The New Typography

What Hacker News says

1. mattkevanJan 2019
   Tschichold was a design genius. His first book ‘The New Typography’ set out the rules for modernist design, rejecting all old forms of design.

   Some of the work he did at that time basically set the template for most design we have now. My old design tutor, who’s father was one of the UK’s leading modernist typographers and knew Tscichold, had a piece of his that she said had almost every modern design cliche, though done for the first time here.

   Later, after a run-in with the nazis, he moved to the UK, rejected modernist design ideology as a little too fascist and revived traditional book design. He also designed the Penguin Classics book series - a major design achievement itself.

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2. hurbledrOct 2016
   I think that a lot of it comes down to designers needing/wanting to justify their job.

   If a designer or typographer does good work, it goes largely unnoticed, since navigating the page and reading the text is easy and fluid. This can lead clients to believe that the designer is not doing much at all, when in fact they are doing their job exceptionally well.

   This leads to designers adding unnecessary ornamentation (often at the clients behest), just to make it seem as though they are providing more of a service.

   As others have pointed out, no one is sitting in meetings reading the boiler plate text on designs, they are just looking at the overall page to see if it 'pops' or whatever. So really, it's as much the clients fault as the designers, although a good designer should be able to communicate why the flashiest, most cutting edge choices are not always the best.

   Also, I'd like to recommend this book, The New Typography. It's an old book, but they do a really great job of explaining the goals of typography, and how one can be creative without sacrificing readability, etc. https://www.amazon.com/New-Typography-Weimar-Now-Criticism/d...

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3. arkitaipMay 2011
   IMHO you first need to understand design, its various sub fields (i.e. typography, colors, layout), user experience design/interaction design/usability, and finally how all of this applies to the web. You can learn the basics by reading books but the only way to truly understand and master is by study this things in the world and by practicing them. Start thinking about design, analyze it in your daily life, do your own makeovers of sites you use, design a blog theme, etc, etc.

   As for web typography, you want to check of the latest generation of font embedding because that's where the real magic's at. The most known web font solutions are: CSS3 (font-face), typeface.js, cufon, flir, sifr, Google Font API, Typekit.

   Here's a list of quality books on design and typography:

       A History of Graphic Design
       Before & After Page Design
       Designing Brand Identity
       Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
       Graphic Design Solutions
       How Designers Think
       Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
       Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop 
       The Complete Manual of Typography
       The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
       The Elements of Graphic Design: Space, Unity, Page Architecture, and Type
       The Elements of Typographic Style
       The New Typography
       The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
       Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
       Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design 
   	

   Books on web design:

       About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
       Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become  
       Bulletproof Web Design
       Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide
       Designing Web Usability
       Designing With Web Standards
       Designing the Obvious: A Common Sense Approach to Web Application Design
       Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction
       Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
       Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed
       Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites
       Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web  
       Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
       Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems
       The Essential Guide to User Interface Design
       The Inmates Are Running the Asylum
       Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology
       Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks

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4. lukeqseeMay 2011
   The book list in readable format:

       Before & After Page Design
       Typography Workbook: A Real-World Guide to Using Type in Graphic Design
       Thinking with Type: A Primer for Designers
       How Designers Think
       Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
       Making and Breaking the Grid: A Graphic Design Layout Workshop
       The Designer's Guide to Color Combinations
       Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things
       The New Typography

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