Listen to our review:

The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst is one of those classics we should all have on our bookshelf. If you’ve never seen this before, seriously do yourself a favor and go grab a copy. We feel so strongly about the importance of this book we’re going to give away a copy to one randomly chosen commenter below. So make sure and leave us comment about either your strengths or weaknesses when it comes to typography in your design work.

Gene: This is Gene and Gio. We want to kind of take it back a little bit and talk about this book, “The Elements of Typographic Style“, Robert Bringhurst. This is a classic book in my opinion.

Giovanni: Yes, this is a classic book on typography and like everything you want to know about it.

Gene: Yeah. And you might be asking yourself why are these guys talking about classroom style typography book for website designs?

Giovanni: But the things…

Gene: This is core to what we do.

Giovanni: Right. It is absolutely fundamental to what we do and we have lots of restrictions about what we can do with typography now but I mean that is fast changing. We are approaching a day where the freedom we will have with typography will closely resemble that that exist in print. And so, it is fundamental for us to kind of start thinking about this differently.

Gene: Yeah.

Giovanni: There is no reason why we can’t start implementing lots of boring issues with licensing and things like that which is just as important. There is no reason why we can’t start implementing new type phases and communicating with them more effectively. We have to. The days of having like A type phases are… they’re over…

Gene: They’re over now.

Giovanni: They’re over.

Gene: Yeah, I mean in web designers, not to pick on us but like particularly of sort of marveled at fine typography and stuff and now, we kind of get our chance to really put this stuff into our websites.

Giovanni: Yeah.

Gene: So, to do that, you got to know what the hell you are doing and these elements of typographic styles like… It’s like the… For me, it’s the fundamental book that I kind of cut my teeth with doing print work and stuff. And this is… I think what we both teach some design classes and things like that. This is definitely a required text.

Giovanni: Yeah. I mean I’d learned… that’s what I learned typography with every instructor I had if they didn’t make a required reading. They made it suggested reading which is the same thing.

Gene: It is absolutely everything you want to know about how the design was typed. But it actually takes it a little bit further in some cases and applies it to layouts and how type can interact with grid and stuff like that.

Giovanni: But the thing that I like about is it breaks it down by letter forms. You get a better understanding of how the letter forms interact with each other and why type phases are designed the way they are because one thing I see a lot in web design is that when people start adopting a new type phase either as image replacement or trying to get it in there with that fun phase or some other kind of service or whatever. It’s all trendier than somebody who actually understands the different type phases picks one for its characteristics and for the project. It looks great if people like it so type designers just copy it. You know what I mean? And I think it is because they want to be as expressive with their typography but they don’t necessarily …

Gene: Know how.

Giovanni: Know how, right. Because if you have been doing this for 10 years, you don’t have the same kind of freedom that like a print designer would who… They put it down. They set it the way they want it to be set. It exists as it exists forever. I mean it gets printed and that’s what it is. So, we think it is important to talk about books like this because it maybe an old book and the version 3.2 that we were talking was published in 2008. So, like by web standards, that’s ancient. Three year old is ancient.

Gene: But these design principle goes back for years.

Giovanni: But this stuff is fundamental. It’s universal.

Gene: Yeah.

Giovanni: So that’s why we wanted to mention it and just talk about how good of a book it is and how everybody should have a copy of it.

Gene: Yeah, go get your copy of this. Read through it and you’ll be a typography bad ass. I promise.

Giovanni: Hopefully.

Gene: I promise.

Giovanni: All right.