Butterick's Practical Typography→

Matthew Butterick has unveiled his new web book, Practical Typography:

This is a bold claim, but I stand be­hind it: if you learn and fol­low these five ty­pog­ra­phy rules, you will be a bet­ter ty­pog­ra­ph­er than 95% of pro­fes­sion­al writ­ers and 70% of pro­fes­sion­al de­sign­ers. (The rest of this book will raise you to the 99th per­centile in both categories.)

All it takes is ten min­utes—five min­utes to read these rules once, then five min­utes to read them again.

It's an astounding piece of work: a comprehensive, no-nonsense, gorgeous handbook for anyone interested in typography. I took my first peek at it the other night and didn't go to sleep for about two hours.

The book is free to read and thus relies solely on reader support, of which there are many options.

Seth Godin on Typography

Seth Godin:

The choice of a typeface, the care given to kerning and to readability—it all sends a powerful signal. When your business card is nothing but Arial on a piece of cardboard, you’ve just told people how they ought to think about you… precisely the opposite of what you were trying to do when you made the card in the first place.

I love typography. I don’t know if I’m any good at it, but I do think about it regularly, and I’m learning little by little.

At the very least, I promise you’ll never see Arial on this website.