5 Prinsip dasar dalam Typography ini diklaim dapat membuat suatu dokumen lebih baik dari 95% professional writers dan 70% professional designers yang ada saat ini.

  1. The ty­po­graphic qual­ity of your doc­u­ment is de­ter­mined largely by how the body text looks. Why? Be­cause there’s more body text than any­thing else. So start every project by mak­ing the body text look good, then worry about the rest.

  2. point size is the size of the let­ters. In print, the most com­fort­able range for body text is 10–12 point. On the web, the range is 15–25 pix­els. Not every font ap­pears equally large at a given point size, so be pre­pared to ad­just as necessary.

  3. line spac­ing is the ver­ti­cal dis­tance be­tween lines. It should be 120–145% of the point size. In word proces­sors, use the “Ex­act” line-spac­ing op­tion to achieve this. The de­fault sin­gle-line op­tion is too tight; the 1½-line op­tion is too loose. In CSS, use line-height.

  4. line length is the hor­i­zon­tal width of the text block. Line length should be an av­er­age of 45–90 char­ac­ters per line (use your word-count func­tion) or 2–3 low­er­case al­pha­bets, like so:

    abcde­fghijklmnopqrstu­vwxyz­abcde­fghijklmnopqrstu­vwxyz­abcd

    In a printed doc­u­ment, this usu­ally means page mar­gins larger than the tra­di­tional one inch. On a web page, it usu­ally means not al­low­ing the text to flow to the edges of the browser window.

  5. And fi­nally, font choice. The fastest, eas­i­est, and most vis­i­ble im­prove­ment you can make to your ty­pog­ra­phy is to ig­nore the fonts that came free with your com­puter (known as sys­tem fonts) and buy a pro­fes­sional font (like my fonts eq­uity and con­course, or oth­ers found in font rec­om­men­da­tions). A pro­fes­sional font gives you the ben­e­fit of a pro­fes­sional de­signer’s skills with­out hav­ing to hire one.

    If that’s im­pos­si­ble, you can still make good ty­pog­ra­phy with sys­tem fonts. But choose wisely. And never choose times new ro­man or Ar­ial, as those fonts are fa­vored only by the ap­a­thetic and sloppy. Not by ty­pog­ra­phers. Not by you.

Ringkasan mengenai 5 prinsip typography diatas:

  1. Kualitas suatu dokumen ditentukan body text.
  2. Point size atau ukuran huruf 10 - 12 poin bila di sistem komputer dan pada web sekitar 15 - 25 pixel.
  3. Line spacing atau jarak antar paragraph berukuran 120% - 145% dari point size. Di CSS menggunakan line-height.
  4. line length atau panjang paragraph 45 - 90 karakter.
  5. Pilih font yang cocok, jangan gunakan font dari default. Jangan pula memilih font Times New Roman atau Arial.