Butterick's Practical Typography

At last.

Butterick’s Practical Typography is a concise and readable primer (in the form of a website) for basic typography on a word processor and, more importantly (for me at least), the web.

What the site is good for is giving a sense of how elegant typography can add clarity and a sense of quality to one's writing. He shows how all those pesky commas, dashes and brackets can be properly wrangled, as well as giving formatting, layout and font recommendations.  Mr. Butterick’s primary concern is type for print, some of his ideas about web type might be a little picky; I like to indent and space paragraphs. I find that it really helps ‘the flow’ of a story; he says use only one or the other, which I find a little crowded on a web device. He isn’t into graphics at all (ergo: no illustration with this post), which I happen to think is almost a must for most web sites.

While not 100% in agreement with the author, I am at about 99% (more on that later.) Matthew Butterick is a writer, typographer and lawyer. His first book Typography for Lawyers covered a specific field of typography. The fonts he has created offer elegant alternatives to the usual dismal mess of system fonts installed in modern personal computers.