Horizontal and Vertical scaling
The proportions of the letters have been digitally distorted in order to create wider or narrower letters.
Optical Size
Some typefaces that work well at large sizes look too fragile when reduced.
Scale
Minimal differences in type size make designs look tentative and arbitrary.
Pseudo italics
The wide, ungainly forms of these mechanically skewed letters look forced and unnatural.
Capitals and linespacing
In stacks of lowercase and capital letters, the spaces between lines appear uneven because caps are tall but have no descenders.
Pseudo small caps
Halvetica has never meant to include small caps. These automatically generated characters look puny and starved; they are an abomination against nature.
Accountability
Slightly squeezed variants of primary fonts in a sign are used to make extra lines fit better, as if it wouldn’t be noticeable.
Similar weight
Typefaces that are from the same family, but are too close in weight, don’t mix well.
Similar style
Two type styles that are too similar don’t provide a counterpoint to each other.
Misuses on punctuation
Signs are visual communication with the masses. Typographic misdoings, such as inadequate apostrophes, quotations marks and hatch marks, demonstrate negligence.
Tightly tracked text
Letters that are tracked too close. Also called negative tracking.
Tracking lowercase letters
Loosely spaced lowercase letters–especially italics– look awkward because these characters are designed to sit closely together on a line.
Inaccurate line spacing
Auto spacing lines yields an uneven effect. Adjusting line spacing with the baseline shift tool helps create an even appearance.
Poorly shaped text block
In most uses, centered text should be broken into phrases with a variety of long and short lines.
Full of holes
When a justified column is too narrow it gets full of gaps.
Punctuation eats the edge.
In flush-right text, excessive punctuation weakens the right edge.
Bad rag
An ugly wedge shape spoils the ragged edge.
Wrong vertical text
Stacked lowercase doesn’t work.
Too many signals
Using paragraph spacing and indents together squanders spaces and gives the text block a flabby, indefinite shape.
Too many hierarchy signals
Emphasis can be created with just one shift. Choose either bold, or italics, or caps, or underlining... But not all of them.
