These 26 key rules from Butterick’s Practical Typography might be the most useful listicle I’ve seen in years. A sample:
- The four most important typographic choices you make in any document are point size, line spacing, line length, and font (passim), because those choices determine how thebody text looks.
- point size should be 10–12 points in printed documents, 15-25 pixels on the web.
- line spacing should be 120–145% of the point size.
- The average line length should be 45–90 characters (including spaces).
- The easiest and most visible improvement you can make to your typography is to use a professional font, like those found in font recommendations.
- Avoid goofy fonts, monospaced fonts, and system fonts, especially times new roman and Arial.
My number one rule for this blog is “Pick a template and don’t deviate” since I figure someone much better at this than me spent a lot of time thinking about how it should look.