Typography is considered to be a form of illustration - 'Type is speech made visible.'
It should embody what is being written as if it were being said aloud.
It is required for type to be designed/chosen based on it's context/audience. Image contributes to how type and the message it is delivering is going to be interpreted, for example, associating guns with a stencil typeface will give connotations of the military. The way a type is interpreted is based on the image associated with it, the colour of the font, and the typeface itself.
Vocab:
Typeface - A collection of letters, numbers, glyphs etc which bare the same individual and distinctive design.
Font - The physical attributes within a typeface, used to create it. Different fonts can be from the same type face but can differ in terms of size and weight, for example, Helvetica and Helvetica Bold are two different fonts that fall under the same typeface.
Collectively these are called a typeface of a typefamily as they are all variations of the same type (light/bold/regular/italic). Bolder fonts are more condensed due to the tighter kerning and leading and this makes the type harder to read, requiring it to be larger.
Gothic - simple sans serif fonts.
Block - bold, heavy fonts, used for headlines and short sentences, never body copy.
Script - Calligraphic style, like handwriting.
Roman - Formal, serif fonts.
Legibility - How understandable or recognisable are individual characters based on their appearance - relies on the anatomy of individual letterforms/glyphs.
Readability - How easy can text be read and understood. Line length, leading, justification, kerning, typestyle, tracking and point size all factor into readability.
Tracking - the spacing of a set of glyphs
Kerning - how glyphs are put together in terms of the baseline.
LEGIBILITY AND READABILITY
The term 'leading' is deciphered from the amount of lead between blocks for a letterpress.
A 'counter' is the negative space within a letterform.
The eye will read what it sees, which isn't always what is written. It becomes harder to read Bold and Script fonts, whereas Serif and Gothic fonts are considered easier. The serifs on Roman fonts help a reader determine the space/counters around the letterform or word. However, increasing the size of Roman fonts to that of Block or Gothic makes them more difficult to read because of the serifs.
Spacing can be altered to improve legibility and that is factored into the design of the font. Manipulating things like spacing of a font can ruin the effect of the typeface.
It is advised that no more than 3 typefaces should be used for one design, while the fonts are able to vary more.
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