Butterick’s Practical Typography
Typography in ten minutes
Summary of key rules
Start
Please pay for this book
Why typography matters
- what is typography?
- who is typography for?
- why does typography matter?
- what is good typography?
- where do the rules come from?
Type composition
- straight and curly quotes
- one space between sentences
- question marks and exclamation points
- emoticons & emoji
- semicolons and colons
- paragraph and section marks
- parentheses, brackets, and braces
- hyphens and dashes
- ampersands
- signature lines
- trademark & copyright symbols
- ellipses
- apostrophes
- accented characters
- foot and inch marks
- white-space characters
- word spaces
- nonbreaking spaces
- tabs and tab stops
- hard line breaks
- carriage returns
- hard page breaks
- optional hyphens
- math symbols
- ligatures
Text formatting
- underlining
- goofy fonts
- monospaced fonts
- bold or italic
- all caps
- point size
- headings
- letterspacing
- kerning
- color
- alternate figures
- ordinals
- web & email addresses
- emails
- small caps
- hierarchical headings
- OpenType features
- mixing fonts
- metrics vs. optical spacing
Font recommendations
- font basics
- Equity
- Valkyrie
- Century Supra
- Concourse
- Hermes Maia
- Heliotrope
- Triplicate
- Advocate
- system fonts
- free fonts
- Charter
- Helvetica & Arial alternatives
- Times New Roman alternatives
- Courier alternatives
- Palatino alternatives
- Baskerville alternatives
- Century Schoolbook alternatives
- Georgia alternatives
- Verdana alternatives
- Gill Sans alternatives
- Cambria alternatives
- Calibri alternatives
- Minion alternatives
- bad fonts
Page layout
- centered text
- justified text
- first-line indents
- space between paragraphs
- line spacing
- line length
- page margins
- body text
- hyphenation
- block quotations
- bulleted and numbered lists
- tables
- rules & borders
- widow and orphan control
- space above & below
- page break before
- keep lines together
- keep with next paragraph
- columns
- grids
- paragraph & character styles
- maxims of page layout
Sample documents
Afterword
Appendix
- typewriter habits
- printers and paper
- how to make a PDF
- how to embed fonts in a Word document
- identifying fonts
- em sizing
- bibliography
- screen-reading considerations
- responsive web design
- how to work with a designer
- the copyright status of fonts
- how this book was made
- typographic humor
- common accented characters
- Concourse Index
- contact
Commentary
- Why there’s no e-book or PDF
- The economics of a web-based book: year one
- Why Racket? Why Lisp?
- The billionaire’s typewriter
- The infinite-pixel screen
- Effluents influence affluence
- Vote with your wallet, not your ad blocker
- Drowning the
“Crystal Goblet” - To pay or not to pay
- The scorpion express: thoughts on variable fonts
- Are two spaces better than one?
- Ligatures in programming fonts: hell no
- Typography 2020: a special listicle for America
- The cowardice of Brave
- Oscars 2020: best-picture typography
- Typography 2024: for America! for America’s best
- MB lectures & articles
Also by Matthew Butterick
- MB Type (fonts used in this book)
Typography for Lawyers (paperback)Beautiful Racket (book about making programming languages)- Pollen (software used to make this book)
- Typography-discussion forum (hosted by me, open to all)
- Chron (= my blog, roughly)
MB XS mailing list
My mailing list is free, occasional, and covers a variety of topics (typography, law, programming, and writing among them). I will never sell or share your email address.