More than just arranging pretty fonts on a nice background, typography is an essential part of most designs—they can make or break a project. Unfortunately, common type mistakes tend to make a bigger statement than good typography. They stick out like a sore thumb, while good typographic choices blend so nicely with the overall design that you might overlook them.

In order to remind us not to make common type mistakes, Brazilian designer and calligrapher Thiago Bellotti has created a witty series of posters called Type Wars. Thiago’s posters use quotes from famous Star Wars characters while cleverly replacing words to make humorous typographic posters.

If you want to get your message across without distracting typographic errors, learn to recognize some of the most common type mistakes. Check out the Type Wars posters below and visit his Behance page to view more works.

Type Wars

Fonts

For many beginners, the task of picking fonts is a mystifying process. There seem to be endless choices with no way of understanding the options. For better or for worse, picking fonts is more like getting dressed in the morning. Just as with clothing, there’s a distinction between fonts that are expressive and stylish versus those that are useful and appropriate to many situations. Our job as designers is to try to find the right balance for the occasion. To learn more, take a look at the difference between fonts and typefaces.

Kerning

Kerning refers to the amount of space between two letters. It’s the process of adjusting that space to avoid awkward-­looking gaps between your letters and improve legibility. Sometimes a font’s default kerning isn’t ideal for certain letter combinations, so you’ll want to manually adjust it so the spacing between all the letters looks consistent. It’s important to note that kerning is all about visual appeal; it involves adjusting your typography to look right rather than creating mathematically equal spacing.

Letter-spacing

Let­ter-spac­ing is often confused for kerning, but the concept is a little different. It involves adjusting the spacing throughout the entire word. Once you’ve determined the proper kerning between each letter, you can change the letter-spacing equally between every letter. Letter-spacing is generally used to fill a space that’s larger or smaller than currently suits the type’s parameters or to make a single word seem airy and impressive.

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Now that you’re had a look at some common type mistakes, click here to find the best free fonts to download.

Source: https://www.behance.net/gallery/24181463/TYPEWARS