Glyphs & Characters

You don’t have to be able to touch your toe to the back of your head to enjoy typographic arabesques. These versatile graphic ornaments can be used singly or combined in elaborate patterns to add a striking visual element to any design.

Bullets are an excellent way to make the elements of a list stand out. Bulleted information seems easy to read, and bullets themselves can add visual interest to a text. A bullet can be much more than a big dot!

Automatic, or manual? No, we’re not talking about transmissions - we’re talking about bullet lists, those frequently used tools for organizing lists of information. Your layout application will be happy to format these lists for you, but for true typographic finesse, it’s time to learn to “drive stick” and call your own shots about bullets, alignment and spacing.

A mark, a yen, a buck or a pound – as the song says, money makes the world go ‘round. This was before the introduction of the euro, of course! Luckily, a variety of currency symbols are included with most fonts. Learn what they are and how to find them.

Like a rim shot after the punch line of a joke, the end mark at the close of an article, chapter, or story lets you know it’s all over. Learn what they are, where to find them, and where to put them.

Can you find the fractions on your keyboard? If not, you’re not alone. Believe it or not, there are no designated keystrokes for fractions on a Mac. PCs offer a few (1/4, 1/2, 3/4), but they’re so well-hidden most users can’t find them anyway. Yet fractions appear fairly often in copy, so what’s a person to do?

Hyphens, en-dashes and em-dashes are frequently used punctuation marks that are just as frequently misunderstood. All three marks are essentially horizontal lines, though their lengths vary. However, these three different marks have very different purposes, and using a hyphen to do an m-dash’s job is just as much of a punctuation error as using a question mark in place of a comma.

An initial letter (or initial cap, as they are also called) is an enlarged letter that is used as the first character of a paragraph. It can sit above, below, to the left of, or even behind the body text, and can be set in a contrasting weight, style or color.

The, for, and, of, to – when you use logotypes, these tiny little words can add sizable flair to your work. There may even be logotypes hidden in fonts you already have, and they’re well worth looking for.