Courtney's Type Tricks and Tips

Another weekly dose!

On choosing Type
Typography is not a science. Typography is an art. There are those who’d like to ‘scientificize’; those who believe that a large enough sample of data will somehow elicit good typography. However, this sausage-machine mentality will only ever produce sausages. That typography and choosing type is not a science trammeled by axioms and rules is a cause to rejoice.

For further reading: http://ilovetypography.com/2008/04/04/on-choosing-type/


Something Interesting: Kinetic Typography
Kinetic typography refers to the art and technique of expression with animated text. Similar to the study of traditional typography of designing static typographic forms, kinetic typography focuses on understanding the effect time has on the expression of text. Kinetic typography has demonstrated the ability to add significant emotive content and appeal to expressive text, allowing some of the qualities normally found in film and the spoken word to be added to static text. Kinetic type has been widely and successfully used in film as well as in television and computer-based advertising. Perceptual psychology research on attention, reading performance, and comprehension has indicated that time-based presentation of text can be used effectively to capture and manipulate a viewer’s attention and in some cases improve overall reading performance.

For further reading: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/kt/


Indesign Keyboard Shortcuts for Styling Text
Bold: Cmd-Shift-B
Italic: Cmd-Shift-I
Normal: Cmd-Shift-Y
All Cap: Cmd-Shift-K
Edit Style Sheet without Applying it: Cmd-Option-Shift-Double click style