Learn and improve your type skills with these fantastic freebies.
Typography is one of the most important skills you can develop as a designer. And however long your career lasts, you never really stop learning.
The good news is that there’s a lot of free help and resources out there. So in this post, we gather together the best typography-related ebooks, tools, cheatsheets and games to aid you in your continuing typographical journey. We've separated each category into its own page to help you navigate your way through this whopping roundup.
First up on this page: ebooks. There’s nothing like a good book to really get you diving deep into a subject. And with so many free ebooks around, you don’t need to spend a lot of money to improve your knowledge and skillset. Here are five of our favourites.
If you want to learn the fundamentals of typographical classifications, then this 27-page ebook is a good start. Created by Just Creative – the design studio and graphic design blog of Jacob Cass – it’s a reference guide to 10 broad classifications, namely Humanist, Garalde, Didone, Transitional, Lineal, Mechanistic, Blackletter, Decorative, Script and Manual.
The Vignelli Canon sets out Massimo Vignelli’s guidelines for using typography
Massimo Vignelli (1931-2014) was one of the 20th century’s most famous graphic designers. In this classic book, which Vignelli made available in free PDF form in 2009, he sets out his guidelines for using typography in graphic design.
Anyone who needs to get their head around using typography on the web should make a beeline for this 2016 book by professional web designer Donny Truong, director of design and web services at Antonin Scalia Law School. It sets out an overview of how type works online, and outlines the author’s process for selecting fonts and typesetting on the web.
Written by Darlo Calonaci and published by Packt, Practical Responsive Typography outlines the fundamentals of web typography and explains how to make it work with responsive web design. Including code examples so you can put what you learn into practice, this is a must-read for web designers. Earlier this year, Packt teamed up with us to offer the ebook version to Creative Bloq readers as a free download: you’ll find full details here.
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Fonts.com is behind this comprehensive workbook of fonts
Many font foundries and font retailers have written their own ebooks to help users get to grips with typography. And one of our favourites is Fontology, from Fonts.com. Structured as a workbook, it covers topics including type history, type families, type anatomy, text typography, web typography, display typography, type choices, numbers, signs and symbols. It's a great self-learning tool for beginners and a handy reference and refresher for professionals.
Next page: Free typography tools
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Tom May is an award-winning journalist and editor specialising in design, photography and technology. Author of the Amazon #1 bestseller Great TED Talks: Creativity, published by Pavilion Books, Tom was previously editor of Professional Photography magazine, associate editor at Creative Bloq, and deputy editor at net magazine. Today, he is a regular contributor to Creative Bloq and its sister sites Digital Camera World, T3.com and Tech Radar. He also writes for Creative Boom and works on content marketing projects.
