Elements of typographic style and web typography

I have just finished reading Robert Bringhurst’s book Elements of Typographic Style, a classic book and essential guide on typography.

Being typography an art over half a millenium old and being the natural heir of the millenar legacy of scribes, there is plenty to learn from history when typesseting a text.

Any good designer knows that desing is much more than just good taste and typography is no exception.

Much of what pleases us is related to natural (biological) factors and is generally universal and somehow unvariable over history. Another good part is cultural, which ends up in history again to understand its dynamics.

Some of the caracteristics of typography on certain periods of time are due to technical limitations that can easily overcame in digital typesetting, however some are very well rooted in the cultural or natural perception of people.

Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style is an outstanding historical and technical reference for
typography.

Typography on the web is not exception to typography in general, but because of very specific caracteristics of the medium, its technical aspects are very different, and unfortunately this is a science of its own, and it has no place on such a book.

Fortunately Richard Rutter has launched Web Typography a beautiful project that consists in comment relevant parts of Robert
Bringhurst’s bookand add web techniques and considerations.

So, if you are pleased by typography the traditional way this book is a perfect reference and, if you are an iconoclast and want to do some weird, freaky and disturbing typesetting you still can find this useful, after all, one can’t break
somethin one cannot reach.