Typography for News Design

Course Overview

Title:
Typography for News Design
Type:
Self-Directed Course
Time Estimate:
This course takes two to three hours to complete.

About Self-Directed Courses

In a self-directed course, you can start and stop whenever you like, progressing entirely at your own pace and going back as many times as you want to review the material.

Typography sets the tone and voice for your publication. In this course, you’ll examine the basic principles of typography and learn the vocabulary to communicate effectively about type in your design.

Through interactive activities, you’ll discover ways to correct common mistakes and apply standard rules to create engaging design. You also can explore our "Inspiration Gallery," a collection of pages featuring design ideas for you to use, as well as a resource gallery of publications, Web sites and professional organizations.

What Will I Learn:

In this course you will:

  • Learn the principles of type contrast and hierarchy
  • Explore the history of type with an interactive timeline
  • Learn vocabulary terms such as ascender, kerning and ligature
  • Explore ways to correct common typographic mistakes
  • Check out inspiring type design from publications around the world
Who should take this course:

Designers, copy editors and anyone who wants to learn how type can be just as effective as images when it comes to designing pages, whether in print or online.

Course Instructor:

Sara Dickenson Quinn

Sara Dickenson Quinn teaches in the areas of design, illustration, typography, visual storytelling, media convergence and leadership at The Poynter Institute. She was the director of Poynter’s 2007 EyeTrack study of newspaper and online news design.

Technical Requirements:

For this course you will need to have at least version 7.0 of the Flash plugin installed. For the best experience, we suggest that:

  • PC users use Internet Explorer or Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox
  • Mac users use Netscape/Mozilla/Firefox or Safari
  • You set your monitor resolution to 1024 x 768 or higher
  • You use a high-speed connection