If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you have an understanding of an appreciation for just how much I’ve come to rely on Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. I reference it frequently in my writing, and at least as frequently in designing and laying out pages, whether for print or for web. Admittedly, however, I often pick up the book to remind myself about a rule and often get more than I bargained for. I get lost in its pages and end up doing more reading than referencing.

Enter Matthew Butterick’s Typography for Lawyers. Butterick’s blog is the book’s namesake, but rest assured, this book is for far more than litigators. A quick, thorough guide, this text offers much to typographic novices and experts alike.Read More

Recently, I was contacted by a design-minded German philosophy student named Anton. His questions were thorough and thought-provoking. And I knew upon reading them that they would require equally honest and thorough responses.Read More

Khoi Vinh has been a seminal figure in the design community for the past number of years, and has helped bring an awareness of grid principles to web design. His book Ordering Disorder: Grid Principles for Web Design was published last year and stands as a beautifully designed text that spans the historical and the practical in the world of grid-based design. Since I discovered his work some time in 2009, Khoi’s design work, writing, and design theory have been a strong influence on me as I have explored these themes in my own work. But I’m troubled by one of the things he mentions in a recent interview.Read More

Kerning, adjusting the letterspacing between two consecutive letterforms, takes a great deal of patience and remains one of the most important typographic skills to cultivate. Enter KernType, the kerning game. This beautifully designed and exquisitely engineered web application gives you notoriously difficult words (how I’ve often labored with the word “Type” in setting branding materials for this site!) that progress in difficulty and allows you to kern them, showing your placement against the suggested kerning.Read More

Like you, I was deeply saddened to hear of Steve Jobs’s passing. And—I’m guessing—like you, I also learned about his death on a device he invented. I’ve been spending a great deal of time trying to sort out my feelings about this, wondering whether or not I should add to the conversation.Read More

If you’ve been following the development of typography on the web in the past year, you’ve no doubt read about and had your own (hand-wringing) experiences with font hinting. Regardless of the platform on which you work and read, you’ve come to appreciate the look and feel of the typography you’re most used to experiencing, and it can be an unnerving experience to design a webpage that renders beautifully in your platform of choice, only to test it in another browser and notice that your fonts become either hideous or, worse, illegible. So what is hinting, and in what way is it responsible for this travesty against design?Read More

About two weeks ago, I was invited to attend Interlink Conference, a boutique conference with some great speakers held at Capilano University in the gorgeous city of Vancouver, BC. I was incredibly impressed with the speaker line-up and felt like each speaker added a great deal to the conference. I left inspired and refreshed about the current directions of the web. Here are some of my overall impressions of the speakers, mixed with notes, photos, and, where possible, links to their presentations on Slideshare.Read More

Rui Abreu is a young type designer from Portugal. You may remember my post about his newest typeface, Aria. Rui is also the designer of Gesta, a friendly sans-serif face also available on Typekit. Given that he has worked as an independent designer, but was also an early adopter of Typekit, and distributes a great deal of his work through the foundry Fountain Type, he has some interesting ideas on type distribution, type delivery services, and the pricing of type.Read More

I recently had the opportunity to talk with Mark Simonson, creator of the ever popular Proxima Nova (which, as it happens, just saw a great update on Typekit). Mark was able to talk about what goes into the production of fonts and shed light on, to put it simply, why type costs money.Read More

At this point, at least 90% of the words I read in a day on a screen. Between my phone and my computer, my reading is done almost exclusively on a device. Most of the books I’ve read lately have been in ePub format, and I often take my phone or laptop to the coffee shop to read.

But my preference to read on the screen has little to do with how comfortable it is or how much I enjoy it. Truth be told, I often prefer the visceral experience of reading a book. But I can’t stand having that many physical objects.

The debate about eBooks vs. paperbacks is well-worn territory, and I won’t bore you by chiming in far too late on the debate. What I want to stress, however, is that there are a few thinkers and designers at the vanguard of web typography that are wedding the comfortability and harmony of the experience of reading a book with the convenience, ease, and searchability of screen text. Let’s take a look at the sites that make me hopeful about web and screen typography.Read More