Typography & Fonts Trivia

Typography is everywhere, even when you're not paying attention to it. The font on a street sign, a menu, or your phone's operating system was chosen deliberately, often after years of testing and design history.

This quiz covers the terms, typefaces, and designers behind the letters you read every day.

The Building Blocks of a Typeface

A handful of terms show up again and again in typography.

• Serif fonts have small strokes, or "feet," at the ends of letters; sans-serif fonts do not.
• Kerning refers to the adjustment of space between individual letter pairs.
• A typeface is the overall design (like Helvetica), while a font is a specific weight and size of that design.
• X-height is the height of lowercase letters, excluding ascenders and descenders.

Fonts You've Seen a Thousand Times

Some typefaces became so widely used that they're recognizable on sight.

• Helvetica, released in Switzerland in 1957, became one of the most widely used typefaces in the world.
• Comic Sans was designed in 1994 for a Microsoft cartoon dog and became infamous for overuse in serious contexts.
• Times New Roman was originally commissioned for The Times newspaper of London in 1931.