Recommended Type Design and Typography Books

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Comments

  • Much of Bringhurst is useful, but it has been inappropriately hailed for decades as the Bible of Typography.

    Thank you, Stephen. I've never understood the Bringhurst hate (or the Bringhurst worship, for that matter).  The book does some things really well.  In other places, the author's preferences are passed off as law.  Not many writers on typography avoid that last trap, so why pillory Bringhurst for it?
  • Chris LozosChris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    Passed off as Law, is the problem.  This implies correctness in perpetuity.  With book typography, particularly in the pre-digital eras, you may have had more of a need for expediency of consistency.  But as the tools evolve the people that use them evolve and the people who read the outcome evolve. We cannot freeze what we do just to suit someones favorite point in time.  We have to design for the subject at hand, within the production schedule we are dealt, and with the people we are forced to deal with, to create a solution which works for that days needs.  Setting fixed laws binds hands.  We still need the opportunity to fail at trying a new way. Decades later, some historian will tell us what worked and what didn't work--at least until another historian years later, tells him/her they were wrong ;-)
  • For those who couldn't get Detail in typography it's in print with another publisher http://editions-b42.com/books/detail-typography/
  • I read Bringhurst's book in my first year as a design student, and it sparked an interest in what typography was and could be that no other introduction, concerned with the pragmatic aspects of type and its use, could have offered. I don't suspect Bringhurst wrote Elements knowing the audience it would eventually reach (and if I recall correctly, he says as much in the introduction), and the view that the only value of his writing lies in its applicability to multifarious contexts that typographers find themselves working within seems to me myopic.
  • Chris LozosChris Lozos Posts: 1,458
    it is easy to teach someone to do competent traditional typography; it is very much more difficult to develop the kind of skills that are needed to produce good 'asymmetric typography'.
    I agree completely with John on this, well said. Traditional book typography of the pre-war era was taught quite well to typographers/typesetters who came out knowing their craft after a long apprenticeship with master craftsman.  As soon as the technology changed, these trained people were replaced by anyone who new how to type but not how to set.  It just became to easy to produce typesetting and ignore typography.

  • Kent LewKent Lew Posts: 905
    Tschichold's own defence of his traditionalist move is worth bearing in mind too: it is easy to teach someone to do competent traditional typography; it is very much more difficult to develop the kind of skills that are needed to produce good 'asymmetric typography'.

    John, are you sure you didn’t get that backwards? It would be a stronger defense of Tschichold’s later stance for him to claim that it is relatively easy to create competent asymmetric typography (the style of his youth), while the skills necessary for truly excellent traditional typography are much more subtle and deceptively difficult to master.

    Or so it would seem to me, at least.

    That aside, I agree with your assessment about the proper context for understanding (and interpreting) Bringhurst.

  • John HudsonJohn Hudson Posts: 2,955
    Kent, I'm pretty sure that I got Tschichold's statement right, but would need to go and track down the source. Tschichold's early modernist work involved a hands-on composition method in which the designer worked directly with the typographic materials; in his later period, he was mostly designing systems for other people to follow—famously for Penguin—and his observation was that traditional typography can be taught to any competent craftsperson, while asymmetric typography requires something more like an artist to be done well. The fact that traditional typography can be taught in terms of rule and canon—not to say it should be—is indicative of this. Modernist typography is, by it's nature, more exploratory. It developed certain tropes—use of sans serif, bold colour in geometric elements—, but remains strongly individualistic: Tschichold's own designs in that mode are unmistakably his, whereas his classical or traditional designs slip into a long anonymity.
  • Kent LewKent Lew Posts: 905
    Okay, I can see that also. Typography at a meta-level.

    Still, doesn’t seem like much of a defense against charges of selling out on his earlier stance. But perhaps I misconstrued the context of “defense.” I suppose here we’re talking about defense of pragmatism in the face of the challenges of production-izing at Penguin in order to achieve consistently high quality.
  • Dan ReynoldsDan Reynolds Posts: 172
    edited June 2016
    I’d say you might be both right. Most of Tschichold’s writing was pedagogic. Elementar Typographie and especially Die Neue Typographie were written for typesetters at work in printing houses. While they are not as explicit as his rules for Penguin – that later case is different anyway, as it was a guide for a specific array of books for one publisher, first and foremost – they are clearly intended to teach typesetters what to do. Again, in the case of his 1920s publications, he definitely does encourage typesetters to look at modern art to learn about composition. The point of his early writing is not that asymmetric typography can only be performed by a few select typographers arranging the type by hand on the presses themselves. Indeed, the books are much more general than that and intend to help typesetters elevate the quality (according to his definition at the time, also delineated in his publications) of their work.

    In at least that one regard, his early writings on asymmetric typography are not as different from his later works on classical book typography.
  • Nick ShinnNick Shinn Posts: 2,131
    edited June 2016
    Already being an experienced typographer when Bringhurst’s Elements was published, and familiar with various style guides, what I found most stimulating about the book was his new historical typeface classification system, connecting with broad culture movements.  

    Also, the very breadth of his reach—organized around a hierarchical “tree” system starting from 1.1.1—signalled the immense gravity of the work, and by extension the great importance of typography. I appreciated the symbolism of that, along with the title, —an homage to Strunk—which put fine typography on a par with the best writing.
  • Niche.Niche. Posts: 86
    I don't know if anyone mentioned this but: Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works, great book. It does not go in depth of the technical elements of type design, but it's more about how we preserve type and how it can be used ! 
  • That's one of the very first type books I read.
  • @elena Veguillas Is Amazon UK the only option for buying the book? Is there a better option for those in Canada/North America?
  • elena Veguillaselena Veguillas Posts: 13
    edited June 2017
    @Josh Apostolopoulos Unfortunately not yet, we are working on finding solutions to sell it in bookshops, but being a small independent publishing house based in Europe it is hard work. As soon as we have some other options I will publish it here.  
  • Paul MillerPaul Miller Posts: 273
    'Letters of credit' - Walter Tracy. As George Thomas suggests.
    Anything Emigre and Fuse. Plus the aforementioned Frutiger book and his own - 'Signs and Symbols - their meaning and design'.

    Just as a matter of interest, 'Letters of Credit' by Walter Tracy exists as a free dowloadable .PDF file on a website which might not be hard to find if one is familiar with the use of a search engine.

    It is probably dodgy and illegal so I could not possibly reccommend anyone to download it.

    However if one were so inclined it would be an alternative to buying a very expensive second hand copy of the physical book when they occasionally pop up on Amazon.

  • It is probably dodgy and illegal so I could not possibly reccommend anyone to download it.

    It is best to not even mention such things here. Why publicize piracy?


  • This raises an interesting predicament. Some of these books mentioned here are famed and regarded essential reading from a craft knowledge point of view, but near unobtainable as original copies. While I detest reading from a screen, some of those books I would gladly buy as digital copies just to be able to read their contents. Alas, there often isn't any.
  • There is some point beyond which it does become reasonable to ignore a copyright (and unreasonable for the copyright holder to demand compliance). But that point tends to be quite a bit more distant than most people will admit.
  • Beau WilliamsonBeau Williamson Posts: 80
    edited June 2017
    On Stone by Sumner Stone is a great monograph that steps through the creation of a font family. I found it very illuminating.

    Lettering as Drawing: Contour and Silhouette by Nicolete Grey pairs very nicely with letterletter
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