Typography

As Jeffrey Zeldman said, "90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace." I can't speak to the whitespace percentage, but I buy the design percentage. More often than not, design conveys textual information. Typography is how you make that look good.

I've broken this study topic out from General Design and from Web Design, since it is so foundational. There's a rich history here that long predates the screen — centuries of punchcutting, page composition, and hard-won conventions about how letterforms carry meaning. Most of it still applies, which is part of why it deserves its own study: the principles outlast the medium. Web Design borrows from this; General Design rests on it; but typography is the substrate underneath both. This is where I'll collect the fundamentals — letterforms and anatomy, measure and leading, hierarchy and rhythm — and the practitioners worth learning from.