Type Tricks: Layout Design Your Personal Guide to Layout Design

Type Tricks: Layout Design is the follow-up to Type Tricks and the second book in the trilogy of user manuals about typography related matters. The first book was about type design, the second book is about type layout and the final book will be about type usability. Sometimes you do not have the time to read a book cover to cover, but you simply are looking for some main pointers to help you move forward. This book is precisely for these kinds of situations.

The book covers both key typography rules as well as the underlying structure of the working process in layout design. In an illustrative format and easily accessible style, it presents the different stages of working with typography. The collection of rules provides more than 200 tips for creating readable layouts and typography settings. The book touches on matters of typography for both print and digital media: from letter spacing, paragraph breaks, text adjustment, leading, emphasis, hierarchy to grid systems.

Layout guidelines are difficult to remember, but with this book you do not have to know them all by heart. The format is small and handy, so you can always have it on hand when you need to check the rules. Type Tricks: Layout Design takes its outset in the author's experience as a teacher of typography, her practical experience with designing layouts and her academic research into improving reading through good typography.

Sofie Beier is a professor at the Royal Danish Academy, where she is head of the research unit Centre for Visibility Design. In addition to creating the Type Tricks series, she wrote the book Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility (2012) and has published numerous academic papers on typeface legibility. Her research is focused on improving the reading experience by achieving a better understanding of how different typefaces and letter shapes can influence the way we read.