Readability & accessibility
Making our text readable should be our primary goal when setting and manipulating type. Readability—along with the closely related concepts of legibility and accessibility—is at the core of typography, and yet it’s rarely discussed thoroughly in typographic contexts. In these articles, we examine the qualities of type and typography that make reading easier.
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Em
A unit of measurement, 1em is equal to the size of a font. Adjusting font size will resize glyphs relative to the em square.
Weight axis (wght)
An axis found in some variable fonts that controls the font file’s weight parameter.
Optical sizes
Different versions of a typeface optimized for use at specific sizes or size ranges.
Typeface
A typeface is what you see; a font is what you use.
X-height
The height of the lowercase characters that have no ascenders nor descenders, which indicates how tall or short the type appears.
Contrast
The difference between the thick and thin parts of a stroke. A monolinear typeface has low stroke contrast, and is the opposite of a high contrast face.