UX/UI Design: Foundations to Practice · Visual Design Principles
Typography Fundamentals
Typography is one of the most consequential and most under-considered elements of visual design, since text carries most of a digital product's actual information, and a poor typographic choice degrades that information's clarity regardless of how well everything else is designed.
Legibility, whether individual letterforms and words can actually be read clearly and quickly, is a non-negotiable baseline requirement that should never be compromised for a stylistic preference, since a visually distinctive but genuinely difficult-to-read typeface fails at typography's most fundamental job regardless of how aesthetically interesting it might be considered in isolation.
Key Takeaways
- Legibility is a non-negotiable baseline; a visually distinctive but hard-to-read typeface fails at typography's most fundamental job regardless of aesthetic appeal.
- A type scale, a small consistent set of font sizes, creates a learnable hierarchy where size differences become genuinely meaningful signals.
- Line length that's too long and line height that's too tight both directly harm reading comfort and accuracy, independent of the specific typeface chosen.
- Using more than a small, limited number of typefaces introduces visual inconsistency; variation in weight and size within a limited palette achieves variety without this cost.