04 — Designing with Type (5-th edition) by James Craig and Irene Korol Scala
Typography in my opinion is the most crucial and essential part of a graphic designer’s job. Almost everything in graphic design revolves around type.
I remember like it was yesterday, when the Art Director from a company I worked at said “Mihai, web design is 70% working with text” and he couldn’t be more right about it. If you want to make your design look slick and flawless, my advice is to master the art of type by learning as much as you can about fonts, how are they built, how to pair them and most importantly — how to modify them.
In this book the authors begin with the origins of the alphabet, by defining the terms and measurements that will later on, form the foundation of the reader’s typographic vocabulary. They also discuss about the Five Classic Typefaces that represent a distinct stage in the evolution of type design, Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Century Expanded and Helvetica.
In the end they summarize everything by providing a long list of typographic terms that every designer should be aware of, terms such as: Ascender — The part of the lowercase letter that rises above the body, as in b, d, f, h, k, l and t.
I strongly recommend getting a copy of this book, even if it’s a used one, I can almost assure you it will be an eye opener and you will most probably find something useful there.