Marco James' Blogger: How to Choose Font Sizes

A tutorial video

From the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vicki Davis

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Helping students select the right font sizes could be a challenge. My sister is a graphic design professor and taught me a simple way to select font sizes. Graphic design students might find it a bit oversimplified but for high school students it works like a charm. I’ve also included the assignment I give after this assignment for those of you who want to understand how this works.

YouTube Video: How to Choose Font Sizes

The Edpuzzle Video: How to Change Font Sizes

This has some checkpoints built into it for those of you who want to understand how I use that tool. Remember that edpuzzle will also let you rip the original audio off and record it in your own voice for those of you who want to use my video and add your voice instead of mine.

https://edpuzzle.com/embed/media/59d684ff0572ac4045f9f25e

A follow-up assignment to demonstrate learning

Note that I’ve already taught my students about the six basic font families: Old Style, Modern, Slab Serif, Sans Serif, Script, and Decorative. I don’t share that video publicly because I lean heavily on The Non-Designers Design Book by Robin Williams (not the comedian.) This book is so helpful when trying to explain basic graphic design to students or adults who need just enough to make their work look great but aren’t in design school.

This lesson reviews font families and also helps them practice interpolating font sizes.

The Font Size Assignment

Based on what you learned in the Font Formula Video, you are going to use PowerPoint. Each slide will have the following:

A Font Formula (you must use 6 different font formulas)
The name of the font you selected
The name of the font family for that font
Make the slide look similar to the one below where you show a Heading, a subheading, and a body typestyle. Draw arrows from the formula to the font size that you selected.
Turn in the PowerPoint here. It should be six slides. Six different formulas. Six different font families and fonts.

A Sample Slide

This is a sample slide. Note that I don’t require students to change the background color but they often want to make it look like mine. This is a simple follow up as well to PowerPoint skills as well but the focus is font families and font sizes and correct interpolation.

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