Most designers get the big decisions right—typeface, size, spacing—but miss the details that make text look professionally set. Straight quotes instead of curly ones, hyphens instead of en dashes, lining figures in body text where oldstyle would read better.
This course focuses on refinement: when to use which dash, how to set true small caps instead of scaled capitals, managing ligatures that help versus ones that distract. You'll learn hanging punctuation for optical alignment, numeral styles for different contexts, and proper fraction formatting.
There's no universal rule for these details—they depend on your typeface, language, and medium. We cover the standards, then show you how to evaluate each situation. Some typefaces need aggressive ligature use, others look better with them disabled. Small caps work for some acronyms but not all.
Technical implementation includes OpenType features in both design software and CSS, character entity codes, and font-variant properties. You'll build reference sheets for different scenarios and learn to audit existing work for typographic errors that most people miss.