My Top Five Tips for Improving Typography

I have been playing around with typography for quite some time and through the years, I have learnt lots of things about it (most of them from experience). Here are some tips that might be useful to people new to typography, or want to improve at it. Most of these tips are more of principles rather than tips as they cover typography in general, not one aspect of it. 

1. Play around with your words, and feel free to break all limitations and rules of shape, size, proportion and positioning. Remember, you are not practicing handwriting, so forget all the rules they taught you at school. Experiment - Try stretching out some of your letters, or make some words larger than others to increase emphasis. Also,you don't have to obsess over upper and lowercases - I often use a mixture of both, because that way I have more choice to choose a letter that fits more into the typography style I am using.


2. Ensure that your text is read-able. Experiment as much as you want to, but without compromising on the legibility of the text. If you're writing something in a beautiful typography style but it isn't very read-able, what you have written isn't of much use at all. So it's important that your typography style is not too complicated or fancy that it becomes difficult to read it. It is important to ensure adequate spacing between lines and letters; having too little space will give your text a congested, clustered look and will make it difficult to read on the whole. Also, some people recommend using Serif fonts for printed documents and Sans Serif fonts for use on the web(however, you can still try out both options and decide for yourself which looks better and easier to read).

Difference between serif and sans serif fonts

3. Let your text dictate the way you write it. Before beginning to write something, pay attention to your text. Listen to it, and then let it determine your typography style. For example, if you are writing the word nature; consider using hues of green and brown or maybe incorporating leaves into the text. Incorporating imagery into text is also a good idea too, but isn't always easy to come up with an idea for it.

You can draw letters so that they form an image...
(Typography by Dan Fleming)

...Or draw images to form letters
(Typography by Chan Hwee Chong)
       

4. Shouting won't help. Putting emphasis on some of your important keywords or headings by CAPITALIZING, emboldening, or italicizing them is a good idea, but putting emphasis on all of your text is not a good idea at all. If you write a lot of text in EMBOLDENED ITALICIZED CAPITALS, use a lot of exclamation marks, or use large font sizes for body text; the viewer will get the overall impression that you are shouting in his/her face. It's okay to use a bit of typographical emphasis here and there, but definitely not everywhere. You don't want the reader to feel shouted at.

5. Don't use a mixture of too many, very different fonts/typefaces, no matter how tempting that may seem (don't get me wrong; I'm not trying to stop you from experimenting). I have tried this several times, and although the results may look very attractive; using a different font for every one or two words is not a good idea.  For one piece; I would recommend, stick to two or three legible font-types. If you write a long sentence with several different fonts, the reader is prone to feel exhausted after reading it(at least that's what I have discovered). Another good idea is to use two fonts, one serif(for headings) and one sans serif(for body text) or vice versa; whichever one suits you more.

Read the word 'Confidence' in these two examples of
typography; one with a mixture of fonts, and one with
only two fonts: which one is easier to read?

Disclaimer: I do nor take any credits for the crocodile and books typography in the post, I just found them on google images. I