Background : Text Illustrations

Character vs. Glyph

Characters are logical text units identified by Unicode codepoints, whereas glyphs are graphical font units. The distinction between character and glyph is critical to understanding FontLab, and fonts in general. Both concepts are explained below:

Character

A character is the minimal unit of the written language – a part of the alphabet, a symbol, a digit. In font terminology, something is a character if it is encoded, i.e. it has a number or code assigned to it in some standard, so that it can be referenced in the same way across fonts. The primary standard for such codes is Unicode, a universal character encoding standard with over 100,000 defined characters so far. These codes are used to store text data on a computer, and also used to reference the glyphs in a font.

The same character can be written or drawn differently based on styles:

At the same time, sometimes characters may look the same, yet represent different characters. For example, the Latin A, the Cyrillic А and Greek capital Alpha Α, all look the same but represent different characters from different scripts.

A character that is supported in a font must have some way of being represented by the glyphs in the font. In simple cases, there is one glyph for each supported character.

Glyph

A glyph is the basic element of the font, occupying a “slot” in the font. A glyph can be a default typographic representation of a character (if it has a Unicode codepoint assigned), or a variant typographic representation of one or more characters, or a constituent of another glyph, or a combined form of two or more glyphs (then they’re accessed via typographic features or composites). Note that all glyphs are unique, even if they represent different forms of the same character. For instance in a handwriting font, each variant of the character A would be a distinct glyph.

You will use the basics of Glyphs for the next project.

CONTRAST

In the next project, the secret to success is found in the principle of design called Contrast.

An Introduction to Contrast

Contrast can be defined as “the difference in visual properties that makes an object (or its representation in an image) distinguishable from other objects and the background.” In plain English that could be described at its most basic level as “things which look different from one another.”

For designers in all walks of the practice, but particularly web designers, contrast is at the root of pretty much everything. We are constantly trying to establish hierarchies of importance, draw people to certain areas of a page, and communicate a clear and concise message at the very heart of our work. Creating relationships between different elements of a design is just about the most important thing that you can do. You’ve probably been doing it a great deal already, consciously or not.

Obvious examples of contrast are black and white, big and small, fast and slow, thick and thin. Opposites are the easiest way to grasp what contrast is, but when applying contrast to design work it’s never quite as black and white. If you were wondering, that’s where the saying about a situation being “black and white” comes from, which also leads to the saying of something being a “gray area”. In design, we are often comparing things that are different but not opposite, for example, an H1 and an h1, or an “add to cart” button and a “check out” button. This is where greater levels of contrast come into play.

Let’s take a look at the different types of contrast and some examples of how they’re used in web design.

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On to the next step.