AV News 201- August 2015
Now to the scale of what lettering you put on the screen. There is nothing wrong with filling the screen with the words of your main title, but don ' t forget that nowadays we have High Definition, and even small lettering can be clearly read, and it can have lots of impact against a plain background. Some TV titles are like this nowadays, and can be very compelling.
It can be effective to make the several lines of your title match each other in length for example, so that they form a block. This is easy to do in Photoshop( CS at least)- look for the little window that contains so many useful controls. There ' s one for increasing the proportionate width of your lettering, so that you can subtly condense or extend it to match the line above- or you can just adjust the font size by quite tiny increments to achieve a matching line length.
It will also allow you to regulate letter spacing, change to bold or italic or both. There ' s a lot tucked away in this little panel!( But please don ' t italicise inappropriate fonts- black letter was never italicised- the mediaeval scribes didn ' t know about ' Italic ' handwriting, which belongs to a later, Renaissance, era!)
Certainly it is unwise to use oversize lettering in other places- captions within the show, and end credits don ' t need to be all that big. Huge lettering is a bit like shouting, and indeed it might be seen as immodest to put for example your own name at the end in letters which seem twenty feet high, delicious as such an ego trip would be! While on the subject of subsidiary type matter, this is the place for those less elaborate fonts, chosen to harmonise( or indeed contrast) with your main font which, as I ' ve suggested, may be in some kind of decorative ' display ' face.
So there it is, for the time being anyway. My reminiscences and ramblings through the rich and populous world of typographical design must close for now, but it ' s a subject dear to me, and on which I ' ve always something to say, and I ' ll welcome your own thoughts or queries on any aspect of it if you care to contact me.
‘ Script’ Fonts‘ Typewriter’ Fonts
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