Looking back over the details from of typography is key when transferring onto the digital screen. A typeface is made up of a combination of different elements, some of which include serif, stroke, letter spacing and the height of the letters including ascenders and descenders. Two phrases that were new to me were the x-height, which is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of all the lowercase letters, and an aperture, which is an area partially enclosed by the letter/symbol. This all builds up the anatomy of a typeface.

Typefaces go through different stages throughout time and development. These are humanist, transitional and geometric. This process leads to the more modern fonts we know today, but many of the earlier fonts are still in use. A humanist typeface is often called an old-style or Venetian, is inspired by traditional Latin letterforms. They are characterised by having a low contrast between the thick and thin strokes and loose letter spacing, which was vital for being legible in small text sizes. Very common serif typefaces are transitional font styles, which include Baskerville and Times New Roman. These fonts stand upright with suitable contrast between the thick and thin strokes and the serifs are wider than before and bracketed. Geometric typography is built using geometric shapes like circles and squares, resulting in sans-serif typefaces. Many modern brands use this typography due to its minimalism, simplicity and cleanliness, like Product Sans.

Serif: the decorative stroke at the base of a letters stem, which is sometimes called the ‘feet’ of letters.

Sans-Serif: a typeface which doesn’t have the extending feature of a serif at the end of the stroke, sans translates to without.

Slab-Serif: can be called a mechanistic, square serif, antique or Egyptian typeface is characterised by the thick, block-like serifs which form a large and varied genre.

Glyph: is an elemental symbol within an agreed set of symbols, with the intention to represent a readable character.

It is key that the reader is able to comfortably read the information on screen. The features of the typeface is vital for this, like the size, length and height, but designers also can use heads and bodies to help divide up the text. Put simply, it is a way of dividing up large areas of text, and adding a subtitle to each one. This in turn helps the reader understand, without having to comb through endless text. The choice of type and colour in the headers can also help the reader understand the type of information below. For example, an old-fashioned typeface, could indicate that it’s a historical piece of text.