From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

Introduction

From the course: The 33 Laws of Typography

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Introduction

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- [Voiceover] Hello and welcome to The 33 Laws of Typography. My name is Jill Butler and I own a design studio in Houston, Texas. One of my favorite parts about design is taking long, really boring looking spans of text and turning these spans of text into beautiful, easy to read documents and it's really fun and it's pretty exciting because it doesn't take much. You just need to follow the laws of typography. Most of these laws have existed for a really long time. It's just that a lot of people are not familiar with them. Typography is just one part of a document and just one part of document design. But it's a really important part that often gets overlooked or even ignored. Steve Jobs who was the founder of Apple Computer studied calligraphy at Reed College and then went on to change the world forever with the invention of the Macintosh Computer. One of the Macintosh computer's biggest innovations was the ability to create beautiful typography. This is something that a lot of us nowadays take for granted. Because of the personal computer and the desktop printer, all of us can create documents. But because of Steve Jobs, all of us can create beautiful documents with gorgeous typography and that's huge. It's revolutionary and this ability for all of us to create beautiful documents simply did not exist before 1984. You may create documents as your primary job function or maybe as part of your larger job duties. You may create documents as a hobbyist, or as a volunteer, or maybe as a student. You may be creating resumes, web sites, e-books, presentations, student assignments, business cards, posters, brochures. But no matter what type of documents that you're creating, they'll be more effective when the typography is both professional and beautiful. Documents with professional, beautiful typography are more legible and that simply means that they're easier to read and that makes them better at communicating, which is the whole purpose of creating a document in the first place. Documents with professional, beautiful typography are also more aesthetically pleasing. They look better and because of this, these documents with beautiful typography, they create a good first impression and they set a positive tone for your audience before a single word is ever spoken or read. This course is going to introduce you to the foundations of beautiful typography by explaining the 33 laws of typography and these 33 laws have been broken down into five categories. How to format a document, how to format large bodies of text, how to format smaller blocks of text, how to use punctuation properly, and how to choose typefaces. So if you are ready to start creating more effective documents with beautiful typography, then you're in the right place. I really hope you enjoy this course and come to appreciate good typography as much as I do.

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