Reddit reviews The Elements of Typographic Style

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is probably the most thorough and well put together book on typography and its history. It's really cheap and I suggest anyone wanting to learn more about typefaces or a general interest in the history and evolution of type to check it out.

Books books books!

Some essential reading:

• Thinking with Type - very basic, and a good place to start; designed like a workbook
  
• The Elements of Typographic Style - pure reference
  
• The Vignelli Canon (PDF, also available as paperback)
  
  You have probably heard of the documentary Helvetica. This movie inspired me to become a type nerd. The follow-up movie, Objectified, is also very good and focuses on consumer design.
  
  Web sites / blogs:
  
  
• Typophile - active forum and community
  
• I Love Typography - great blog
  
• The Ampersand - pictures of ampersands; more interesting than it sounds
  
• Brand New - logo design, not typography specifically
  
  If you are at college or have a college campus nearby, check our their art library. There are bound to be awesome resources there. Explore graphic design periodicals and get lost in giant bound books of type samples.
  
  Edit: Disclaimer: I'm merely a design hobbyist.

Not sure about websites, but these books are absolute must-reads for learning typography.

Thinking With Type

Designing With Type

The Elements of Typographic Style

The Elements of Typographic Style

It may be a bit dense for a beginner, however it's been referenced as the bible of typography multiple times to me, by unrelated sources! (And it's cheap!)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063/ref=pd_lpo_k2_dp_sr_2?pf_rd_p=1535523722&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0881791326&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=191BS5CQJSX6RBDKACAE

If you want to be a web designer and not just a code monkey, there's no way of getting around learning (at least the basics) of graphic design. Composition, grid systems, colour theory, typography. Did I mention typography? Really, visual trends come and go, but good typography is timeless and arguably the #1 factor that decides whether a site's content (the most important part of a site) is consumable.

Then, learn HTML and CSS. Write code by hand, i.e. no WYSIWYG editors. Also, ignore server-side languages (PHP, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, etc.) and even JavaScript at this point. Once you're familiar with the elements of HTML and how to style them via CSS, learn JavaScript, because now you'll have a good mental model of what you're manipulating with JS.

This alone will keep you busy for a substantial period of time, but it's the meat of front-end engineering. Simultaneously, keep refining your design knowledge and skills. Practice on personal projects. Get feedback from peers, it's a very generous community.

This book will take years off your learning curve.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063?ie=UTF8&tag=alldietslowca-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0881792063

The Elements of Typographic Style, By Robert Bringhurst is an excellent resource for setting type.

EDIT: Of course, I would recommend purchasing a copy if this sort of thing interests you. It's a great book to keep near your desk for quick reference.

The elements of typographic style

http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1250821514&sr=8-1

learned more about fonts and font design than i ever wanted to. great book. lots of why, lots of theory, not as many examples.

I have compiled a reading list to be read in order just for this question.

I strongly believe that these books will make you better than 90% of designers out there.

Level One

Start with Thinking with Type it is a really good introduction to all things graphic design. It focuses a lot on typography and it is really basic. I

Next is Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type This book takes what you learned in Thinking with Type and allows you to develope it further in a grid based system. Its good, basic, and has exercises for you to do to play with composition.

Third on the list is Graphic Design: The New Basics It will take what you learned in Thinking with Type and Grid Systems and open them up a little. You learn about design elements other than just type like scale, rhythm and contrast. It really good, and has some projects to do.

Level 2

Now You can get into more "advanced" stuff. There are a lot of books that can go here, but Ill recommend some of my favorites. Its not as important to do this section in order.

Grid Systems in Graphic Design is the bible when it comes to grids. Its german and dry as fuck, but it is basically awesome. Its expensive, but worth every single penny.

Elements of Typographic Style Not alot about grids in here, but it tells you every insane crazy thing that typographers do when they massage text.

You can look at other designers work too. Heres a list of designers I like a lot:

Stefan Sagmeister

Paul Rand

Massimo Vignelli

James Victore

Paul Sahre

Wolfgang Weinhart

Paula Scher

Tibor Kalman

Most of these designers also have books out about their life and work.

Get a sketchbook and play around in it. Draw, collage, glue bubblegum wrappers in there. Just make it a diary of your visual life.

You could also get into Visual Theory here:
Norman Bryson has a book on still lifes that awesome
JWT Mitchell's What do pictures want is great

After this, its just a matter of making a lot of really bad shit and eventually its just a little less worse and maybe one day it might be good.

Ive got more, but that should keep you busy for a year or two.

Thinking with Type is a great book, but I'm more of a Bringhurst fan - The Elements of Typographic Style is my recommendation.

If you're looking for something he will learn from, not just a gimmicky "lolol I hate papyrus" gift, I'd strongly recommend The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst.

This book was recommended to me by one of my lecturers while I was in university. I didn't purchase it until I had graduated (mainly because I was broke at the time), but I really wish I had purchased it earlier. It is the pinnacle book for learning about typographic history and best practices. I cannot stress enough how much of an amazing resource this is for a young typographer. Even if you don't end up getting it for him, just let him know that it exists so he can pick it up at some point.

Get The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. After you've read it you can check out webtypography.net a site which is going through chapter by chapter and adapting the lessons of The Elements of Typographic Style to the web providing helpful css snippets and explanations of how print and web typography differ by convention and necessity. In my opinion design without typography is nothing. A thoughtfully typeset page with no adornment caries far more weight than a poorly typeset page filled with the fluff techniques demonstrated on the multitude of tutorial websites out there. Understand typography and you are well on your way to understanding design.

The best thing to do is get a copy of Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographical Style and read it. Then read it again. Then reference it regularly.

There is no better resource for learning to set type well.

Elements of Typographic Style

• The Form of the Book by Jan Tschichold
  
• The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst
  
  These are mostly directed at classical book design, so they probably tend more conservative than you should do for a magazine, but these books actual spell out rules for what you should do (I'm a big believer in handcuffing yourself to rules for the purpose of understanding them, and then breaking them later), which is I think what you're asking for.
  
  My sorta summary/advice based heavily on what I read in the above books:
  
  Don't decorate; be confident. There's definitely an urge to add little horizontal rules above things or boxes around page elements. Tischichold especially points out how young designers can't help but put a thin box around the inside title page of books. He says it shows a lack of confidence. The solution is to have a justification for where you put things.
  
  Basically, if you have a baseline grid for the page, then you can place page elements on it and know that they will be harmonic with the overall page.
  
  Page numbers can honestly go anywhere as long as it's not the inside edge. Putting them there means the publication has to be completely open in order to use the page numbers, which is annoying.
  
  Don't put repeating information on pages. It's annoying to have the author's name or the book title at the top of every single page. Again, this is a demonstration of a lack of confidence. I believe the thinking is that if the pages are photocopied and distributed, then people will know where it came from. DRM annoys.
  
  Usually the font size for notes will be smaller than the main text, so keep aware of the leading difference between the two, especially if you put notes along the side. The leading shouldn't necessarily be equal, but it should be a multiple of the main content, so that every three or four lines the text aligns again.
  
  I hope none of that was totally irrelevant to your project :) Good luck!

Go read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst

@OP I second the typography being…default as sitniz said. I would suggest checking out resources like ilovetypography, thinkingwithtype, and the fundamental "Elements of Typographic Style" by Binghurst

With design, at least when I was in school, there weren't really textbooks. There were some suggested/recommended books and such for kind of 'expanded' learning, but very rarely did we have required readings.

That said, there are some decent books in this sub's wiki tab.

I would especially recommend The Elements of Typographic Style. If there was a textbook for design, that would probably be the closest thing. It's essentially a 'type bible' and I did have an entire course pretty much framed around it.

I'm a type designer, so feel to ask me questions.

To keep the look and feel consistent across the entire font largely depends on understanding the fundamentals of visual communication design, typography, and the relationship between characters.

The process starts with a design with specific parameters, a "skeleton" of a typeface. You need to decide if it's going to be a serif, sans serif, slab serif, display, etc., then move on to the qualities of the typeface. What characters would it have (cold, friendly, fat, loud, etc.)? What purpose would it serve?

Once the design is settled, the work in creating a typeface from scratch involves lots and lots of tweaking to maintain a relationship with each glyph. Drawing glyphs is a lot of work, and yes, a lot of the work is done by eye. Each character could be "generated" and be mathematically accurate as a foundation, but it will be largely optically incorrect and loses an important quality, a human touch.

Extrapolation with fonts can be done with Superpolator and interpolation with RoboFab, but it doesn't make the typeface design better if it is not drawn correctly in the first place.

The best fonts out there, upon close inspection of their glyphs, show that their forms are derived from the written hand. See Gerrit Noordzij's The Stroke for more.

Karen Cheng's Designing Type is another good read. Another book that's coming soon is Fred Smeijers' Counterpunch 2nd Ed..

As glasspenguin mentioned, Typophile.com is a great message forum on type design. You will find a lot of information there.

1. Illustrator is a very useful tool, it would serve you well to know how to use it. Illustrator also uses a very similar skill set to other applications you will end up using like indesign for example.
   
   
2. No not at all, I think people love to complain no matter what industry they are in. However it is very competitive, there are plenty of very very successful designers out there and lots of really unsuccessful ones. No where is it more immediately obvious how "good" or "bad" you are at something than with a visual portfolio, people can see at a glance exactly how competent you are, that's pretty intimidating. For instance you might be able to escape notice as a mediocre insurance claims adjuster for much longer than a mediocre designer. If you can find a handful of solid clients and build good relationships with them it can go a very long way to having a long and comfortable career.
   
   
3. Pay varies dramatically and theres a reason that very few people can give you a straight answer, your dealing with at least 3 variables at any given time if not more. What you are worth, what your client is worth and what the client is asking you to do. So for instance if your doing a multi million dollar marketing campaign and rebranding of a huge corporation while sitting in your manhattan office expect to be paid a little differently than if you are doing the CD cover for your friends band (that they recorded in garageband), the skill set, stakes and experience are dramatically different in those scenarios.
   
   Graphic design is everywhere and at all levels, expect to be paid accordingly. Understand too that $1000 for a logo is completely relative and doesn't by any means reflect the work that goes into it. You may have a someone who whips something together in a few minutes or have a team of designers slaving away iterating on an identity for weeks to make sure it's perfect, to make sure it becomes a household/highly recognizable piece of branding.
   
   
4. One of the toughest and most technically challenging things I feel like you will have to deal with is typography. Having a good understanding of how to wield it's awesome power can go a very very long way. I think as far as learning your tools goes, for me at least the internet has been a far more valuable resource than any book, if you need a problem solved google can do that pretty quickly, theres also a ton of good tutorials or articles on design process out there, I have yet to see any books that come close.
   Now on the typography I can make a few suggestions, some of these are pretty dry and not so flashy but have very solid fundamentals in them. If you go to art school (and I highly suggest you do if you can afford it, it can be a phenomenal experience) then these are the kind of books you will be reading in the first year or two.
   
   Typographic Systems of Design ~Kim Elam
   
   Grid Systems: Principles of Organizing Type ~Kim Elam
   
   Thinking with Type ~Ellen Lupton
   
   Elements of Typography ~Robert Bringhurst
   
   
5. I started doing some design work and drawing in high school. Both my parents are designers so I'm sure that helped, from there I went and got a BFA in illustration. While my first love is drawing and most of my work is illustration I still end up doing lot's of design work because it is (in my experience at least) very frequently in demand.
   
   Hope that was helpful and I'm sure lots of other people have had very different experiences and will share their stories and opinions. It's a very diverse field.
   

But the bible of typography is definitely this.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0881792063?ie=UTF8&tag=desi05d-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0881792063

Way too many typefaces, lack of hierarchy, and no attention to typographic style. Try to keep to no more than 2 different typefaces per design, but create hierarchy and variation through size, color, and occasionally by including variations of weight or font style in the same font family.

There are many things I could list that are incorrect or need improvement about the brochure, but until you get the basics of typography down, none of them will really matter. Type treatment is arguably the single most important part of a good design. It defines the design. Good type treatment applied to the ugliest images can be completely transformational - however, no mater how beautiful the images are, bad type will destroy the design.

Read some books on typography to get an understanding of the basics, and then start to apply the new knowledge.

This book is single-handedly the best book you can read to get you headed in the right direction. I would highly recommend starting there.

Then, apply what you have learned to a new design of this brochure and come back for a second round of critique.

I'd be glad to. To start, here are some terms to look for:

1. IxD / Interaction Design
   
2. UX / User Experience Design
   
3. HCI / Human-Computer Interaction
   
4. Goal-Directed Design
   
   "The Crystal Goblet" explains the aim of print design, which is a good precurser to reading about interactive design media.
   
   As far as books go, I strongly recommend About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. It's a fairly long book, but it's worth reading to build a strong foundation of understanding in IxD.
   
   A lot of IxD is about effectively using visual design to achieve goals. If you want to understand the visual tools of IxD after finding the theory interesting, you might read the mistitled Layout Workbook (or any other overview book; it's not actually a book about layouts — nor a workbook), followed by Bringhurst for advanced traditional typography.
   
   Rocket Surgery Made Easy and other Steve Krug books are commonly suggested for more IxD topics, but I haven't gotten around to reading them. It's likely they're lighter reading than About Face 3.

a few things:


-read about design history. It's probably the most important and commonly overlooked aspect of learning design. Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide was a good one.


-subscribe to Design magazines. The quality of articles in print magazines is always way better than most blogs you'll find. Also, it just feels good to flip through a magazine once in awhile. Communication Arts. Applied Arts. Computer Arts. They're all worth looking at.


-color theory books are pretty easy to come by and most of them seem to be the same. So any color theory book is good.


-for type I really liked thinking with type. And the elements of typographic style is amazing but a lot harder of a read.


-also, process is everything. If you can think of design as more than 'making things look good', that helps. Ultimately design is making this work better. Every choice affects how a person will feel/react when they see your design. Color, type, layout, everything, will have a psychological affect on people, even if they don't realize it.

Just because something is regularly used does not mean that it is good or appropriate. Besides, free fonts are seldom used in newspapers, television, movies, and music videos (and almost never used by reputable organizations). Free fonts are almost always terrible because of: kerning, x-height, letterforms, glyphs, ligatures, leading, etc. A good typeface has a family, not just a single font. Here's a primer, but I would recommend this book and this one.

My critique remains the same as my initial comments: far too many typefaces, and avoid using free fonts. Buy them if you can, steal them if you have to, or be much more diligent in finding well designed free typefaces. Start here.

Thanks! One of my friends told me I need to read up on typography as well. He recommended me reading THIS and also THIS before I even start college to get a better understanding of it all. Regarding HTML and CSS, hopefully we'll learn that during the Web design I, II and III during the course. Otherwise I know a college in town where you can get a Web Design diploma (2 evening classes per week) in just two months and that is basically ONLY html, css and dreamweaver. It's dirt cheap to do as well so I might do that if I dont get enough html/css experience from college.

Ahhh these type exercises bring back fond memories! Typography can be a difficult thing to learn and teach because there is never one answer to a problem. Just learn the few things you shouldn't do and rock out with the rest. It is a skill that has a feel to it and the only way to develop an eye for it is to just practice and observe. I will dig out some of my work of similar projects and share.

Here are some of my favorite reads from back in day.

The Elements of Typographic Style

The Fundamentals of Typography

U&lc : Influencing Design & Typography

holy shit is that comic sans in publishing i think i just shat myself

...

Well, it's pretty creative though. Not a bad job in that sense. Here's a free tip if you're actually interested in publishing.

the first decent book i got a long time ago was Type and Image. A very good book on typography is The Elements of Typographic Style, for a wider perspective go for Typographic Design: Form and Communication. To get a perspective on the 'communication' part of graphical communication i'd got for Information Architects

I guess this list dates me a bit :)

La design nu pot sa zic ca ma pricep prea tare, dar domeniul ma preocupa din ce in ce mai mult. Thinking with type si The Elements of Typographic Style, The Design of Everyday Things, Grid Systems in Graphic Design, Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop si Don't Make Me Think sunt cartile care mi-au placut/din care am invatat cel mai mult, dar sunt clasice asa ca banuiesc ca stii de ele.

"Just doing it" is fair enough and is valuable, but also can only take one so far without understanding fundamentals as well.

What you don't want to be is someone with just a high software proficiency but relatively little understanding of what they're doing, or why. They essentially end up becoming an expert at mimicry. They can build whatever you want, but don't understand why what they're building works.

I've seen enough examples where it can simply delay advancement, such that someone self-taught with 5-10 years experience ends up with skills comparable to a graduate with 0-3 years of experience.

If the goal is to circumvent school, especially if the motivation is to save money, then the goal should also be to replicate the benefits of design education as much as possible without the expense.

> Books are nice but they aren't nearly the invaluable tool that "Just Doing It" is.

I assume you're just talking about instructional books, which relates to what I was saying above. To discredit the reading of a book such as The Elements of Typographic Style would be a shame. I imagine a book like that is required reading in any graphic design program.

This is my favorite, mostly because it brings in concepts that surround design, and explains things like gestalt. Pardon the Amazon link, but it's not an affiliate link.

http://www.amazon.com/Universal-Principles-Design-William-Lidwell/dp/1592530079/ref=sr_1_56?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1418235901&sr=1-56&keywords=graphic+design+concepts

Edit: forgot my favorite type book, which is dry as hell, but full of great info: http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Typographic-Style-Robert-Bringhurst/dp/0881792063/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=1RD40NPJ75KD5V99KXAB

And the version for online type: http://webtypography.net/

The Elements of Typographic Style, very good book about the fundamentals.