Prescriptive, general, and excellent for beginners like me
4 stars
This year, I've begun attending Indieweb meetups, where I find myself surrounded by people who tend to have better design taste than the average functional programming schlub like me. Since I primarily operate in text, typography is a natural place to begin leveling up.
This book is highly prescriptive. For someone with little experience or taste, like me, this is welcome. It's not the first time I've taken an interest in typography, and I've found previous expositions on "vertical rhythm" or "harmony" enlightening, as proportionally sized elements are related to what pleases us in music. Butterick doesn't have much use for the idea. This was a good reminder to me that we are in a subjective field and tastes vary. I can imagine a more experienced designer craving nuance, but the lack of it worked well for me.
The contents are highly general. It specifically covers the Web, but also …
This year, I've begun attending Indieweb meetups, where I find myself surrounded by people who tend to have better design taste than the average functional programming schlub like me. Since I primarily operate in text, typography is a natural place to begin leveling up.
This book is highly prescriptive. For someone with little experience or taste, like me, this is welcome. It's not the first time I've taken an interest in typography, and I've found previous expositions on "vertical rhythm" or "harmony" enlightening, as proportionally sized elements are related to what pleases us in music. Butterick doesn't have much use for the idea. This was a good reminder to me that we are in a subjective field and tastes vary. I can imagine a more experienced designer craving nuance, but the lack of it worked well for me.
The contents are highly general. It specifically covers the Web, but also print media and slide decks and several other contexts. I was looking for advice on questions like improving the rendering HTML's definition lists that I so heavily overuse, and instead got advice on how to make a more compelling business card. In all its generality, I still learned a lot. A key point for me is to design outward from the main text, and not inward from the edges of the browser window.
The book also covers commercial fonts, including selling some of his own in this "ad free," reader supported book. I don't mind that at all. Talking about his own fonts is an advertisement of sorts, but it's done transparently and tastefully, and he fairly examines other commercial and open source alternatives.
This book will not be the alpha and omega of typography for me, but is a good point to resume my studies and something I'll refer back to often.
