This paragraph shows the rhythm and balance of body text. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. "Typography," Bringhurst writes, "must invite the reader into the text and help keep him there."
In principio erat verbum — the beginning was the word. Type, when well set, vanishes into the voice of the text, into the meaning itself.
The typographic page is like a musical score: the text is the libretto, the type is the instrument, and the reader is the performer.
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Robert Bringhurst's The Elements of Typographic Style is widely considered to be the pinnacle of typographic practice, cited by typographers such as Hermann Zapf, Jonathan Hoefler and Richard Rutter as the typographers' Bible.
It provides guidance on font choice, legibility, hierarchy, kerning, leading and white space. Aimed at print typographers, it devotes only two pages to the screen — yet the fundamentals are as valid for web as print.
Letters have a life and dignity of their own ... well chosen words deserve well-chosen letters; these in turn deserve to be set with affection, intelligence, knowledge and skill.
This page is set in EB Garamond, sized at 1.2rem with a line-height of 1.6. The container is ~66 characters wide. Drop caps and small caps reinforce typographic structure and voice.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.― Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style
Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.― Robert Bringhurst, The Tree of Meaning