Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2424 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Amazon.com
This lovely, well-written book is concerned foremost with creating beautiful typography and is essential for professionals who regularly work with typographic designs. Author Robert Bringhurst writes about designing with the correct typeface; striving for rhythm, proportion, and harmony; choosing and combining type; designing pages; using section heads, subheads, footnotes, and tables; applying kerning and other type adjustments to improve legibility; and adding special characters, including punctuation and diacritical marks. The Elements of Typographic Style teaches the history of and the artistic and practical perspectives on a variety of type families that are available in Europe and America today.

The last section of the book classifies and displays many type families, offers a glossary of typography terms, and lists type designers and type foundries. The book briefly mentions digital typography, but otherwise ignores it, focusing instead on general typography and page- and type-design issues. Its examples include text in a variety of languages--including English, Russian, German, and Greek--which is particularly helpful if your work has a multinational focus.

From Library Journal
In a discussion embracing five and a half centuries, poet and designer Bringhurst covers the design of individual characters of type and entire alphabets, as well as the layout of pages, including such items as footnotes, margins, and tables. A glossary defines terms such as kern, fore-edge, and pica, and there are annotated lists of type designers, from the 1400s until now, and of type foundries, mostly contemporary. An appendix illustrates unusual typographic characters, such as the Croatian "dyet" and the German "sharp s," and a final appendix lists, without annotation, more than 100 books and periodicals for further reading. The author's prose is sometimes flowery, and some of his strongly expressed opinions are questionable. Nonetheless, there's a wealth of sound advice and instruction here. Not required for most collections, this will be useful to graphic designers and those interested in the history of printed letterforms.?Margarete Gross, Chicago P.L.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Elements of Typographic Style, Bringhurst
An excellent book; extremely densely written. Everything you wanted to know about typography: rules, opinions and explanations of good typesetting, spacing, design, structure of the book, creating the page (with mathematical structural references and histories). There is a chapter on analphabetical symbols. Appendices A through E cover extensively the working alphabet (international)- including the alphabets of many type faces; characters; terms; type designers; and typefoundries. His first rule: respect the text.

holy bible of type
Get reference book, has everything to know about type. Very heavy in content , not exactly a light read. A must have for anyone serious about typography. Very very good.

Classic foundational text in typography
I'm a type geek -- for which I make neither excuse nor apology. And while your garden variety Barnes and Noble or Borders will have plenty books on typography (and more on calligraphy), this is a must-have for the serious type nerds out there. Bringhurst's book is an elegant example of all he writes about typography -- it's a pleasure to read the text itself precisely because of its beautiful design (in a paperback!) and typography.

Be careful, though -- exposure to this is likely to significantly decrease your ability to tolerate the millions of poorly designed and typeset books out there. Bringhurst gets remarkably technical in areas (and I still don't understand his comparison between design proportions and musical scales), but this book is absolutely critical for any designer.