James Felici

Them's the Breaks

Forcing lines to break -- or not break -- where you want them to gives you more design control, better type composition, and faster formatting.

A Question of Character: Finding What You Need in Your Fonts, Part 2

Everything you wanted to know about Unicode but didn’t know whom to ask. Bonus: A cheat sheet for instantly creating such characters as fractions; up and down arrows; and open and filled circles and squares.

A Question of Character: Finding What You Need in Your Fonts, Part 1

As fonts get larger, finding the characters you need keeps getting more complicated. Here's a chart that gives keyboard shortcuts for the degree symbol, multiplication sign, the cents sign, and much more.

One Good Kern Deserves Another

Evening out the spaces between characters is a matter of finding the right rhythm, then going with the flow.

Antique Gothic Grotesque: Deciphering the Typeface Name Game

The vocabulary of type is mysterious at best, and nowhere is this more true than in how typefaces are labeled. Yet knowing how typefaces are named and categorized has very practical benefits.

To Boldly Go . . . Or Is It Italically?

In any family, you can always spot the role of certain members. Typeface families are no different.

Punc Rocks: The Typographer's Guide to Punctuation

When it comes to understanding what we read, periods, commas, and their dotty allies are proof that it's the little things that count. Here's how to use them correctly.

To Double-Space or Not to Double-Space...

A thought-provoking disquisition on the thorny issue of how much space should follow a sentence-ending period.

In White Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

Think you're in total control of your type? Truth is, you're on a short lead, in the tight grip of your typeface's designer.

Illustrator Type Tricks: A Frolic on the Far Side

These techniques for "enhancing" your type will have your mild-mannered fonts cowering in fear as you take them to places they dared not ever go.

Managing Fonts on the Mac

Fonts multiply like rabbits. The Mac OS gives you fonts. Applications give you fonts. And you'll find it hard to pass by those cheap CDs full of fonts. The next thing you know, you've got hundreds of them all over the place. It's no wonder that font management has become a big issue.