Matthew Butterick released a full-fledged book on typography and published it exclusively online. Readers can access everything for free. Butterick is relying on people to help pay for the work through font purchases or PayPal donations. I’ve just started reading - it’s really good. Here is a quick blurb that introduces the book’s motivation:
You might be a programmer, writing documentation for a new software tool.
You might be a scientist, writing a proposal for a research grant.
You might be a lawyer, writing a brief for court.
When we think of “professional writers,” maybe we think of novelists or journalists. But the programmer, the scientist, the lawyer—and you, if your work depends on presenting written ideas—all deserve to be called professional writers.
But as professional writers, we do more than write. We edit, we format, we print, we generate PDFs, we make web pages. More than ever, we’re responsible for delivering the written word to our readers. So we’re not just writers—we’re publishers.
Typography is the visual component of the written word. And being a publisher of the written word necessarily means being a typographer.
This book will make you a better typographer.