an image, which is a great way to combine the two and create a great hierarchy. This is also something that is extremely important in design. Hierarchy creates a path for the consumer’s eyes to follow. With this in mind, figure out what you want your audience to see first. This is usually the most important part of the design, for instance, an image or the name of something. In typography, you want this to stand out the most over other areas of text. In most cases, this will be the title.

For an event poster, you have a title, then a strapline, maybe some features of the event, and at the bottom, in smaller print, usually all the key details. There are certain styles in typography that help you create a hierarchy. You don’t necessarily need to change the font to create a hierarchy, and in most cases, you should stick to a maximum of two fonts in your design.

When you have chosen a font, you can change its style to create differences, for example bold, italic, underlined, heavy, or light. You can also change the font size, of course, and the color can be changed too. There are spacing changes you can make to increase or decrease the room in between the lettering (kerning) and alter the spacing between characters in a block of text (tracking).

There are plenty of ways you can do to draw attention to different parts of your text other than just the size of the text. Have a go at creating your own text hierarchy and play around with all the typographic settings to create exactly what you want. Use this tutorial to create imagery out of your text and produce a striking graphic that combines both design and typography skills.