I've struggled a bit with the latest addition to this 'simple steps' typography series. Mostly because it's not so simple and it's a bit more of a grey area than the previous three articles.

Typographic hierarchy, put simply, is how different faces, weights and sizes of typefaces structure a document. Some of these hierarchical devices are well-established conventions, such as cross heads and folios, so I'm not going to touch on them in this post. To keep it simple I'm going to concentrate on two things - size and weight. The first of which is size.

First off a bit of history.

Early typographers created their manuscripts by using one font, one size, one colour mostly, interspersed with hand painted illuminations. The products of such typographers has a flat quality to the information, almost mesmeric.

Take a look at some early manuscripts and the typefaces themselves, especially the older Black letter styles, appear similar - m's look like u's, y's look like p's and so on. As beautiful these manuscripts are, other than the illuminations, they are devoid of structure within the content. There is no typographic hierarchy.

Evolution of the scale

In the sixteenth century, European typographers developed a series of typeface sizes, a scale (the musical analogy is a good one - stick with me). As shown in the diagram they are sizes we're are all familiar with. Six point through to Seventy-Two point type has remained pretty much intact for over four hundred years. In fact, they are the default font sizes in many applications (give or take a few.).

So, what's so special about these sizes? Well, because this scale of sizes has been used for centuries, if set correctly, type set in this scale will appear more pleasing to the eye and therefore more legible.

An interesting point. Originally the sizes in the scale were referred to by name instead of by point size. here's a few examples of some of the older names: