So, you finally received the completed text for a story, newsletter, etc. What’s next?
As a designer, our role is to make the text both visually appealing and approachable for the consumer. While there are a myriad of ways to do this, there are small changes we can make using spacing to make text cleaner and more readable.
Type Terminology
Before we dive into specific examples, let’s talk about some critical terminology: kerning, leading, and tracking. These three terms all deal with spacing but focus on different aspects of type.
Leading (Blue) deals with the space between lines of text. If you’ve ever changed the spacing of an essay from single-spaced to double-spaced, you’ve adjusted the leading.
Kerning (Yellow) relates to the “personal space” between two letters. Tweaking kerning can help with the readability of text.
Tracking (Red), like kerning, focuses on the space between letters. However, tracking deals with larger chunks of text. Instead of pairs of characters, tracking adjusts the spacing of entire words, sentences, or paragraphs.
Refining Our Design
The design we’re going to fix is below. We’ll be working with a fairly basic layout and some placeholder text.
Save Widows and Orphans
Let’s talk about widows and orphans. Within type, widows and orphans refer to single words on a line. A widow is a word left at the end of a paragraph, such as the one in our first column. An orphan is a word abandoned at the top of a new column, like in the third column. While these are not egregious errors, to quote the impactful words of a fellow designer, “They look stupid.” I’ve highlighted these in red in the video below. I’m not addressing this problem yet in the document because I want to adjust some spacing first, which might help fix these errors.
Equality is Key
The first thing I notice in this layout is the uneven columns. To keep my design looking clean, I want to even this out. Since I’m short by only a single line, I’ll adjust the tracking in some of my paragraphs to see if I can create that extra line. Thankfully, this also fixed my lonely third-column orphan.
Final Touches
Next, I’ll again use tracking to fix the remaining widows in this text.
Finally, I’ve noticed that the drop-cap “R” at the beginning of this layout overlaps part of the following text (the “et” on line 6). Increasing the kerning between the “R” and the following “u” will make the text more readable.
And we’re done!
The video of the process and the final version are below!
