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mburnamfink 's review for:
Butterick's Practical Typography
by Matthew Butterick
Do you get a little frisson of pleasure from the way serifs draw your eyes across the page? Does improper kerning make you irritable? Do you vandalize notices made in Comic Sans? If so, this book might be for you.
Butterick's argument is that typography matters. Good typography, defined as the visual component of the written word, conserves the reader's attention, helps your work stand out, and is an art worth practicing in and of itself. The problem is that the world is full of bad typography, from moronic defaults in word processing programs, to holdovers in design from newsprint and typewriters. With just a little of effort, you can do much better. The book itself is proof that this works: freely available on the web, it is one of the most minimalist but elegant sites I've seen. I stayed up way too late hitting the next page for the joy of seeing the layout.
Much of Butterick's advice is eminently practical. Learn to use the style settings on your word processor, which even in Microsoft Word are powerful enough to do almost anything. Focus on the body text first, and use white space more. 11 point fonts with 20 point line spaces and a narrower column size make for a much better reading experience than 12 points double spaced as wide as it can go, let alone abominations like exotic fonts, Arial, and BOLD UNDERLINED CAPS. His resumes are a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, in much of my life as an academic I'm constrained to other people's formatting, but I will try and follow his advice. (by the way, scientific journals can eat a dick. This is not 1970, no one reads paper copies, optimize for screen and printer and legibility, not fitting as many words as possible in 4 columns of tiny type).
Butterick does constantly up-sell his custom fonts, which is a little annoying. A guy's got to eat, and apparently people are not paying for a free webbook. I'm actually not that opposed to system defaults, unless you're a graphic designer, in which case your skill should be knowing better options than Helvetica. Typography demands sensitivity to context, and one thing that seems clear is that the 80-20 rule applies here: Doing a little will make your typography much better, getting that last little bit requires literally hand-tuning a document. System fonts are like jeans or a dark suit. They signal something like "I am wearing clothes." Putting in the money and effort to get bespoke fonts may give you a subliminal bump in credibility, but also seems like playing the business card scene from American Psycho straight.
As an aside, Butterick's resume is fascinating. He switched from math to design at Harvard, specialized in typography, got a law degree, wrote a custom web typesetting tool in a LISP variant, and a couple of books on typography.
Butterick's argument is that typography matters. Good typography, defined as the visual component of the written word, conserves the reader's attention, helps your work stand out, and is an art worth practicing in and of itself. The problem is that the world is full of bad typography, from moronic defaults in word processing programs, to holdovers in design from newsprint and typewriters. With just a little of effort, you can do much better. The book itself is proof that this works: freely available on the web, it is one of the most minimalist but elegant sites I've seen. I stayed up way too late hitting the next page for the joy of seeing the layout.
Much of Butterick's advice is eminently practical. Learn to use the style settings on your word processor, which even in Microsoft Word are powerful enough to do almost anything. Focus on the body text first, and use white space more. 11 point fonts with 20 point line spaces and a narrower column size make for a much better reading experience than 12 points double spaced as wide as it can go, let alone abominations like exotic fonts, Arial, and BOLD UNDERLINED CAPS. His resumes are a thing of beauty. Unfortunately, in much of my life as an academic I'm constrained to other people's formatting, but I will try and follow his advice. (by the way, scientific journals can eat a dick. This is not 1970, no one reads paper copies, optimize for screen and printer and legibility, not fitting as many words as possible in 4 columns of tiny type).
Butterick does constantly up-sell his custom fonts, which is a little annoying. A guy's got to eat, and apparently people are not paying for a free webbook. I'm actually not that opposed to system defaults, unless you're a graphic designer, in which case your skill should be knowing better options than Helvetica. Typography demands sensitivity to context, and one thing that seems clear is that the 80-20 rule applies here: Doing a little will make your typography much better, getting that last little bit requires literally hand-tuning a document. System fonts are like jeans or a dark suit. They signal something like "I am wearing clothes." Putting in the money and effort to get bespoke fonts may give you a subliminal bump in credibility, but also seems like playing the business card scene from American Psycho straight.
As an aside, Butterick's resume is fascinating. He switched from math to design at Harvard, specialized in typography, got a law degree, wrote a custom web typesetting tool in a LISP variant, and a couple of books on typography.