Thinking with Type A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, and Students (3rd Edition, Revised and Expanded)

By: Ellen Lupton

Published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2024

The essential and bestselling guide to typography from beloved design educator Ellen Lupton--revised and expanded to include new and additional voices, examples, and principles, and a wider array of typefaces.

"Thinking with Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time is to physics."--I Love Typography

The bestselling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded third edition: This is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Covering the essentials of typography, this book explores everything from typefaces and type families to kerning and tracking to grids and layout principles.

Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. Historical and contemporary examples of graphic design show how to learn the rules and how to break them. Critical essays, eye-opening diagrams, helpful exercises, and dozens of examples and illustrations show readers how to be inventive within systems that inform and communicate.

Featuring 32 pages of new content, the third edition is revised and refined from cover to cover:

• More fonts: old fonts, new fonts, weird fonts, libre fonts, Google fonts, Adobe fonts, fonts from independent foundries, and fonts and lettering by women and BIPOC designers
• Introductions to diverse writing systems, contributed by expert typographers from around the world
• Demonstrations of basic design principles, such as vi­sual balance, Gestalt grouping, and responsive layout
• Current approaches to typeface design, including
  • Variable fonts and optical sizes
  • Tips for readability, legibility, and accessibility
  • Stunning reproductions from the Letterform Archive

Thinking with Type is the typography book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, anyone who works with words on page or screen, and enthusiasts of type and lettering. Readers will also love Ellen Lupton's book Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers.