Ninja type: Finding the right weapon

Pamela Wilson has a great guest post at IttyBiz about typography, called, “How to Become a Typography Ninja in Five Easy Steps.”

One day, I must learn the art of making snappy titles...

I want to elaborate on one of the recommendations:

(T)he typeface you choose should include regular or book; italic; bold; bold italic at the very least.

If you are working with just the fonts that came with your computer, you are probably getting a very limited set of weights. Sometimes, you don’t get a “book” weight. People will sometimes say, “Oh, that type is no good for text blocks,” but they haven’t seen all the variations of the type.

My computer comes with five versions of Gill Sans, for instance. You don’t have to go far to find that packages that contain over 20 versions of Gill Sans.

For posters, a wider range of type weights than those can be valuable. You might not need 20 versions of the same typeface, but you might need more than “regular.” I’ll talk about why next time. And, to return to the ninja theme, it has to do with bleeding.

Picture by simonella_virus on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.