Practical Typography
practicaltypography.com
Practical Typography
1–10 of 64 posts
Re: Practical Typography
#2If you don't find something to argue with in this book, you haven't thought about it enough.
There's a dividing line, though, between books that are full of Wrong (and so you should ignore them) and books which are full of Considered Opinion (and are worth arguing over); this one falls firmly into the latter category for me.
Re: Practical Typography
#3If you don't find something to argue with in this book, you haven't thought about it enough. There's a dividing line, though, between books that are full of Wrong (and so you should ignore them) and books which are full of Considered Opinion (and are worth arguing over); this one falls firmly into the latter category for me.
You know, I think that's a pretty wise point that I haven't really heard put into words before - a good teacher's goal is to prepare their students to be able to debate the merits of the teacher's own opinions on equal ground.
Re: Practical Typography
#4Butterick made his own programming language called Pollen [1] to publish this site. [2] Pollen is implemented in the Racket programming language. [3] He has another online book called Beautiful Racket [4] about language-oriented programming in Racket.
[2] https://practicaltypography.com/why-racket-why-lisp.html
Re: Practical Typography
#5For me, this online-book is the most beautiful site on the entire web, at least with the default Valkyrie font. It's a prime example of how excellent content design can be made in black-and-white, and the sorta-recent wave of "this is a website" pages didn't come close to it. White space there is simply magical, every single interval is perfect―I envy the author for the ability to achieve that.
The site, together with other Butterick's online-books, also uses a rather non-traditional styling for headings: they stand out just a bit from the body text by the use of bold face, and that's enough. Every day, I see examples of either loud and heavy headings, or subheadings that are not obvious―on very popular sites―and I keep thinking how I would apply Butterick's trick, alas to no avail.
Re: Practical Typography
#6For me, this online-book is the most beautiful site on the entire web, at least with the default Valkyrie font. It's a prime example of how excellent content design can be made in black-and-white, and the sorta-recent wave of "this is a website" pages didn't come close to it. White space there is simply magical, every single interval is perfect―I envy the author for the ability to achieve that. The site, together wit…
Try equity also
Re: Practical Typography
#7Funny that even if this site does typography well, it miserably fails in accessibility as parts of text have way too low contrast against background. Still great content and I will definitely dig in.
Re: Practical Typography
#8The five quick rules don't mesh well with the rest of the book's points. The chapters urge tailoring the style to the content, but the quick rules don't mention this at all. They just recommend ranges for basic font measures.
The chapters are short, so if you only have 10 minutes, you'd get more out of reading the first few.
Re: Practical Typography
#9"And never choose Times New Roman or Arial, as those fonts are favored only by the apathetic and sloppy."
Why? Can someone explain this?
Re: Practical Typography
#10The five quick rules don't mesh well with the rest of the book's points. The chapters urge tailoring the style to the content, but the quick rules don't mention this at all. They just recommend ranges for basic font measures. The chapters are short, so if you only have 10 minutes, you'd get more out of reading the first few.
I assume the idea is that, on average, you'd get better results just following those five points (focus on the body, get a reasonable text size, get decent line spacing, adjust the two for 45-90 characters per line, choose a decent font). When you spend reading the rest of the book, you'll realize that the author seems to deal with absolute bottom of the barrel typography regularly. Those five things alone would dramatically improve most of the bad examples the author brings up.
A small improvement on a large scale is better than no improvement.