Practical TypographyMatthew Butterick
Practical Typography
by Matthew Butterick · first published 2013
132mentions
98recommended by
113HN commenters
2013–2026first – last mentioned
87% recommend4% neutral10% critical
A guide to typography for professional writing (free online book).
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.







…Galaxy series (Douglas Adams) 15: Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference (William MacAskill) 16: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Edward Tufte) 17: Butterick's Practical Typography (Matthew Butterick)
on “Ask HN: I have no commitments for the next 6 months – what books should I read?” ↗I thought the book Practical Typography made the best case by just showing an example. Two spaces creates rivers in the text that make it look bad. The author's proposed solution to custom-typeset to avoid this is not sustainable (because it's sensitive to reformatting) or practical. Judge for yourself: http://practicaltypography.com/one-space-between-sentences.h...
on “Why two spaces after a period isn’t wrong – lies typographers tell about history” ↗Honestly, this is really rough. The impulse is admirable, but the implementation has a lot of rough edges and ugliness. A web author looking for good typography is going to be better served reading Butterick's Practical Typography (http://practicaltypography.com/).
on “Tufte CSS” ↗If this stuff (typography, punctuation, etc.) interests you, definitely check out Butterick’s Practical Typography [1]. Great resource and easy to follow. [1] https://practicaltypography.com/
on “How to use (or not use) a hyphen” ↗My personal favorite is Mike Butterick's Practical Typography. He's a programmer, typographer, and lawyer and the book is entirely web based. They're static pages generated by code he wrote in Racket, a language in the Lisp family. For a quick introduction check out a small section of the book: Typography in Ten Minutes http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.htm... The book in
on “Choosing the perfect typeface” ↗Thanks. This got me started on studying Racket, though: http://practicaltypography.com/why-racket-why-lisp.html
on “If Lisp Is So Great (2003)” ↗Ah it seems to redirect HN users to [0]. Sorry, it worked in my search so I didn't know about that. You can just search for "color typography" and read an alternate link or try clicking into that one from Google/the address bar mode since it seems to rely on reading the referrer. On a sidenote, the whole book is great so if you do read it and find it useful, I would pay for it. [0]: http://practi
on “How the Web Became Unreadable” ↗I'd just like to say that I admire Matthew Butterick's creative experimentation with business models for web publishing and absolutely adore Practical Typography to the extent that I've purchased several of his fonts and intend to purchase Beautiful Racket as well. It can be hard to imagine that there's a world for type design on computers outside the formulaic…
on “Beautiful Racket v1.0” ↗It's 10 min yet also a nice guide: https://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.ht... Just love the book and his fonts :) I know it has been posted before, but I just had to ...
on “Five minute guide to better typography” ↗…behind these deceptively simple rules. https://practicaltypography.com/color.html This drives home the concept of "less is more" and leads by example. https://practicaltypography.com/straight-and-curly-quotes.ht... I just love the layout of this page. The design of the table, the elegant asides and a hundred smaller details. There are areas I don't agree with the author, especially when it comes…
on “Web Typography Resources” ↗The line width (number of characters per line) is way too long. You should aim for 50-60 characters per line in a column for maximum legibility. See (for example) this: https://practicaltypography.com/line-length.html
on “Tract: A Hugo theme for ambitious documentation projects” ↗I’d recommend against using ligature fonts in your shell. If there’s one place you don’t want any ambiguity about what glyph you’re using, it’s in the middle of sed, awk, or grep. Programming code has special semantic considerations. Ligatures in programming fonts are likely to either misrepresent the meaning of the code, or cause miscues among readers. So in the end, even if they’re cute, the ri
on “Customizing Your Shell” ↗…of Cambria as font. I don't think I could call it aesthetically pleasing without being insincere, however. Too much is wrong in terms of what I consider to be good typography (which mostly aligns with Butterick's Practical Typography). At least it's not Arial?
on “I bought ISO 8601-1:2019 and 8601-2:2019” ↗…serifs and justification on the web instead of yet another boring sans-serif left-aligned page. Elements of Typographic Style is one of my favourites too. However, I’d suggest that for web publishing, Butterick’s Practical Typography might be a better guide than Bringhurst, who was primarily focused on print.
on “Bringing “The Elements of Typographic Style” to the Web” ↗1) Startups/business. If you haven't, I would read all of Paul Grahams essays. I think startups are a great option (http://www.collegeanswerz.com/risks-and-rewards-of-startups), but even if you don't end up starting one, you should understand the business. I would also highly recommend reading Rework. 2) Your site. The top part (good design is good business) and the footer (contact me) are so
on “Ask HN: I'm a young developer. What should I do next?” ↗