Typography matters: anatomy of a typeface
- Amber Davis
- Mar 4
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 24
Typography—the art and technique of arranging type—can double the impact of your branding and marketing efforts.
According to the American Marketing Association:
By using typography as a visual as well as a verbal communication tool, brands can benefit from the picture-superiority effect—where subjects remember image cues better than verbal ones. By forcing an individual to see your typography as an image that they encode as visual, and then again as a linguistic concept, you get twice the binding power over a word that just registers as a word.
Take a second to think about one of the most famous, most memorable, most impactful advertising campaigns of all time: got milk?
You know it, right? My money is on yes, no matter who you are, because that campaign slogan, in that font, is still in effective use after more than 30 years.1 It has been swiped and modeled and parodied a million times over, with every product, service, or outcome imaginable being substituted for “milk.” On bumper stickers, t-shirts, billboards. Every designer and their grandma wants a piece of that simple, two-word, unforgettable Oreo pie—and a glass of milk to go with it—and yet no knock off can replicate the power of the original campaign.
The got milk? font is Phenix-American, a sans-serif typeface.2 It’s bold and clean. Substantial, but not bulky. It’s tall—even in lowercase—and friendly: horizontally condensed, in a chummy way. It’s the perfect choice to evoke a glass of milk in the consumer’s mind, and it was, at the inception of the California Dairy Board’s radical milk-sales rescue campaign, an overlooked and rarely used font. Arial was the preferred font face of the 1990s.
That’s right, folks: Fonts, like any visual design element, are subject to trends influenced by social, economic, and cultural shifts. You know this, even if you don’t know that you know it.
No matter the decade, fonts are more than just letters, and typefaces are more than just groups of fonts with a similar style. They are the parts and pieces of the art form of typography—and they have parts and pieces all their own.
When we gain familiarity with the anatomy of a typeface, we gain a new language—and, subsequently, the ability to express what it is we want out of the visual imprint of words in our work.
Something with serifs, for example, can add a sense of tradition, trust, and authority.6 A shorter x-height might feel posh, while an elongated tail can add elegance.
The way that words are shaped and their letters drawn offers predictable meanings for the people who look at them beyond the meaning of the word itself. And the fact that most people intuit attitude, emotion and meaning from the “image” of the words they are looking at without even realizing it makes typography one of the most powerful tools of design and marketing when creating brand meaning and influencing consumer sentiment.
We firmly believe that words and design shape decisions. The more empowered we are to design well and write well, the more impact we can have on those decisions. Here’s a starter glossary of typographic anatomy terms to help us and our fellow marketers out there in that vein.
Arm
A straight or curved portion of a letter that extends upwards or outwards, attached at one end and free at the other.
Aperture
The partially enclosed, somewhat rounded negative space in some characters such as ‘n’, ‘C’, ‘S’, the lower part of ‘e’, or the upper part of a double-story ‘a’.
Apex
The point at the top of a letter where two strokes meet, for example in the capital ‘A’.
Ascender
Any part in a lowercase letter that extends above the x-height, found for example in ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘f’, ‘h’, ‘k’, etc. Some types of ascenders have specific names.
Bar (or crossbar)
A bar is a horizontal stroke in letters like A, H, e and f.
Baseline
The imaginary line upon which the letters in a font appear to rest.
Bowl
The curved part of the character that encloses the circular or curved parts (counter) of some letters such as ‘d’, ‘b’, ‘o’, ‘D’, and ‘B'.
Counter
The enclosed or partially enclosed circular or curved negative space (white space) of some letters such as d, o, and s is the counter. An ‘eye’ is the specific name of the counter in a lowercase ‘e’.
Crotch
Yep, exactly what you think it is: The inside of a narrow angle where two strokes in a character meet, as in V, W, Y.
Descender
A descender is a vertical stroke that extends downwards below the x-height.
Finial (or terminal)
The curved or tapered end of a stroke that has no serif.
Leg
The down-sloping stroke on the letter ‘K’, ‘k’ and ‘R’.
Serif
A short line or finishing stroke that crosses or projects from stems or strokes in a character. Serifs have many shapes, including hairline, bracketed, wedge, and slab. Fonts without serifs are called “sans serifs.” This example is Times New Roman; all other examples in this article use Montserrat, which is a sans-serif font.
X-height
The height of the lowercase letters, disregarding ascenders or descenders, typically exemplified by the letter x. The relationship of the x-height to the body defines the perceived type size. A typeface with a large x-height looks much bigger than a typeface with a small x-height at the same size. The midline is an imaginary line that is parallel to the baseline and marks the x-height.
These terms and definitions were largely compiled from here and here. We highly recommend you visit these links to learn more.
You’re on the road to using typography to double the impact of your marketing and branding efforts. To explore at a deeper level, check out the Revision Future Typography report from Monotype—some of the smartest folks in the typography trade. It’s a trends report unlike any we’ve ever seen, incorporating multi-sensory observations, curating work from talented designers, and exploring topics through a creative typographic lens.
Oh, and in case you were wondering, the Mix Consulting brand font is Montserrat: a geometric, sans-serif typeface with a large x-height, short descenders, and wide apertures, which give it high readability and scalability. Montserrat was designed by Argentine graphic designer Julieta Ulanovsky, and was inspired by early 20th century sign prints often seen in the historic Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires.7
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