Here is a list of my top five books on typography for aspiring graphic designers. As I bonus, I have included three books specifically covering typography on the web. However, if you choose to read only one book on typography, make sure it is Binghurst. This book should be permanently on every designer’s desk.
Table of Contents
The Elements of Typographic Style
Robert Binghurst
Hartley & Marks (2004)
ISBN: 978-0-88179-206-5
Excerpt: Long the preserve of trained specialists alone, typography is a territory opened now to everyone equipped with a computer. For millions of people around the globe, the ability to produce effective printed documents has lately become, like effective speaking and writing an essential skill and an important source of personal satisfaction.
The Elements of Typographic Style is far more than a style guide. It is also a brief history of typographic art, and a wonderful compact encyclopaedia of typographic symbols, concepts and traditions, and a highly entertaining, richly informative tour of the technologies employed old and new. In all, it is a thoughtful and insightful, fresh and yet authoritative desktop reference for everyone who works with written words.
To writers this book offers a whole new set of skills and tools for effective expression and communication. To readers, it offers a new dimension of reading: a deeper appreciation of letters and a deeper understanding of what they mean. For students and practitioners of the graphic arts, it has become, as Hermann Zapf initially proposed, “the Typographers Bible.”
Detail in typography; Letters, letterspacing, words, lines, linespacing, columns.
Jost Hochuli
Hyphen Press (2009)
978-0-907259-34-3
Excerpt: An attractive, interesting layout can certainly attract and please the reader; but when details are not good, reading requires more effort and any pleasure is short-lived. Detail in typography is a concise and close-up view of the subject. It considers all the elements that contribute to a column of text — letters, words, the line, and the space around these elements — and it discusses what is essential for the legibility of text. Yet this is more than a guide to correct typography. How is it, Hochuli asks, that the text can be set perfectly and yet look insufferably dull? Answers may be found here, not least in the way the book itself has been set and produced.
Thinking with Type; a critical guide for designers, writers, editors, & students
Ellen Lupton
Princeton Architectual Press (2010)
ISBN: 978-1-56898-969-3
A blank page or screen confronts the designer with fundamental questions. What kind of typeface to use? How big? How should those letters, words, and paragraphs be aligned, spaced ordered, and shaped? Thinking with Type provides clear and focused guidance for students, designers, writers, and editors on how to arrange content. Throughout the book visual examples show how to be inventive within the systems of typographic form.
Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works
Erik Spiekermann & E M Ginger
Adobe Press (2003)
ISBN: 978-0-201-70339-4
Excerpt: Designers can be passionate about good type, and this classic handbook has inspired countless designers when choosing a typeface. Spiekermann and Ginger have distilled their decades of typographic experience into a lively, rewarding guide to type. If you use type — and these days, almost everyone does — their engaging, common-sense style helps you understand how type can enhance your design and reinforce your message.
Type on Screen; a critical guide for designers, writers, developers, and students
Ellen Lupton ed.
Princeton Architectual Press
ISBN: 978-1-61689-170-1
Excerpt: Type on Screen is the definitive introduction to using typography in screen-based applications, from film and video to websites, electronic publications, and mobile apps. This practical primer shows how to combine classic concepts of typographic form and structure with screen-based technologies and principles of user interaction and animation. Type on Screen offers guidance on how to choose typefaces for screen; how to style beautiful, functional text and navigation; how to apply principles of animation to text; and how to create compelling logos and icons. Reinforced with dos and don’ts, and basic exercises and tutorials, Type on Screen can be used as a textbook for college-level courses in wed-design, interaction design, and motion graphics and is an indispensable guide for any designer or developer seeking practical and inspirational information about digital typography.
Web Typography; a handbook for designing beautiful and effective responsive typography
Richard Rutter
Ampersand Type (2017)
ISBN: 978-0-9956642-0-3
Excerpt: Typography is what comes between the author and the reader. This is as true on the web as it is in any other medium. If the text has anything at all significant to say, it needs a typographer’s care, which will in turn be repaid by the reader’s attention. If you design websites or use CSS, then you are a typographer whether you know it or not.
This book is a practical guide and companion reference to all aspects of typography on the web. It deftly combines implementation details with typographic theory, and is ideal for designers, developers, and anyone else involved in the process of creating a website.
Flexible Typesetting
Tim Brown
A Book Apart (2018)
ISBN: 978-1-937557-70-6
Excerpt: For the first time in hundreds of years, because of the web, the role of the typographer has changed. We no longer decide; we suggest. We no longer simply choose typefaces, font sizes, line spacing, and margins; we prepare and instruct text to make those choices for itself. In this book, Tim Brown illuminates the complex, beautiful world of typesetting—arguably the most important part of typography because it forms the backbone of the reading experience—and shows us how to parry the inevitable pressures that arise when we can no longer predict how, and where, our text will be read.
On Web Typography
Jason Santa Maria
A Book Apart (2014)
ISBN: 978-1-9375570-6-5
Excerpt: Typography is your design’s voice and the most powerful tool you have to communicate with your readers. Learn how to wield type with care and wit: how to evaluate typefaces, consider technical constraints, create flexible typographic systems, and put together your own collection of favourite faces.
Jason Santa Maria wants you to see type beyond code or flourishes. You’ll discover how typography shapes the way we read and how you can adapt the craft’s practices for the screen. So go ahead. Choose, combine, and set typefaces with ease—and invite readers in.