Learn and improve your type skills with these fantastic freebies.
The older we get, the more we learn. But just to keep us on our toes, nature also teases us by making it more difficult to retrieve information from our ageing memories, especially if we're tired. So it can be very handy to have a well-ordered cheatsheet to hand. Here are five great examples.
The correct use of double and single apostrophes is explained, along with much more
Launched by Colorado designer Jeremiah Shoaf in 2013, Typewolf has grown into a fantastically useful collection of font-related resources for designers. And one of the highlights of the site is this brilliant cheatsheet, which sets out a lot of great info on the proper use of typographic characters. Even seasoned designers will find this a useful reference to keep bookmarked.
Keep up with which typographic features currently are and aren't supported online
Browser implementation of typographic features is constantly and quickly evolving. So it’s great to be able to keep tabs on the state of play via one central resource. Designed by Jake Giltsoff and maintained by Bram Stein, The State of Web Type offers a comprehensive guide to what’s supported where, from alternative fractions to terminal forms.
The Type Terms cheatsheet by Supremo explains the fundamentals of typographical terminology beautifully
Looking for an animated cheatsheet? Us neither. But this creation by Dan Heywood, a designer at Manchester web agency Supremo, is still pretty awesome. Aimed at both typography beginners and more experienced designers looking for a refresher, Type Terms is a brilliantly interactive run-through of the fundamentals of type terminology.
As a print company specialising in leaflets and flyers, FastPrint knows a thing about fonts. And so it has produced this great cheat sheet to how well 20 popular Google Fonts work together. It’s based on inspiration from a handout that was created by the International Journal of Typography in 1992.
This online guide is a great typography jargon buster
Founded in 1997, Fontsmith is a boutique font foundry based in London. And it has created this rather wonderful cheatsheet setting out an A-Z of typography terms. This guide sets out everything you need to know about font-related jargon, from anti-aliasing to x-height.
Next page: Free typography games
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
