It’s been said that desktop publishing democratized graphic design. For those of you too young to know what the term means, it means the technology that enabled graphic design to go digital. It was an ecosystem, really: the Mac, PostScript, LaserWriter, and PageMaker. But before all that, designers depended on typesetters to set type.

David Langton writing for UX Collective:

A lot was lost when the Macintosh wiped out the traditional typesetting industry. From the art of typography to the craft of typesetting, many essential elements were lost. Typesetters were part of a tradition that stretched back more than 500 years to Gutenberg’s printing press. They understood the basics of type: kerning (spacing between the letters), leading (the space between lines of text), and line breaks (how to avoid widows — those solo words abandoned at the end of a paragraph). They knew about readability (like how to avoid setting type that was too wide to read). There were classic yet limited fonts, with standards for size and leading that assured that everyone working within common ranges maintained a threshold for quality. Yet it was in the craft or business side of typesetting that these services were most under appreciated. Typesetters provided overnight service. They worked overnight, so graphic designers did not have to. We would finish our days specifying the type, and the typesetters would keystroke the manuscripts, proofread, stylize the type, and set up columns following our instructions.

Designers would then pick up the galleys from the typesetters in the morning. The black type was photographically printed on white photo paper. You’d have to cut them up and paste them onto boards, assembling your layout.

Because this was such a physical process, we had to slow down. Langton says:

But since the Macintosh became an in-house tool, the process was reversed. Now, designers design first, then think about it. This shift in process has contributed to a trivialization of the role of graphic designer because anyone can noodle around with the Mac’s sophisticated type tools and make layouts. The design process has been trivialized while the thinking, the evaluation, and the strategic part of the process are often abandoned.

One small thing I’ll point out is that desktop publishing wasn't popularized until 1985.

• PostScript was released by Adobe in 1984.
• The LaserWriter printer was released by Apple in 1985.
• PageMaker was released by Aldus—later bought by Adobe—in 1985.

John Gruber wrote a hilarious rant about the single-story a in the iOS Notes app:

I absolutely despise the alternate single-story a glyph that Apple Notes uses. I use Notes every single day and this a bothers me every single day. It hurts me. It’s a childish silly look, but Notes, for me, is one of the most serious, most important apps I use. 

Since that sparked some conversation online, he followed up with a longer post about typography in early versions of the Mac system software:

…Apple actually shipped System 1.0 with a version of Geneva with a single-story a glyph — but only in the 9-point version of Geneva. At 12 points (and larger), Geneva’s a was double-story.

To me, it does make sense that 9-point Geneva would have a single-story a, since there are less pixels to draw the glyph well and to distinguish better from the lowercase e.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Emigre was a prolific powerhouse. The company started out as a magazine in the mid-1980s, but quickly became a type foundry as the Mac enabled desktop publishing. As a young designer in San Francisco who started out in the ’90s, Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans were local heroes (they were based across the Bay in Berkeley). From 1990–1999 they churned out 37 typefaces for a total of 157 fonts. And in that decade, they expanded their influence by getting into music, artists book publishing, and apparel. More than any other design brand, they celebrated art and artists.

Here is a page from a just-released booklet (with a free downloadable PDF) showcasing their fonts from the Nineties.

I’ve had Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography website/ebook bookmarked since I discovered it over ten years ago. It’s making the rounds again, and I think it’s a good reminder that we are all “professional writers” as he describes:

When we think of “professional writers” we probably think of novelists, screenwriters, or journalists. But the programmer, the scientist, the lawyer—and you, if your work depends on presenting written ideas—all deserve to be called professional writers.

But as professional writers, we do more than write. We edit, we format, we print, we generate PDFs, we make web pages. More than ever, we’re responsible for delivering the written word to our readers. So we’re not just writers—we’re publishers.

Typography is the visual component of the written word. Thus, being a publisher of the written word necessarily means being a typographer.

He’s right. As much of our work is in producing documents and content, we are publishers. Here are a few of my favorite pages:

• Straight and curly quotes (I have a similar post from 2009)
• One space between sentences
• Em sizing

This book reminds me of a couple of seminal books from the early 1990s: The Mac Is Not a Typewriter by Robin Williams and Stop Stealing Sheep by Erik Spiekermann and E. M. Ginger. The former is how I learned all the basics, back when I was designing my high school’s newspaper. The latter is more comprehensive, going deeper into how type works conceptually. These three are all essential resources for any designer.

Sometimes it takes a small push to get the creative obsessions going. Like the majority of the country, I’ve been appalled at Donald Trump’s presidency. From his administration’s cruel policies to just how awful of a man Trump has shown himself, I have been gritting my teeth for four years, waiting for him to lose his re-election bid. I was profoundly concerned about democracy in the United States and how it was being actively undermined by Trump and his band of far-right Republicans.

When Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, I made a poster and website called “Inside Trump’s Brain.” I knew back then how terrible of a president he would be, but had hoped he’d grow into the office. Boy, was I wrong.

So when Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination, I needed to do all I could to get him elected and make Trump a one-term president.

I donated. I talked to the few I knew who supported Trump. I joined Biden’s texting team. But then my friend Christopher Simmons put out a call to his network for artwork to show support for the Biden & Harris ticket. What began as a one-off for me turned into a series driven by not only the cause, but by a need to just make. I became obsessed with 3D typography and loops. The format on Instagram is about creating bite-sized animations that can catch people’s attention and make them pause their scroll for a few seconds.

Recently Guillermo Esteves did a fantastic experiment with HTML5 and CSS3 by recreating the opening crawl to Star Wars. Although it only currently works in Safari 4, it’s a good preview of how to create something dynamic using web standards and web fonts once the other browsers come along.

But Guillermo’s experiment also reminded me of how awful the typography was of those opening crawls. The original Star Wars opening crawl uses two different typefaces (three if you count “A long time ago…”), is justified without hyphenation, and thus creates obvious rivers and awkward tracking.



Whenever I look at anything with words on it, I look at the typography. Bring me to a local corner lunch cafe with a menu typed out and printed from Microsoft Word and I will have a field day. I would judge even more harshly at a more expensive restaurant. I can’t help it as I—like most designers, I’m sure—just look at everything with a critical eye.

My biggest typographical pet peeve is the rendering of apostrophes, single and double quotes.