does butterick know what he is talking about?
how does typography stack up in the age of e-books?
matthew butterick wrote a book about typography, and then put up a website to reproduce his book…
he has a “typography in ten minutes” introduction.
http://practicaltypography.com/typography-in-ten-minutes.html
he makes a bold claim, saying he stands behind it:
if you learn and follow
these five typography rules,
you will be a better typographer than
95% of professional writers and
70% of professional designers.
backing up his “ten minutes” claim, butterick says:
all it takes is ten minutes —
five minutes to read these rules once,
then five minutes to read them again.
5 rules is doable, even in our attention-short world.
but does butterick know what he’s talking about?
particularly in this day and age of electronic-books?
because, let’s face it, the economics of e-books are such that they allow wide distribution of your work, in a way that old-fashioned print-runs never could… (never mind the fact that print-runs are expensive.)
indeed, i do believe that the main reason butterick believes he can sell a book about typography to the public is because the digital revolution has caused many people to seriously entertain the thought of writing a book.
***
so let’s review butterick’s five typography rules…
1. body-text is most important,
because there’s more of it than anything else.
makes sense to me. so far, so good.
butterick then goes on to say that success with body-text hinges on four typographic choices, which then become the substance of his following 4 rules:
2. the first is point-size, the size of the letters.
butterick says that, in print, the most comfortable range for body text is 10–12 point. he continues that, on the web, the comfort range is 15–25 pixels.
and here, right at the outset, we can see exactly where butterick has gone wrong for us, because — in electronic-books, whether they exist on the web or an off-line device instead — the point-size can almost always be changed, made bigger or smaller. it’s one of the most important benefits of e-books, for many people. (for some, it’s the most important.)
all this is not to say that a person preparing an e-book shouldn’t use a decent point-size; of course you should. but it doesn’t really make all that much difference, since an end-user can change the point-size to her preference.
3. the second is line-spacing, the space between lines.
butterick suggests line-spacing of 120–145% of point-size.
that’s a good rule-of-thumb. but again, in most e-book apps, the end-user can adjust the line-spacing. so even if you were to make a bad choice here, it won’t be a fatal mistake for you.
4. the third choice butterick mentions is the “measure”,
the typographic term for the width of the text-block.
butterick says that the measure you choose should produce an average of 45–90 characters per line. that’s a wide range, but the center is around 65, and that’s a middle-position typically suggested. you can test that with the following line, which is composed of exactly 2.5 lowercase alphabets:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm
that line is centered; here’s what the same line looks like left-justified:
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklm
so… as you can see, this is just about the precise measure that medium uses.
(at least it is for me, with my monitor, and my web-browser, and on and on.)
but again, the measure is not something that you, as the designer of an e-book, can always control, since it depends largely on the screen being used, not to mention the size of the font, which we also have no control over, as we’ve discussed up above.
indeed, it is the very essence of digital documents that characteristics like this will vary quite widely.
so this particular bit of advice is not useful to us.
5. butterick’s last choice is the font that you pick.
and here, for the final time, we see butterick’s folly.
now yes, of course, as the designer of an e-book, you are going to choose the font that you believe will showcase the product to its very best effect.
but you’re also aware that most e-book viewer-apps let end-users change the font to whatever they want.
so you cannot get too caught up in your admiration for the font that you prefer, if you want to stay sane.
***
what we’ve learned here is that, however good butterick’s rules might be for printed-books, created via large print-runs, they fall apart when applied to e-books. indeed, these rules reflect the pixel-perfect mentality of the designer who knows the exact dimensions of the canvas on which they are placing the book. this is the mentality that web-designers have learned they need to leave behind, in the 20th century. control has been ceded to the multiplicity of form-factors, and — more importantly— to the end-user, and most end-users like that just fine, thank you very much.
-bowerbird
