Way back in 1991 I was lucky enough to get along to what must have been one of the last Monotype Conferences. The stand-out speaker was Jost Hochuli who talked about Micro-typography or Good typography through detail. At the time I worked with a small team of designers who valued their production skills highly. We all had backgrounds in what used to be called "finished art" and had started out, mostly, in pre-Mac days. "The details" were important to us but as younger designers joined we became conscious of a need to manage standards. So I compiled guidelines for our working practices, which included extensive composition rules.
Tschichold's Rules for Penguin played a large part (they'd been reproduced in Ruari McLean's book Jan Tschichold, typographer) but there was other material drawn in from various sources: Stanley Morison's First Principles of Typography, Vincent Stear's Printing, Design and Layout, to name just a couple, and significantly, Hochuli's talk at the conference.
It was just what we needed in those days when we were still trying to work out all the things we needed to know, the things that the typesetter used to take care of. And now, thankfully, everything he covered is covered in his beautiful book Detail in typography: all the finer points of letter, word and line spacing that I hope is, largely thanks to Hochuli, second nature to me know.
This is the first English edition of the recently extended and updated edition.
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