A friend of mine asked me to review the title type of his upcoming book. I pointed out some crazy kerning issues and gave a few pointers on how to layout the title. After a moment, he responded with “Now I will never not see those space issues.” To which I said, “Welcome to my life.” All day, every day I am subconsciously evaluating typography and design choices in everything I see. Whether I want to or not. This was no more evident than this past weekend, watching a This Week On Xbox video on youtube.
After the first few seconds, I noticed something, paused the video, and started ranting. My wife sat there grinning, powerless to stop me.
Xbox, please check your line widths.
Especially with inline type. The wells in that font’s ink trap fill in and leave you with uneven inlines. Throw in the fact that each line of copy is a different size, the line weights end up looking thicker on the word “on”. It was all highlighted clearly by the (very clean) type animation.
In the future, I would swap the typeface to one made for inlines or adjust the line weight of each line of copy since they are different sizes. Also, it looks like the font stroke is inset, versus centered or outside the font. If you set it to center, it would alleviate some of the stress on those ink wells.
My wife sat through all of that, but it was much longer and louder. I am passionate about design and video games. I can’t help it.
Interested in learning more about type?
Canva has a great glossary of typography terms to reference. There is also typography.com, which sells type and instructs you on how to use each of their typefaces. I have also written about some of my favorite typefaces before if that interests you. If you need help with your type, or some other design problem, drop me a line, and let’s solve it together.
