Introductory Resources to Fonts for Developers
O’Reilly book author Jason Pamental sat down with us during Codementor design office hours and answered our viewers’ questions about some great introductory resources about fonts.
Question: Do you know of any resources that you recommend that are introductory to fonts? I’ve been more like a developer, but doing more work on front end, and a decision is coming up in the future about design.
Jason: Yeah, so, Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style is a fantastic book.
That may be a little bit off the path for what you need in the shorter term.
It’s still a great reference, but another one that you might want to look at is Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton.
There’s a new edition that just came out, and that’s a fantastic book. It’s used as a textbook in a ton of graphic design programs, and it’s really, really well-written She also wrote one recently for type on screen, so looking at her books is a really great resource.
Jason Santa Maria is another fantastic designer who has a book coming out soon called On Web Typography from A Book Apart.
We’ve actually gone back and forth a little bit about our books. I have a little bit more of a technical approach in mine. I spend a lot more time focusing on the implementation, and he focuses a little more on aesthetics, so his might be a really great example. But that’s not out yet, so I don’t know for sure, but he’s a pretty amazing designer and he’s a great writer, so I can only imagine it’s probably going to be really, really good.
Other posts in this series with Jason Pamental:
- Choosing & Pairing Typefaces
- Pros & Cons for Icon Fonts Like Font Awesome – Design Tips for Developers
- Using Modernizr to Detect HTML5 & CSS3 Features in Browser
- Additional Resources About Responsive Typography
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