Now it’s time to put every­thing to­gether. Like good writ­ing, good ty­pog­ra­phy isn’t de­ter­mined by el­e­ments in iso­la­tion but by the re­la­tion­ship of those el­e­ments and the ef­fect of the whole.

So far we’ve looked at ty­po­graphic rules in­di­vid­u­ally. In this chap­ter, we’ll look at these rules in the con­text of some com­mon doc­u­ments. Your goal is to get bet­ter at see­ing ty­po­graphic flaws in lay­outs and fix­ing them.

Each sam­ple doc­u­ment is shown as a be­fore-and-af­ter demon­stra­tion: “be­fore” rep­re­sents a typ­i­cal lay­out with the usual bad habits; “af­ter” rep­re­sents a lay­out up­graded with the lessons of this book.

Ex­cept for web­sites, the sam­ples in this chap­ter were cre­ated with Mi­crosoft Of­fice on Mac OS. Not my fa­vorite de­sign tool, but its ty­po­graphic ca­pa­bil­i­ties are typ­i­cal of those avail­able to the pro­fes­sional writer. If I can make good ty­pog­ra­phy un­der those con­di­tions, you can too.