The Anatomy of Type
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The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces
AKA The Geometry of Type: The Anatomy of 100 Essential TypefacesStudents and professionals in any creative field can benefit from a good typographic eye. The Anatomy of Type (published in the UK as The Geometry of Type) is all about looking more closely at letters. Through visual diagrams and practical descriptions, you’ll learn how to distinguish between related typefaces and see how the attributes of letterforms (such as contrast, detail, and proportion) affect the mood, readability, and use of each typeface. Nutritional value aside, the spreads full of big type make tasty eye candy, too.
The typefaces featured in the book are hand-picked by the author for their functionality and stylistic relevance in today’s design landscape. Along with several familiar faces (such as Garamond, Bodoni, Gill Sans, and Helvetica), you’ll also discover contemporary fonts that are less common — and often more useful — than the overused classics.
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“It is a down-to-earth but playful and helpful tool for users in search of a distinctive typographic tone. A cautiously plotted but worthwhile attempt to shake type classifications to the core.” -
“There are many things I like about Stephen Coles’ recent book; the bright, clean design and the accessible structure allowing you to dip in and out; but most of all, it’s the lack of fluff or filler. … In highlighting and comparing the features that give each typeface its character, anyone exploring this subject can begin to make informed choices between similar typeface options.” -
“Stephen’s book couldn’t have come at a better time. It presents just what those new to designing with type need to know. This is a book that could, and probably should, become a staple for a generation of typographic designers” -
“The Anatomy of Type provides a glorious opportunity to taxonimize another everyday visual encounter. As your knowledge accumulates, and your vocabulary grows, you, too, will begin to appraise these fonts with a critical eye. You will gaze at them alongside Coles, nodding at his insights.” -
“Coles does a wonderful job of initiating the layman to the field of modern typography.” -
“The Anatomy of Type is a surprisingly accessible book that will appeal to anyone with even a passing interest in typography. This is an easy-to-use guide that rewards both light browsing and intensive study.” -
“It’s a very good book … packed with wonderful typographic insights. I think it will be around in designers bookshelves for a long time to come.” — Jim Parkinson, type designer and creator of countless publication logos, such as Rolling Stone -
Today, Thames & Hudson releases The Geometry of Type (the UK edition of the book published as The Anatomy of Type in the US). The covers and titles of these two editions are different, but the innards are the same. So don’t buy both. Unless you are a completist — in which case: collect them all!
For the Geometry jacket, designer Tony Seddon employed the curvaceous Pompadour by Andy Mangold. The typeface isn’t featured in the book (this prototype cover design was selected by T&H early in the project’s life) but it certainly makes a striking facade. Underneath the jacket, the printed laminated cover is neatly wallpapered with the names of typefaces featured inside. For a complete list of those faces, stay tuned.
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Further Reading: FontShop Typographer’s Glossary Back when I was with the creative team at FontShop, we built a little glossary to help customers become smarter font shoppers. That section of their site has grown into one of the most exhaustive sources of typography terms online, complete with handy illustrations and cross-references. We opened that page with a compact illustration of basic type anatomy (above). It’s pretty good — and set in one of my favorite typefaces, FF Clifford — but the set of diagrams in The Anatomy of Type is more clear and comprehensive.
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A spread from the introductory section of The Anatomy of Type
This image was generated from one of the book’s final PDFs, but we made one more edit before we sent the book to press. Can you spot the missing label?
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Further Reading: TypeCooker Parameters TypeCooker is a drawing exercise for students at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, one of the few schools that offer a Masters degree in typeface design. But you don’t have to be a letter maker to benefit from the site. Its handy list of parameters — illustrated in instructor Erik van Blokland’s signature no-nonsense style — offers a simple but comprehensive summary of the visual traits found in typefaces. These are the core attributes that define letter styles. Once you know these you are much better equipped for selecting and pairing typefaces, not to mention discussing them intelligently with colleagues.
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Further Reading: “Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility” This book by Sofie Beier has an unfortunate title. Some readers pick it up assuming it is a comprehensive treatise on what makes letters legible. Others are looking for a manual on how to design typefaces. There are bits of this and that, but it is really neither of these things. But it is a pretty good overview of the decisions a typeface designer can make and how those decisions affect the type’s performance in different settings. It gathers a lot of resources that I haven’t seen in print before — certainly not in a single volume. It’s as useful to typographers as it is to type designers and it will help any font user be more informed about how they select and set type.
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Further Reading: “Type classifications are useful, but the common ones are not” The challenge with any published collection of typefaces, be it the website of a font retailer or a book like The Anatomy of Type, is that someone has to decide how to sort the stuff. It’s a task that is thankless and sisyphean. In fact, the Classification section in Anatomy begins with a disclaimer about how type classification systems are inherently problematic. Typefaces are not birds or plants, after all. They have no scientific genetic data from which we can derive an absolute typology.
The post above, by educator and typographer Indra Kupferschmid, goes into deeper detail about which categorization methodologies don’t make much sense and those that do. Indra and I agree that many of the traditional terms and models can be ambiguous, outdated, and even misleading. So, the way the book is organized incorporates some of Indra’s ideas. Still, we don’t agree entirely. No one would. Which brings us back to the simple truth: type classification can never be perfect, only helpful.
