What is your design team talking about? Design jargon buster

Design can often feel like another language to those not familiar with the terms, as a lot of them only appear within the world of design. Here’s a breakdown of a few that will help you when dealing with your designer colleagues.

Hierarchy

One of the most important principles in design. If you hear your designers complaining about hierarchy from your amendments, they’re talking about the order in which a viewer will process the content. Important in all aspects of design but particularly in editorial and print; headers should be large and bold, with quotes and sub-headers following slightly smaller and different styling, then body copy and captions in a nice, legible font.

Kerning

Kerning is the space between individual letters in a word. It can make or break a logotype or large heading. A great example of bad kerning is the White House logo that sits behind the US press secretary. Designers have even more reasons for shouting at the news than most people.

You can practise your kerning ability with this online game here and really impress your designer colleagues: https://type.method.ac/

Tracking

Tracking is the space between words in a paragraph. If you’ve ever supplied your designers with copy over the word count, you may hear them complaining about how they’ve had to increase or decrease the tracking of your copy. This just means the space between words has had to be increased or decreased. Adjusting the spacing too far in either direction can greatly affect legibility.

Orphans and widows

An obscure one to the uninitiated and a definite design faux pas. These are words that appear on their own at the bottom or top of a column or body of text. Usually fixed by changing the ‘Tracking’ of the text (see above) to remove them, or by clever use of line spacing. It’s the bane of any designer working in editorial or print with large amounts of copy.

Typeface or font?

These two terms are often mixed up or used interchangeably, which is understandable as they are very similar. The best way to distinguish each is that a Typeface is like a family name for a group of fonts like Gotham, and a font would be a specific styling like Gotham Bold.

Serif and sans serif

Typefaces can come in many different shapes and sizes, but the two main categories you need to know about are serifs and sans serifs. Serifs are the little lines that appear at the beginning and end of letters. The style is thought to have come from the Romans, who used chisels to make these marks to improve legibility. Serifs are usually associated with more traditional typefaces like Times New Roman, Garamond or Baskerville. Sans Serif fonts simply lack these marks and are usually associated with being more modern and contemporary, think fonts like Gotham, Helvetica or Montserrat.

Hopefully, these terms will give you a starting point to help you understand what the heck your design team is talking about and why they care so much about these things. Stay tuned for even more tips for communicating with your design team.