From the course: Creating Fonts with Fontself, Illustrator, and Photoshop

Essential typography terms

From the course: Creating Fonts with Fontself, Illustrator, and Photoshop

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Essential typography terms

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- [Instructor] Even though at the outset of this course I likened font self to rock and roll for type and typography, most of us know you can't make rock and roll, really, without learning at least three chords, and maybe some other stuff. So that's where we are right now. We're going to learn our basic three chords and we'll start out with the Baseline. It is the foundation for everything. If you have nothing else in the basis for your font, then have a Baseline. Everything relies on, sits on, or relates to that. Next, we have the X-Height, which is the height of a lowercase X where it gets its name from, and all of our lowercase letters normally sit between the Baseline and the X-Height. The equivalent for caps is the Cap Height, and you can see there that there's a distance, which you determine by the way, between the lowercase and the uppercase letters. Now we'll just take our three chords now up to five by taking a look at the next line, which is the Ascender line, and that meets the highest thing in your font. Again, a relationship between the Baseline and the Ascender, as there is with its opposite, the Descender, which is the line that goes along with the lowest character part in your font set, and everything else uses that. Now, we'll take another look at the Baseline and why you really really should use it in the next movie, but as for now, this is it. You are ready to make some rock and roll.

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