Typography is such a simple thing. It's the art of type, the design of making things as easy to read as possible. I've written about typography before, but I need to write again, because there is so much bad typography in the world. I've just finished reading the
His Dark Meterials trilogy by Philip Pullman. Now the books are quite exciting, but the typography in them is really poor, almost on par with Microsoft Word. A typical example is to check for a
ligature, a new shape when two characters are close together. The typical one is an f followed by an i: fi. In most fonts, the f leans over the i and clashes with the dot (as it did in the trilogy). I've been spending a lot of time with typography recently as I've been putting the finishing touches to my book,
Tick My Boxes, full of tips about web development.
The image above is from my book, notice the ff and fi ligatures, as well as small capitals for the abbreviation. Better typography for a better world!
