20 Typography Mistakes Every Beginner Makes – And How You Can Avoid Them

Much more than just arranging pretty fonts on a nice background, typography is an essential part of most designs — one that can make or break a whole project. Unfortunately, typography errors tend to make a bigger statement than good typography. Mistakes stick out like a sore thumb, while thoughtful typographic choices blend so nicely with the overall design that you might overlook them. So if you want to get your message across without distracting typographic errors, learn to recognize some of the most common mistakes below, and use this article as a final checklist before wrapping up your design. 01. It’s a tempting fix: You’re short on space; you need to fit in a certain amount of text; so what do you do? 02. This applies to whole lines of text, too. 03. Another rookie mistake (similar to the previous one) is stretching or condensing words to fit into a certain space. But there are ways to avoid this problem. 04. 05. 06. 07. 08. 09. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

THE ART OF HAND LETTERING: The End Result Ever since the workshop with Yves I have been thinking a lot abut what he told me as we discussed digital lettering. "The end result is what matters not so much the process". As a result of that experience I decided to post some detailed screenshot images of the process I use to create a lettering piece. This one being a gestural script. First I start with a pencil. I placed the sketch under a sheet of semi transparent layout paper and lettered the words with a extra fine Condor fountain pen. When I start in Illustrator I fist create single line paths to follow the shapes of the letters in my layout. With vector lines and bezier curves I can fine tune details as the lettering in my Illustrator file is rather large at about 60 inches wide. This is just one way of creating lettering and there are many other methods available.