Berry’s Dot-Font Columns, Collected

The letter forms we use to communicate words convey meaning, enhancing a text.

Dot-Font, John D. Berry’s long-running blog, also exists as two books. The blog began on CreativePro.com and both books are available as free downloads. Unfortunately, the books were published ten years ago and are difficult to locate used.

Every designer should visit and read CreativePro regularly. So should teachers of design and visual communication. Anyone practicing or teaching Web design, too. If you work with digital type, you should read CreativePro. I spend a lot of time reading the type and typography articles.

There was a glut of books on page design, typography, and typefaces from the mid-1990s through 2010. Many books have also been published since the major wave receded, with many of those owing a debt to the foundational works on typography for the masses.  The titles and names are now well-known, at least to the type snobs and type hipsters:

• The Mac is NOT a Typewriter by Robin Williams, the book that made computer users aware of typography.
• Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton.
• The Elements of Typography Style by Robert Bringhurst.
• Designing with Type by James Craig and Irene Korol Scala.
• Every book written or edited by design historian Steven Heller.
• Thinking in Type and Type in Use by Alex White.
• Design for Hackers by David Kadavy, the 2011 book that reminded us design for screen is often more important and more difficult than designing for a static page.

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What began with Robin Williams and continued through David Kadavy is an awareness of typography driven by the font choices provided by personal computers. The Macintosh not only gave us choices, it also forced us to think about those choices more critically. Okay, not everyone thinks about font choices. Design for Hackers is also the book that explained why Comic Sans is disliked, using actual examples and data to explain the typeface’s problems on computer screens.

I have prepared a typography bibliography and am expanding it for this blog. I hope to post the bibliography within a few weeks.