There are a lot of rules associated with beautiful typography, and entire books have been written about how to organize letters to make them readable and elegant.We don't need to get into that level of detail here. Let's just review a few mistakes that small business owners who are creating their own marketing materials commonly make.
Avoid these typesetting errors and your material will look more polished.____________________________
1. Using all capital letters: The only time in our lives when we read letter-by-letter is when we're first learning to read. Once we've mastered reading, our eyes take in entire words at a time. We see the shapes of words, not each individual letter. Upper and lower case letters make this process easier. When a block of text is written in all capital letters, every word looks like a rectangle. This slows down reading and comprehension.
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2. Stretched thin: Letter forms are drawn with specific proportions to be both beautiful and readable. Some software programs give us the ability to stretch letters either horizontally or vertically. When we do this, the proportions get distorted, and type is less readable (and not as beautiful). Condensed and expanded typefaces exist, so if you need letters to be stretched in either direction, look for a typeface that's drawn that way.
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3. Inch and feet marks for quotes: Quotation marks are "curly," and inch and feet marks are straight. Nicely typeset text makes this difference clear.
Having written this, however, I realize that some of you may be seeing straight quotes in this newsletter. Typography on the web is still limited, but be sure to get this right in print.
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4. Double spaces after sentences: Adding two spaces after sentences is a habit from typewriter days, when letters were evenly spaced and you needed two spaces after sentences to see where one ended and the other began. Now, though, two spaces is one too many. Just type one space, and your text won't have funny "holes" in it.
Here's to beautifully typeset business materials!
