Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton is an excellent critical guide for designers, editors and writers which provides me with a good introduction into the art and visual presentation of typography. The book is split into three main categories; letter, text and grid.
In the first section of her book, Ellen looks at the history of type and defines each class of typeface such as humanist (old roman typefaces) transitional typefaces and eventually modern typefaces. She also talks about famous typographers such as Wim Crouwel and his engineering behind typefaces and the design process that follows. I really enjoyed this section as it showed a diverse range of type and describes the methodology on how it connects visually to the reader. She also dives into the guidance of letters and its form.
The second section looks at the smaller details in type such as kerning, alignment of letterforms/words, spacing and both metric kerning and optical kerning with a great deal of mental exercising along with it. This comes with great help to me as I am now on kerning my own wordmark which shows headline/logo kerning, paragraph kerning and tracking.
Finally, the third section goes into great diagrammatic details on the proportions and the golden section of typohpnoic grid structure. Ellen prescribes great diagrams similar to Josef Brockman’s book ‘Grid Systems’. She prescribes grid templates and visually unconstructive exercises to show the importance of the presentation of structure with golden ratio comparisons. Also, Ellen deploys a more complex format of typographic hierarchy of spatial arrangement to make projects more complex allowing room to be added for variables such as weight, size and alignment. She then typographically proceeds to display these innovatively across both axis.
I found this book overall pleasant to read as not only has it allowed me to explore different uses and exercises that I can deploy on typography but it also has provided me with contextual background knowledge and the methodology of typography.