On Typography & Design

I have always admired beautiful books, beautiful documents, beautiful typefaces.

Like many composers, I stumbled into a fascination (obsession?) with clean, elegant typography as a result of engraving my works. Committed engravers spend a great deal of time developing their house style and optimizing line widths, slur parameters, etc. While I’m no pro when it comes to engraving, I’ve done my fair share of exploration, and even spent several months searching for the perfect workhorse typeface for my scores (it’s the inimitable Artifex CF by Connary Fagen used in the example below).

My own forays into typography, layout, and design have opened up an endlessly fascinating world of notation and written word, and I’d like to share a few of my favorite resources for diving deeper.

(an excerpt from Bitter Fruit for soprano and electronics)

Butterick • Practical Typography

This free* digital book on typography is my go-to resource when talking with others about the principles of clean typography. Butterick is a remarkable typographer and computer programmer, and his newsletter is full of fascinating insights and incisive writing. He has designed several typefaces and has programmed a remarkably flexible open-source framework for multi-format publishing called Pollen. (For all the OpenMusic/Lisp-enthusiasts, it’s written in Racket, a powerful offshoot of Common Lisp). In short, he knows what he’s talking about!

Butterick outlines practical, common-sense principles for typography that will help polish and elevate any document – his sample documents at the end of the book provide excellent visual examples of what clean, elegant typography looks like. These features of the text gently guide the reader through the process of developing a discerning and critical eye for good typography. 

*If you find Practical Typography helpful and can do so, please pay for it to support Butterick’s work.

Bringhurst • The Elements of Typographic Style

Bringhurst’s book is a classic and highly-acclaimed text on typography. It gives a detailed overview of the history and practice of typography and inspires the reader to pursue artistry in typography and design. Bringhurst’s thoughts on the rhythm, proportion, harmony, counterpoint, and form of the word on the page are fascinating and delightful.

Additionally, the last sections of the book provide an excellent resource for discovering and identifying typefaces and unfamiliar glyphs (typographical characters). Together, Butterick and Bringhurst offer formidable wisdom and insight to the composer, designer, writer, and bibliophile.

Kimberly Elam • Grid Systems and Geometry of Design

Kimberly Elam’s book Grid Systems was one of the first works that I read on the topic of composing type on the page. Elam gives a thorough exposition of the principles of proportion, the energy of the page, and the useful presentation of written information in hierarchy. The book is replete with test cases illustrating good practice and common pitfalls, and includes plenty of examples of real designs, often with facing semi-transparent pages that display the underlying “architecture” of the design in boxes, lines, circles, etc.

Geometry of Design is perhaps slightly less immediately applicable to the page (as it covers a variety of designs for products, cars, and the built world as well), but it never fails to spark my imagination, especially in considering the proportioning of my works (both in time and in the material of the page).