# The Anatomy of Typography

> This is content from just-tim, the data-and-analytics channel by Tim Ngwena (formerly 'Tableau Tim'). Tim has 12+ years of hands-on BI experience and covers Tableau most of all, plus Power BI, Looker, Hex, SQL and data modelling, the analytics industry, and the craft of doing the job — always tool-agnostic and honest about the trade-offs.

- **Author:** Tim Ngwena (just-tim, https://just-tim.com/about)
- **Published:** 2010-04-10
- **Format:** Video · 9 min watch · transcript available
- **Topics:** Data visualisation
- **Canonical:** https://just-tim.com/posts/the-anatomy-of-typography
- **Watch:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6jc4m8yZ3Y

I walk through the anatomy of typography, using a handy summary wallpaper to label the parts of type. I cover character types, ligatures, the three families of font, the baseline and x-height, ascenders and descenders, plus terms like bowl, counter, stem, and the difference between tracking and kerning.

## Key takeaways

- Special characters include maths signs, punctuation, accented letters and reference marks like the copyright and trademark symbols, while ligatures are letter pairs (such as fi or ff) drawn to sit better together.
- Fonts fall into three broad families: serif (with tapered, bold endings), sans serif (no endings) and free form fonts that follow no strict rules.
- The baseline is where text sits, the x-height caps most lower-case letters, the cap height marks capitals, and ascenders rise above x-height while descenders drop below the baseline.
- Bowl, counter, ear, terminal and stem are named parts of individual letterforms, and a terminal is the soft ending on a serif font where it doesn't finish in a full serif.
- Kerning adjusts the space between two individual letters, whereas tracking adjusts the spacing across a whole group of letters or block of text.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Introduction and character types
- 1:17 Ligatures explained
- 1:54 The three families of font
- 3:15 Baseline, x-height and cap height
- 4:24 Ascenders, descenders and tails
- 5:52 Terminals, ears, bowls and counters
- 7:13 Stems
- 7:40 Tracking versus kerning

Watch the full video, read the transcript and use chapter deep-links on the page: https://just-tim.com/posts/the-anatomy-of-typography

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just-tim — Data and analytics, with a point of view. · https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC7HYxRWmaNlJux-X7rNLZyw · https://twitter.com/TableauTim · https://www.linkedin.com/in/timngwena