Typography accounts for over 90 per cent of what users actually read on a screen, yet it is the most under-studied discipline in most design curricula.
The fundamental rules of typography are well-established: limit yourself to two typefaces, maintain a clear type scale, ensure sufficient line height for readability, and never set body text smaller than 14px on screen.
But the rules worth breaking are the ones that limit expression. Mixing a high-contrast serif with a geometric sans-serif can create the kind of visual tension that makes a layout memorable.
The concept of typographic hierarchy goes deeper than font size. Weight, colour, spacing, and case all contribute to the visual weight of a text element.
Optical alignment is the difference between design that looks right in a grid versus design that looks right to human eyes. Numbers in a table should be right-aligned.
