The Type Palette

Let's talk about letters, words, sentences and paragraphs this week. No, you don't have to diagram sentences, and this is not an English lesson. But words and type are a huge part of design. You probably already knew that. As far as web design goes, you can't even begin a design without thinking about what font you will use, what size, what weight, etc... So let's talk a tad bit about what Photoshop 6 can do when it comes to type.

Above you can see a palette that contains some drop down boxes and such. There are actually 2 palettes there. One is the Character Palette and the other is the Paragraph palette.The first one, which happens to be on the top here, is the Character palette. It is where you decide what typeface you want, what font, what weight and what color and so forth. The Paragraph palette below is where you control the way in which paragraphs and sentences are margined, align and what not. I have labeled them with letters. I will discuss each area around the letters from the top down. Some of these features you will use constantly, such as color, size and the type face. Others you may never use, such as the baseline shift and the kerning feature. There is another way to control kerning that I will show you later. Let's begin. First select the type tool and click on the palette button at the upper-right corner of the screen.

Letter A:

This is the area where you control what type face/font you want, and what weight you want it. You can use the drop down boxes to choose your font. You are of course limited to the fonts you currently have on your system, but you can add new ones if you so desire. The drop down box will tell you which font you currently have chosen. It will use the last font chosen as the default. At any time, you can change this font. Once you put type on a layer, you can change this and it will change the type. You do not have to select the type in order to do this. I love this feature, since it saves the time of having to select the type prior to changing the face. To the right of this box is the actual font style box. Here is where you would choose bold, medium, italic or whatever fonts you have associated with your particular type face. If you only have one option in this drop down box, it means you only have one option to choose from. Makes it easier to choose that way huh?

Letter B:

There are four boxes in this area. Here you control the following things:

• Type size
• Line-Spacing
• Individual Kerning of letters
• Tracking of letters/ words

Type size can be measure in a number of ways. You control that in your preferences. I am using pixels here. I almost always use pixels since I work on the web and it is much easier for me to deal with. Line-spacing is the same measurements for the most part. Again I am using pixels. Kerning is the spacing between individual letters. You can increase or decrease spacing between two letters by putting your cursor between them and increasing or decreasing this number. I find that it is easier to do this however:

Hold down Alt/Option and Shift -> Then use the cursor keys to move the letters closer or further apart. Watch what happens in the kerning box.

Finally we have tracking. That simply gives spacing between entire words either breathing room or claustrophobia. Look below.