How to learn typography

A curriculum is a list of things to read, watch, and do, in roughly the order I’d want a friend to do them. Skip what you already know. Linger on what catches.

01 — Foundations

• Read Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. The whole book, slowly. This is the cheapest, friendliest way in.
• Read The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst, chapters 1–3. Treat the rest as a reference you’ll come back to.
• Watch Helvetica (Gary Hustwit, 2007). 80 minutes. A documentary about a single typeface that becomes a documentary about everything.
• Do Open five sites you read often. For each, identify the body typeface, the line length in characters, the line height, and the font size. Write it down.
• Do Set the same paragraph in five typefaces — one serif, one sans, one slab, one mono, one display. Print them. Sit with them on paper for a day.

02 — Letters

• Read Letters of Credit by Walter Tracy. Short. Specific. Teaches you to see.
• Read Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick, “Type composition” and “Text formatting.” Free online.
• Watch The Type episodes on Garamond and Caslon, if you can find them.
• Do Draw the lowercase g from memory. Then look at a real one. Notice everything you got wrong.
• Do Identify ten typefaces in the wild — on signs, books, packaging — without using an app. Confirm with WhatTheFont afterward.

03 — Setting type

• Read Bringhurst, chapters 4–6 (rhythm, harmony, structural forms).
• Read Butterick on web typography. Especially the part on line length.
• Do Set a 1,500-word essay for print. Choose a typeface. Choose a measure. Choose a leading. Justify or rag. Defend each choice in a sentence.
• Do Set the same essay for the web. Notice what changes.
• Do Find a book whose typography you love. Photocopy a spread. Annotate the margins, leading, hierarchy, and entry points.

04 — History, briefly

• Read An Essay on Typography by Eric Gill. Short and opinionated. Mostly disagree with it.
• Read the first two chapters of Anatomy of a Typeface by Alexander Lawson. Skim the rest.
• Visit a letterpress shop or a museum with a print collection. Touch the metal if they let you.
• Do Pick one historical period — incunabula, Didone, Bauhaus, phototype, digital — and write 500 words on what it changed.

05 — Drawing letters

• Read Designing Type by Karen Cheng. The reference for proportion and optical correction.
• Do Type@Cooper or Type West, if you can. Otherwise: TypeTogether’s tutorials and Glyphs Mini.
• Do Draw a complete lowercase alphabet by hand, in pencil, at 4cm cap height. Don’t redraw — finish the bad version. Then do it again.
• Do Build one typeface in Glyphs Mini. Aim for ugly and complete, not pretty and unfinished.

06 — Where to go next

You’re now equipped to argue. Subscribe to Typographica, follow a few foundries (Klim, Commercial Type, Dinamo, Production Type), and keep a folder of typography you love.

The rest is just doing it for ten years.