Originally published in 2018, Flexible Typesetting has sold thousands of copies and given a new generation of designers fresh mental models to craft meaningful, multidimensional typography. It is required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged the rethinking of core curricula.
Few things in my career have been as rewarding as writing and sharing this book. I’m so excited to give it to you for free. Download the PDF.
I hope you’ll recognize the significance of this moment we share together in the living story of graphic design.
Many people think of the web as just another medium, like print or film, and glamorize each new platform or device as the next big thing when, in reality, these are mere happenings in a vast new layer of our world — a plane where human beings should enjoy greater power, individuality, and dignity.
Flexible Typesetting is my attempt to guide you in the practice of design on this new plane. From Chapter 1’s philosophical framing, to Chapter 2’s prioritization of text and reader, to the multidimensional considerations in later chapters about picking fonts, shaping text, and managing compositions, this book blends vital typographic tactics with rhetorical questions that challenge the reader to reason deeply about beauty.
Although I’m proud of having written this book, and although it continues to help me drive product work at Adobe toward accessible, readable, respectful outcomes, my goal has always been to find you and inspire you to contribute to our shared story.
It’s the first how-to book on contemporary typography that keeps its promise.
My sincerest thanks to A Book Apart for starting and growing one of the finest brands in design education, and for inviting me to take part in the journey. Many thanks.
To my fellow ABA authors: It has been my great privilege to be in your company, it’s an honor to have first published my book in a collection alongside your fine works, and I look forward to supporting your inevitably awesome future efforts. Solidarity!
It saddens me that ABA has closed its doors, but all things end. This was a special experience that I will always appreciate. Later, I may reformat Flexible Typesetting as a web reading experience. For updates, get your copy of the book.
🪕 May 25th. It’s a warm, lazy Saturday and I’m sipping 1Q84 which I don’t love, but which like other Murakami novels puts me in a mood to appreciate music — that, I do love.
Then I happened to check my friend Donny’s blog and learn about Remembrance. Thanks to the magic of my favorite streaming service and some nice little speakers, lively, soulful banjo and piano now float through my living room with the gentle breeze of the ceiling fan and our dogs sound asleep.
🌷 May 3rd. Bright and breezy. Bears and bees have woken up, with warm sun over the past few days. Sparrows, woodpeckers making their morning noise. New growth abounds.
As I mentioned in a recent interview, inventing typographic intelligence technologies is what I do at work. So I thought I’d elaborate: Imagine spell check for design, with advice about choosing fonts, setting line spacing, rearranging text, and more. I’m guiding a small team as we decide what to check for, how to make changes, and how manual/automatic the controls should be.
The hard part is, well, all of it. Design decisions are interrelated, and there are no correct answers (despite what snobs may say). Landing an acceptable user experience is tough. And the deafening roar of “AI” makes it challenging to focus.
But although it’s difficult, creating smart typography tools is worth doing because human beings need to take better care of one another. Better tools can help designers scale their empathy and show the business value of being more considerate.
Good typography means many different things to many different people. While there is no “correct”, there are contexts, conventions, and cultures. By designing from many different flexible, multiscriptual, accessible points of view simultaneously, we can craft compositions that respectfully respond to fit individual readers. Practically speaking, this is unreasonably complicated. But with assistance it becomes possible.
If a computer is a bicycle for our minds, then typography is a bicycle for our words, helping them to reach further and have a greater impact. Smart typography tools will let us go up a few gears, providing sensitive, high-level controls to manage low-level details. The algorithms that power these controls can be fine-tuned by experienced users, and can provide targeted domain-learning materials to help everyone stay sharp.
Typography is way too hard these days. While doing a good job should require some effort and investment, it often feels like we waste our energy and money poking through nests of angry features, trying out fluffy apps that claim to save us time, or setting up (and maintaining) elaborate systems that aren’t much fun. There must be a better way to apply our skills and knowledge.
Flexible, digital creations could match and, over time, even transcend the design quality of history’s finest printed works if we exercise care, honor diversity, and elevate the baseline functions of our design tools. Typography can show us the way.
Now in my mid-forties, I increasingly appreciate time spent with my spouse, children, siblings, and parents. Nothing nourishes and uplifts me more, comforts me more in uncertainty, or provides me with more clarity and energy to focus on projects in life and work than spending time with my family. It is a great privilege and a blessing that these relationships are positive.
Dedicated self-reflection led me to prioritize family time, and systems are now in place to preserve the likelihood of my spending time in this way.
Eileen and I meet daily to plan our days and support one another. In focused moments, I listen to each of my daughters talk about what they’re doing or excited about, and sometimes I take them on “truck dates” where we go somewhere nearby with a snack and talk for a little while.
I chat with each of my parents at regular times each week. I tried this with my brothers, but our combined schedules make it too unpredictable. Instead, we message occasionally and annually we hang out for a weekend, doing the stuff we used to do as kids.
It’s hard to capture how special these times are to me, and how deeply satisfying it is to have invested my life in these ways. I have tried, in Oliver Burkeman’s words, to treat each experience “with the reverence we’d show if it were the final instance of it” … and to also recognize that it is “incomprehensibly miraculous to have been granted any time at all”. Quotes from Four Thousand Weeks.
Ethan Marcotte coined the term Responsive Web Design and, more importantly, continues to teach people that it’s more than a technique — it’s an ethos. I enjoy following Ethan’s personal site because his industry awareness is off the charts, he’s deeply thoughtful about both practical and generational challenges, and he is above all encouraging.
Tyler Sticka is part of Cloud Four, a web agency I have admired for years because of their innovation in responsive design techniques and focus on inclusive experiences. Tyler keeps a journal on his delightful personal site that also includes his Cloud Four posts, so it’s a nice way to keep track of what he shares. Super sharp.
The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. — Watterson
You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. — Jobs
To do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. — Graham
Stories forthcoming.
About
Hello, I’m Tim Brown. I’m a designer and toolmaker with 15 years of product leadership experience.
My special interest is typography, a fancy word that means using fonts. I’m Head of Typography at Adobe, where I work on design tools and help people stay sharp.
I live and work in New York State’s Hudson Valley with my wife and college sweetheart Eileen, our three daughters, and our dogs.
Please feel welcome to email and connect on social.
Featured
Flexible Typesetting is a book about how to make websites and apps look great at different screen sizes.
Flexible Typesetting
Practicing Typography Basics