Typography and layout skills
designers need

Typography is the craft of making text readable, appropriate and expressive: choosing typefaces, setting sizes, weights, line height, letter spacing and line length, and building hierarchy. Layout is the arrangement of text and other elements in space: grids, margins, gutters, alignment, proximity and white space. Together they decide whether content feels effortless or exhausting.

Some guidance is well established. Baymard Institute's review of readability research recommends roughly 50–75 characters per line.¹ Accessibility sets firm requirements. WCAG 2.2's text spacing criterion requires content to keep working when users increase line, paragraph, letter and word spacing,² and the 2026 WebAIM Million found low-contrast text on 83.9% of top home pages.³ Strong typography is valued across design roles: in India, AmbitionBox lists communication designers at a typical ₹7.7–8.7 lakh⁴ and visual designers at ₹7.3–8.1 lakh.⁵

Characters per line for comfortable reading (Baymard)

50–75

WCAG text spacing criterion

1.4.12

Top home pages with low-contrast text (WebAIM, 2026)

83.9%

Typical communication designer pay in India (AmbitionBox)

₹7.7–8.7 lakh

Table: How typography and layout skills are assessed (editorial summary)

Table: An example type scale for a product (illustrative; adjust for scripts and brand)

Table: How typography developed (editorial summary)

• A type scale documented with use cases
• A text-heavy layout with comfortable line length
• A grid with columns, gutters and margins
• A multilingual example with Indian scripts
• A check at 200% text size and increased spacing
• A verified typography and layout assessment

Show content impact: "Rebuilt policy pages with a 6-step type scale and 65-character lines; support queries about policy terms decreased."

"How do you choose a typeface for a product?"

Readability at small sizes, language support, licensing, performance and brand fit.

"What's a good line height for body text?"

Around 1.4–1.6 times the font size for Latin text; often more for Indic scripts.

"How do you build hierarchy without many sizes?"

Weight, colour, spacing and position as well as size.

"Why use relative units for type on the web?"

So text respects user settings and scales with zoom.

"How do you design a grid?"

Columns, gutters and margins chosen for content and screen sizes, then used consistently.

• "Which languages does the product support?" — script needs.
• "Is there a type system in the design system?" — consistency.
• "Who chooses and licenses fonts?" — practical constraints.
• "How content-heavy is the product?" — typography's importance.

Table: Roles relying on typography and typical pay in India (AmbitionBox, October 2026; indicative)

Table: Common typography and layout tools (editorial guidance)

• Junior designer — applies type styles.
• Visual / graphic designer — chooses and sets type.
• Senior designer — builds type systems.
• Brand or design systems lead — owns typography standards.
• Art / creative director — typographic voice of a brand.

1. Week 1: Basics — Anatomy, classification, pairing and scales.
2. Week 2: Layout — Grids and white space on a text-heavy page.
3. Week 3: Test and prove — Check scripts, zoom and spacing; take the Typography and Layout Assessment.

Related: Visual Design, Graphic Design and Accessibility. Guides: visual design, graphic design and accessibility.

• Setting text — headings, body, labels.
• Maintaining styles — type tokens in the system.
• Reviewing — readability and hierarchy.
• Localising — scripts and longer translations.
• Testing — zoom and spacing.
• Partnering — with writers on structure.

"Serif or sans-serif for body text on screens?"

Both can work; choose for readability at the size used, rendering quality and brand.

"How do you handle long translated text?"

Allow flexible containers, test with real translations and avoid fixed-width labels.

Table: A first-90-days plan (editorial guidance)

Start with an audit of every type style used in the product and its key content pages. Consolidate them into a clear scale with named roles, and test it with real content in every supported language. Apply it to the most-read pages first, checking zoom and spacing. A clean type system quietly improves the whole product.

Products in India often mix English with Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Marathi or other scripts, and typography needs to handle this gracefully.

Choose fonts with real support. Many popular Latin fonts lack Indic glyphs, so the browser or app falls back to a different font that may look mismatched. Choose families designed for both, or pair a Latin font with an Indic font of similar weight and proportions.

Increase line height. Devanagari and other scripts have marks above and below the main letterforms, so they usually need more line height than Latin text to avoid collisions.

Check sizes. Some scripts appear smaller at the same point size; adjust sizes so they look visually equivalent.

Avoid letter-spacing tricks. Tracking that works for Latin capitals can break conjuncts in Indic scripts.

Test real content. Use genuine translated text, not placeholder text, and check on low-end Android devices where font rendering differs.

Getting this right makes products feel native rather than translated, which builds trust with users.

AI layout tools can draft pages and slides in seconds, but they often get typography wrong. Typical problems are too many sizes, cramped line height, overly long lines and weak hierarchy. They also tend to ignore non-Latin scripts. That makes typographic judgement more valuable, not less: someone has to turn a quick draft into something genuinely readable.

AI is also useful for typography work itself. It can suggest font pairings to evaluate, generate test content in several languages, and help spot inconsistent text styles in large files. The final decisions — choosing typefaces, setting the scale and checking readability with real users and real content — remain human. In interviews, show how you use these tools to explore and audit faster while keeping control of the type system.

• Too many typefaces and sizes.
• Very long or very short lines.
• Low-contrast body text.
• Fixed pixel sizes that don't scale.
• Ignoring non-Latin scripts.

Line-length guidance comes from Baymard Institute; text spacing requirements from W3C's WCAG 2.2; contrast data from the WebAIM Million (2026); and India pay from AmbitionBox (read October 2026; small sample for layout artists). The type scale, Indic guidance, assessment formats and history are editorial. Science of Apps publishes the free assessment linked here. Last reviewed October 2026.

• Type scale — a consistent set of font sizes.
• Line height (leading) — vertical space between lines.
• Tracking — overall letter spacing.
• Grid — columns, gutters and margins guiding layout.
• Measure — the length of a line of text.