TypeNotes is a love letter to letterforms, a journal dedicated to typography and graphic design.

The magazine was launched to celebrate a love of type and the craft behind making it, and explores all things type-based from a passionate and knowledgeable standpoint, drawing on the expertise of type designers as well as voices from across the creative industries worldwide.

“Whoever does not respect the penny is not worthy of the dollar”. This proverb also applies to the conscious use of punctuation marks in text setting. Typography with impressive features that appear striking at first glance is compelling – font selection and a blend of fonts, appropriate line length, appropriate line spacing and typographic emphasis. The minutest details are just as important: comma, semicolon, period, colon, question mark, exclamation mark, brackets, hyphen and dash.

Searching for the right font for a text-intensive design project can feel like trying to solve a riddle. This is because the requirements for a suitable font are actually much more complex than it seems at first glance – and the almost endless number of available fonts doesn’t make the decision any easier, either. But don’t worry: with the right questions and a few criteria, your search will be a success. The focus of this article is fonts for typesetting.

Sure there are lots of things you can do to improve yourself as a typographer, like reading books and becoming a generally more observant person. And there’s no getting around that. You’ll eventually have to do it and it’ll take time. “But what can I learn right now?,” you ask.

OpenType fonts have some big advantages to older TrueType fonts, or legacy PostScript Type 1 fonts. That’s because OpenType is an updated version of the TrueType font format spec, with improvements you notice, like OpenType features, and those you likely don’t, like the type designer’s ability to use PostScript outlines instead of TrueType outlines in the fonts.