Portfolio Tips – Part 3: Typography

January 18, 20100 Comments Tagged: , , , ,

Welcome back to the third instalment in our series on Architectural Portfolios -  one of the major rites of passage for any architecture student. This is the third post in our series outlining tips and suggestions for Architecture Portfolios. Why not catch up on the previous instalments - Part 1 – Taking Aim and Part 2 - Get Styling.

Today it is time to take a look at the next step - Typography.

The typography in the design of your architectural portfolio should be a blending of both form and function. Type has the power to communicate in tandem, or  against its message. It can be used to great effect to reinforce the style of your portfolio.

At the same time, however, there is an extent to which the type in your portfolio serves a totally utilitarian purpose. If the typography does not function, that is - communicate its message, then it has failed. Stylised type that looks great, but is illegible will generally do more harm than good to the message you present.

So the typography of your architectural portfolio must be an elegant combination of both.

You may be tempted to think that typography boils down to one thing - the font. This is far from the truth. The font (or typeface to be technical) plays a great role, but we will also look at some other attributes of typography like layout, hierarchy and attention to detail.

Typefaces - all about Style

This will usually be your first stop in laying out your architectural portfolio - which font to use. A substantial part of this decision will finds its roots in our previous discussion of style. Most of the time you are going to want your typeface to reinforce the style of your whole portfolio. Going for a sleek, modernist aesthetic? Then a geometric sans-serif like Futura might be just your type. A more refined heritage aware portfolio might use a nice elegant serif like Garamond or Baskerville.

Take a look at other designs in a similar style to your portfolio - magazines, websites, books, flyers. Is there a trend in the typeface styles used? Do they use caps or lower case? Perhaps they use a single typeface, or maybe a few paired together.

All in the family

You can find typefaces to download all over the web these days. My advice would be to be cautious about the use of freely downloaded fonts. A free "modern-space" font could come in very handy for big headlines or anything where it will get limited usage. Where these free fonts  start to lose their appeal is when you need to use them for more than a few words of text. There can often be inconsistencies and glitches that come to light when used for long sections of text.

For paragraphs of copy, or long stretches, you may be best served to use a plainer, but more fully featured font. You probably already have a few good workhouse installed by default on your computer. These fonts will have had much more time put in to them, and for various reasons will read a lot more easily over long stretches. Fonts like Helvetica, Gil Sans, Futura, Clarendon, Garamond, Baskerville, Optima and even Calibri can be good choices in this situation.

There are also more likely to a larger number of styles in the family (bold, black, italic, light etc). These can be really handy, as we will see a little later on. Free fonts from the web will not always have these variations.

Typographic Layout

Now we have our typeface selected, it's time to move on the the wider typographic layout of our architectural portfolio. These are all things related to the placement of the type and how it relates from line to line.

The first thing to consider is the measure. That's basically a special, typographer's term and refers to the width of a block of text. There are lots of rules to consider but, in the name of simplicity, here is a good tip, taken from Mark Boulton's fantastic series Five Simple Steps to Better Typography. "A general good rule of thumb is 2–3 alphabets in length, or 52–78 characters (including spaces)". The basic reason for this is to achieve a line-length where the eye is able to easily travel to the start of the next row. Too long and the eye gets lost on the way back, too short and the eye will read down rather than across - both of these making reading sub-concioulsy more difficult for the reader.

Leading and Tracking

The next things to consider for your architectural portfolio are Leading and Tracking. These are items to do with the spacing of words/characters and are sometimes referred to as line spacing and letterspacing. The main thing to bear in mind when setting your text is that the eye should be able to read smoothly along the line of text. If the gap between lines is too large, then it will be hard to see which line is next. Too close and you may jump between lines in the middle of reading. The best way to do this correctly is mostly trial and error. Try reading your text and see how difficult or easy it is - tweaking it till it is effortless.

Hierarchy

Hierarchy is very important, and can play a great role in the way your architectural portfolio communicates. Hierarchy refers to the use of type to indicate different levels of importance. Through the use of size and boldness you can indicate subconsciously to the reader, how important the part they are reading is.

The most obvious example of this is headings. A larger or bolder type will always exude more importance than a similar one that is smaller or less obvious. You can use this to guide your reader through your portfolio - highlighting important sections throughout.

For further reading on hierarchy I would highly recommend checking out Part 4 and Part 5 of Mark Boulton's fantastic Five Simple Steps to Typography .

It's all in the Details

The Final thing to consider is actually a lot of smaller points. Attention to detail with the type in the design of your architectural portfolio can make all the difference.

One thing to consider is use of apostrophes and double quotes. Many applications these days insert a symbol for these items that is simply an inches symbol, rather than the traditional "curly" quotes. In most cases you can replace them, to make sure the correct "curly quotes" show. It's true that many people may not notice, but it will add to overall professional appearance of your architectural portfolio.

Another detail to be aware of is hanging punctuation. This is most useful when blocking out quotes, or using bullet points. Most  desktop publishing programs will indent the text, keeping the punctuation (bullet, or quotes" inside the line of the text. It is actually much easier to read text when the punctuation is set outside the width of the text, so the text block is the same size. I recommend you check out Part 2 of the aforementioned Five Simple Steps to Typography.

Be careful with Bold, Italics and Small Caps

The final thing to be aware of with your architectural portfolio is a warning of sorts. Lots of applications give you commands to make text bold, italicised and in small capitals. What these commands do is create a sort of a fake bold or italics. You would do well to avoid these - instead you should use the italic or bold version of your chosen font. This is another reason why it pays to find a font with lots of variants as a part of it.

Wrapping it up

So there you have it. A few brief tips and pointers on the typography for your architectural portfolio. Keeping these in mind will helpful you immensely in creating something with a professional appearance. If you want to read some more on the subject I can highly recommend the following:

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