The Elements of Typographic Style

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• Author: Robert Bringhurst
• Published: 1992
• Format: paperback
• Started: 17 May 2013
• Finished: 10 March 2014

Named after Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, this book is the definitive guide to print typography. It’s full of advice demonstrated by the book’s own beautiful typesetting. Below are my highlights and notes.

The Grand Design

First principles

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. p. 17

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition. p. 19

Tactics

The typographic performance must reveal, not replace, the inner composition. p. 21

Give full typographic attention especially to incidental details. p. 24

Summary

Good typography should:

• invite the reader into the text;
• reveal the tenor and meaning of the text;
• clarify the structure and order of the text;
• link the text with other existing elements;
• induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.

Rhythm & Proportion

Horizontal motion

• 1 em is the size of the type (top of ascender to bottom of descender).
• M/4 (quarter em) is a good word space.
• The measure is the length of a line (number of characters).
• 45–75 characters is good, 66 is ideal.
• 40–50 for multiple columns (any shorter should be set ragged right).
• Use a single space after a sentence-ending period.

Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit [two spaces after periods]. p. 29

• Use a hair space or no space at all between initials (e.g. J.F.K.).
• Letter-space strings of caps, small caps, and numbers.

A man who would letter-space lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. p. 31

• Kern consistently and modestly or not at all.
• Never use dot leaders (e.g. in a table of contents). Remove the empty space so that you don’t need them.

Vertical motion

• Leading (or line spacing) is the space from one baseline to the next.
• The shorthand T/L×M means T pt type with L pt leading and a M pica measure (this book is set 10/12×21).
• Typical combinations are 9/11, 10/12, 11/13, or 12/15.
• 11 pt “set solid” means 11/11.
• Negative leading (e.g. 10/8) can work for some u&lc (upper and lower case) if the ascenders and descenders don’t collide.
• Longer measures and darker faces need more leading.
• Sometimes ragged depth is better than uniform depth.
• Prose should use uniform depth; the lines of text should line up on facing pages and overleaf (on the other side).
• The vertical space consumed by a heading, figure, table, etc. should be a multiple of the leading so that baselines match when the text resumes.

Blocks & paragraphs

• Don’t indent the first paragraph after a title or heading.
• Indentation: minimum 1 en, ideal 1 em or 1 lead, maximum 3 em.
• Distinguish block quotations with new face, new size, or by indentation, and add extra leading before and after.
• Center verse quotations on the longest line.

Etiquette of hyphenation & pagination

• Leave at least 2 characters behind and bring at least 3.
• Avoid orphans (less than four letters alone on the line).
• Avoid more than 3 consecutive hyphenated lines.
• Avoid hyphenating proper names.
• Link short numerical expressions with hard (non-breaking) spaces.
• Avoid letting the same word begin more than 2 consecutive lines.
• Orphan paragraphs (first line at bottom of page) are okay, but widows (last line at top of page) must be avoided.
• Avoid hyphenating across an interruption such as a table or figure (a page break isn’t necessarily an interruption).

Harmony & Counterpoint

Size

• Limit yourself to a scale of a few sizes.

Numerals, capitals & small caps

• Use text figures always, except with full caps.
• Use spaced small caps for acronyms.

Ligatures

• 5 Latin ligatures: ff, fi, fl, ffi, ffl.
• Consider choosing a face designed to not need ligatures (e.g. Palatino).

Tribal alliances & families

• See the font variation chart on p. 55.
• Don’t use a font you don’t need.

Contrast

• Change one parameter at a time.
• Don’t bold punctuation surrounding bold type.

Structural Forms & Devices

Openings

• Whitespace is important in the title page.
• Don’t let titles oppress the text.
• Mark each beginning and resumption of the text (fleuron, caps, versal).
• Red is the typographer’s habitual second color.

Headings & subheads

• Crossheads: symmetrical heads (centered).
• Sideheads: asymmetrical heads (left or right).
• Use as many levels of headings as you need.

Notes

• Footnotes must not extend to a second page.
• Endnotes can work, but they are more work for the reader.
• Sidenotes are the best (according to Bringhurst).
• Use the same symbol multiple times on same page, or none at all.
• Use superscript figures in the markers themselves but full sized characters in the actual notes.
• Endnotes should go all together at the end of the book; they shouldn’t be grouped together at the end of each chapter.

Tables & lists

• Treat tables like text; never set text vertically.
• Minimize the amount of furniture; rules should be horizontal.
• Avoid over-punctuating lists.
• Align figures flush right or on the decimal.
• Align on repeated characters (e.g. “=”) but avoid overall visual chaos.
• Hang superscripts to the right.

Starting & stopping

• Begin a book with the half-title, end with a blank leaf.
• Pages need to be divisible by the signature (usually 16).
• Avoid a wad of blank leaves at the end.
• Leave no recto (front side) blank between the start and the end.

Analphabetic Symbols

Analphabetic style

• Use the midpoint to invoke the inscriptional tradition.
• Make sure symbols are in tune with the font.
• Common problems: [] too dark, () too symmetrical and skinny, * and other symbols stiff and bland, # too large.
• In heads and titles, use the best available ampersand (italic).

Dashes, slashes & dots

• Use spaced en dashes – not em dashes – to set off phrases.
• Use close-set en dashes for ranges.
• Use an em dash to mark dialogue.
• Use the dimension sign ×, not the letter x.
• Use an ellipsis that fits the font.
• Treat punctuation as notation, not expression.

Parentheses

• Use the best available parentheses (often too closely set).
• Use upright brackets () [] {}, even in an italic context (e.g. [sic], not [sic]).

Quotation marks & other intrusions

• Minimize the use of quotation marks.
• Position quotation marks consistently in relation to other punctuation.
• Omit the apostrophe from numerical plurals.
• Eliminate other unnecessary punctuation.

Diacritics & the keyboard

• Use accents and alternate sorts required by proper/imported names.
• Use a different keyboard layout if necessary.

Choosing & Combining Type

Technical considerations

• Consider the typeface’s original medium.
• Choose faces that are faithful to the spirit and letter of the old design.
• Choose faces that will survive and prosper under final printing conditions.
• Choose faces that will suit the paper you intend to print on.

Practical typography

• Choose faces that suit the task and subject.
• Avoid excess ornamentation.
• Choose faces that can furnish whatever special effects you require.
• Use what there is to the best advantage.
• Modest faces should be set modestly.

Historical considerations

• Choose a face whose history matches the text’s.
• If you use a historical typeface, learn the typographic idiom for which it was intended.

Cultural & personal considerations

• Choose a face whose spirit and character matches the text’s (e.g. French-designed typeface for French-authored book).

The multicultural page

• Consistency or contrast can both be beautiful.
• Start with a single family to achieve variety and homogeneity at once.
• Mixing roman with an italic of a different family probably won’t work.
• Consider bold faces on their own merits.

Bold romans and italics have been added retroactively to many earlier faces, but they are often simply parodies of the original designs. p. 103

• Faces that aren’t intimately combined can be chosen based on their own merits and on compatibility rather than genetic connection.
• Pair serifed faces and sans faces based on their inner structure.

Mixing alphabets

• Choose non-Latin faces as carefully as Latin ones.
• It’s similar to mixing roman and italic.
• Use a real Greek typeface, not a symbol font or “pi” font.
• Match continuity of typography to continuity of thought.
• Mixed alphabets should balance closely in color and contrast.
• Consider the flow and slope as well.
• Balance type optically more than mathematically.

New and old orthographies

• Add no unnecessary characters.
• Avoid capricious redefinitions of familiar characters.
• Add only characters that are visually distinct.
• Don’t mix faces haphazardly when specialized sorts are required.

Building a type library

• Choose your library of faces slowly and well.
• It is better to have a little of the best than a lot of everything.

Historical Interlude

Printing from movable type was first invented not in Germany in the 1450s, as Europeans often claim, but in China in the 1040s. p. 119

The early scribal forms

• Earliest letters were Greek capitals scratched in stone.
• They evolved into familiar Roman capitals (like Trajan).
• Majuscules and minuscules appeared.

The typographic Latin letter

• Letterforms are objects of science and of art.

The Renaissance roman letter

• Developed among scholars and scribes of northern Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries.
• Vertical stems, circular bowls, modulated stroke, humanist axis, modest contrast, modest x-height.
• Crisp & oblique serifs, abrupt/flat bilateral foot serifs, abrupt/pen-formed terminals on curved strokes.
• Rising crossbar in e, perpendicular to stroke axis.
• No italic or bold.

The Renaissance italic letter

• Vertical or evenly sloped stems, elliptical bowls, light & modulated stroke, humanist axis, low contrast, modest x-height.
• Cursive forms with crisp & oblique entry and exit serifs.
• Descenders serifed bilaterally or not at all.
• Terminals abrupt of lachrymal.
• Italic lower case paired with small & upright capitals (otherwise fully independent of roman).

The Mannerist letter

• Like Renaissance, but with subtle exaggerations.

The Baroque letter

• Varying stroke axis, increased contrast, increased x-height.
• Reduced aperture, more lachrymal terminals (not abrupt).
• Serifs become sharp wedges.

The Rococo letter

But the Rococo period, with its love of florid ornament, belongs almost entirely to blackletters and scripts. p. 127

The Neoclassical letter

• More static and restrained; interest in rigorous consistency.
• Vertical axis, uniform italic slope, adnate serifs (thinner, flatter, level).

The Romantic letter

• Abrupt stroke modulation, exaggerated contrast, round terminals, thin & abrupt serifs, reduced aperture.

The Realist letter

Realist letters often have the same basic shape as Neoclassical and Romantic letters, but most of them have heavy, slab serifs or no serifs at all. p. 132

Geometric Modernism: the distillation of function

• Seek purity; shapes inspired by pure mathematical forms (the circle and the line), not scribal letters.

Lyrical Modernism: the rediscovery of Humanist form

• They rediscovered calligraphy.
• Closely allied with Abstract Expressionism phase of painting.

The Expressionist letter

• Examples: Rudolf Koch, Vojtech Preissig, and Oldrich Menhart.

Elegiac Postmodernism

• Frequently recycle and revise Neoclassical, Romantic, and other premodern forms.

Geometric Postmodernism

• Highly geometric; almost always based on more mannered, often asymmetric forms (not just circle and line).

Mechanical typsetting

The Linotype machine

• Invented in the 1880s by Ottmar Mergenthaler.
• A cross between a casting machine, typewriter, vending machine, and backhoe.

The Monotype machine

• Invented in 1887 by Tolbert Lanston.
• Stamped individual letters into cold metal; later used molten metal.

Two-dimensional printing

• Punching metal into paper is very different from 2D printing.
• Step forward in technology was a step back in typography to the two-dimensional world of medieval scribes.

Phototype machines

• Operates on the principle of photography.
• Used during the brief time between hot metal and digital composition.

Historical recutting and twentieth-century design

• Many old typefaces have been resuscitated in the digital era.
• Typography was radically reformed between 1920 and 1950.
• Best digital foundries were cultural institutions, not mark-driven factories.

Digital typography

• Too soon to summarize this period (we are still in it).

Letters derive their form from the motions of the human hand, restrained and amplified by a tool. That tool may be as complex as a digitizing tablet or a specially programmed keyboard, or as simple as a sharpened stick. Meaning resides, in either case, in the firmness and grace of the gesture itself, not in the tool with which it was made. p. 142

The plurality of typographic history

• Every culture, with its alphabet, has its own typographic history.

Shaping the Page

If the book appears to be only a paper machine, produced at their own convenience by other machines, only machines will want to read it. p. 143

Organic, mechanical & musical proportion

• Choosing page dimensions is important because some proportions and sizes are more pleasing to the eye, hand, and mind than others.
• The numbers used in many of these proportions (π, e, $\sqrt{2}\text{,}$ the golden ratio) aren’t unique to typography – they’re found everywhere in nature.

The golden section

• The golden section is made from two numbers where the smaller is to the larger as the larger is to the sum.
• As you go farther you go in the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio of pairs of consecutive terms approaches the golden ratio.

Proportions of the empty page

• Choose inherently satisfying page proportions in preference to stock sizes or arbitrary shapes.
• Choose page proportions suited to the content, size, and ambitions of the publication.
• Choose page and column proportions whose historical associations suit your intended design.

The textblock

• If the text is meant to invite continuous reading, set it in columns that are clearly taller than wide.
• Shape the textblock so that it balances and contrasts with the shape of the overall page.

Margins & satellites

• Bring the margins into the design, and bring the design into the margins.
• The margins must lock the textblock to the page, lock facing pages to each other, frame the textblock, and protect the textblock.
• Folios (page numbers) should be aligned with the outside edge of the textblock on the top or bottom for quick navigation.
• Don’t use running heads unless they are necessary.

Page grids & modular scales

Grids are often used in magazine design and in other situations where unpredictable graphic elements must be combined in a rapid and orderly way. p. 166

• Modular scales are more flexible than grids. They use a sequence of indivisible sizes, which can be based on one or more ratios derived from anything from the golden ratio to the proportions of the author’s hand.

Improvisation & adjustments

• Adjust the type and the spaces within the textblock using typographic increments, but rely on free proportions to adjust the empty space.
• Keep the page design supple enough to provide a livable home for the text.
• For short documents, the whole design can be changed accommodate the text. In books, the design must be flexible because it cannot be redone every time there is an widows or orphans.

Altering the leading on short pages to preserve a standard depth (vertical justification, it is sometimes called) is not a solution. Neither is stuffing extra space between the paragraphs. These antics destroy the fabric of the text and thus strike at the heart of the book. p. 178

The State of the Art

The hundred-thousand character alphabet

• The latin alphabet includes at least 600 characters, not just 26.
• ASCII represents typography poverty.
• The standard today is Unicode, which contains over 100K characters.
• A single person can never hope to design a font including all of them, but there are good fonts with over 10K characters available today.
• Unicode lists textual symbols, not typography symbols (although sometimes the distinction gets blurry).
• Characters are defined as “the smallest components of written language that have semantic value.”
• Unicode treats small caps as variants glyphs, not characters.

Taxonomy, like politics, involves a lot of compromise. It is easy to see that in some sections of Unicode, the literalists had the upper hand, in others the conceptualists. p. 183

The large “private use” section of Unicode is not a solution – unless shared, dependable, unofficial standards of encoding are constructed, like permanent refugee camps, in that unpoliced domain. p. 184

The text is a string of characters; the font is a palette of glyphs – along with all the information (width tables, kerning tables and so on) needed for stringing the glyphs to match the characters. p. 184

• Variant glyphs can be chosen (1) by hand, (2) by chance, or (3) by rules embedded in the font itself. The first and second have been successful historically; the third is now a part of OpenType.

The substance of the font

In metal and digital founding alike, the standard is set by the human who does the work, not by the recipe or the brand name of the tools. p. 187

• The first digital fonts were bitmapped fonts.
• They were replaced with fonts defined by scalable outlines when PostScript was introduced.
• Next came TrueType, which approached hinting differently and used quadratic splines instead of cubic ones.
• OpenType fonts can be defined in either PostScript T2 or TrueType format.
• OpenType fonts can include large numbers of glyphs and alternative stylistic sets, and they can provide rules for when certain glyphs should be inserted or substituted.

Size, color and scale

At least two crucial things were lost in the long transition from handout metal to digital type. One was the sculptural bite of type into paper; another was the rich singularity of detail, weight, and proportion inherent in the handmade fonts and letterforms. p. 190

The infinite scalability of digital type is one of its great attractions. But when multiple sizes of type are mixed on the page, all scaled from one invariant design the disharmony inherent in uniformity is clear. p. 190

• One great feature of digital fonts is the ability to include pairs of glyphs on opposite ends of a spectrum with the ability to interpolate between them.
• The best use of this is designing a separate titling, text, and footnote fonts and interpolating for sizes in between (instead of scaling a single design).

Methods of justification

• Always use the best available justification engine.
• Good justification is calculated paragraph by paragraph, not line by line.
• On average, there are five times more letters than spaces on a page, therefore the allowable elasticity in and around characters should be around one fifth of the allowed elasticity between words.

Pixels, proofs & printing

• Text that will be read on a screen should be designed for that medium.

When texts disintegrate into pixels, the eye goes looking for distraction, which the screen is all too able to provide. Both fine technology and great restraint are required to make the screen as useful to the eyes as ordinary paper. p. 192

The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words or names stand little chance. p. 194

• Good typefaces for screens have low contrast, a large torso, open counters, sturdy terminals, and slab serifs or no serifs at all.
• Paragraphs should be ragged-right, short, and narrow (closer to 36 than to 66 characters per line), with frequent headings.

While we wait for screens to improve, there is one other option, and it is a real one: typographic abdication: deliver the text but leave the choice of face and measure to the reader. p. 194

Maintaining the system

Like all the arts, it is basically immune to progress but not immune to change. Typography at its best is sometimes as good, and at its worst is just as bad, as it ever was. p. 196

Yet inside that complexity, typography persists as what it is: the making of meaningful, durable, abstract, visible signs. p. 197

Grooming the Font

Typography is to writing as the piano is to the human voice: “The notes are fixed but they can be endlessly rearranged, into meaningful music or meaningless noise.” p. 198

Legal considerations

• Check the license before tuning a digital font.
• If the license doesn’t let you improve the font, the only legal way to proceed is to use software overrides.

Ethical & aesthetic considerations

• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• Respect the text, letterforms, type designer, and foundry, in that order.
• There is no such thing as a perfect font.

Honing the character set

• Mend defective glyphs. But if the basic letterforms are poorly drawn, abandon the font.
• For example, copy the roman brackets to the italic font – only then can you do proper kerning and spacing.
• When adding new characters, try to assign them to the correct Unicode location instead of replacing unused slots.

It is better to correct the side bearings than to write a bloated kerning table. p. 202

Hinting

• In the long run, the real solution is high-resolution screens that make hinting unnecessary.

Naming conventions

• Font families must have files with identical names suffixed (usually) with the operating system’s standard for the different variants – italic, bold, etc.