A couple of months ago, Matt Mullenweg asked the team to read Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography. We build publishing tools at Automattic, so paying closer attention to how we communicate made sense. I’d never heard of the book, and my first reaction was that typography is a niche skill — for graphic designers and publishers, not for me.
But I was wrong…
A few weeks with Butterick changed how I see words on a page. I can’t open a Google doc or a slide deck anymore without spotting what’s off — which, by the way, annoys a lot of people. But like any matter of taste, it annoys some and wins over others.
Not just a matter of taste
Most of us treat typography the way we treat wine. The people who care are professionals, snobs, or both. The rest of us pick something that looks fine and move on — nothing to learn, we tell ourselves, because there’s no truth, only opinion. But it’s more complex than that.
In a YouTube rabbit hole, I once found the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who had a theory about why some people appreciate art and others don’t. Appreciating form for its own sake — looking past what something is for to see how it’s made — requires breaking free from material necessity. People who have to focus on usefulness develop what he called the popular aesthetic. They judge a photograph by whether the subject is meaningful, a meal by whether it fills you up, a document by whether the information got through. You can only appreciate composition, proportion, and structure once you no longer have to fight for the meaning.
That’s why most people can’t see typography as an art form. A document is something they read through, not something they notice. And the eye that notices the difference is the one that’s been freed up to notice anything.
Most of what passes for taste is really a measurable difference, once that eye opens. Line length affects reading speed. Body text below a certain size strains the eye. The default Word document — Times New Roman 11, double spaces after periods, one-inch margins, no leading — isn’t neutral. It’s bad, and it’s been bad for decades. We just never had the spare attention to notice.
Butterick doesn’t change your aesthetic overnight. It changes your eye. You start to catch the difference between curly and straight quotes the way a musician hears a flat note. You notice when a heading sits too close to the paragraph beneath it to breathe. You wonder why every Ukrainian publication uses « » while English wants “ ”, and which to follow when you’re writing in two languages at once.
That’s what the book is about. Learning to see what was always there.
Writing in two languages
Coming to English from Ukrainian, I’d absorbed two sets of rules that rarely agree. Ukrainian uses long em dashes, often without spaces, where English wants a comma. It uses « » for primary quotes and „ “ for nested ones. English titles capitalize most words. Ukrainian capitalizes only the first word and proper nouns. Sentence spacing. Ellipsis style. Hyphen versus en dash versus em dash.
Every rule has two right answers, depending on which language you’re standing in.
For years, I didn’t know it mattered. I’d notice minor inconsistencies at best.
Not anymore.
I know what a Chicago-style em dash looks like now, and when to use an en dash for ranges. Ukrainian doesn’t really do the Oxford comma, so I add it back when I switch. None of this is creative work, but all of it is what a reader senses even when they can’t name it.
Once you train the eye, you can’t go back. You can’t unsee a bad ligature once you’ve seen a good one. And it matters, because readers are always looking for a reason to stop.
Why readers quit reading now
Why does this matter in 2026? Because the reader’s default has changed.
Five years ago, someone landing on a post or a memo read the first paragraph in good faith. Today they’re looking for a reason to stop. AI content has flooded every channel we have, and the rational response to a screen full of plausible nothing is to assume nothing until proven otherwise.
This sets a new context for typography. It’s not decoration anymore. It’s one of the first signals of whether something was written by someone who cared.
Curly quotes mean someone touched this. Consistent sentence spacing across thousands of words means a human was here long enough to make a choice, even if they used AI to edit. A clear hierarchy means the writer decided what mattered and what didn’t.
None of that guarantees the substance is good. But the absence of these signals tells you almost everything you need to know. Because the way you do one thing is how you do everything.
Scaffolding, with the right building
Don’t get me wrong. Typography is no substitute for having something to say. The most beautifully set page of nonsense is still nonsense — Butterick says as much himself. The rules exist to remove friction between the reader and the idea, not to replace it.
I’ve watched designers obsess over kerning while their argument fell apart in paragraph two. I’ve seen decks where every typographic choice was right and every business claim was wrong. There’s a kind of bullshit that hides behind beautiful formatting.
The rules matter. But they’re scaffolding. What sits on top has to have real substance. And once you know them well enough that they feel obvious, the next move is sometimes to break them.
Engaging writing = novelty (substance) x resonance (analogies, metaphors,
Julian Shapiro
and examples).
Learn the rules first
In late 1917, the Ukrainian People’s Republic was a few months old and had no agreed coat of arms. The historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky had floated the idea of resurrecting Volodymyr the Great’s medieval tryzub, but the proposal remained unresolved in committee.
Meanwhile, Heorhii Narbut was racing to ship the country’s first banknotes. He had to decide what went in the center. He picked the trident — not as a state mandate (there was none yet), but as a design choice. He drew it in baroque ornament, set it in the geometric heart of the 100-karbovanets note, and surrounded it with Cossack-era visual vocabulary that made it feel inevitable. Like it had always been there.
The notes went into circulation on January 5, 1918. Five weeks later, the Little Rada adopted the trident as our newborn country’s coat of arms.
It rarely happens, but a typographic decision pushed the political one. The same symbol Narbut had quietly placed at the center of a banknote is now on the cap badge of every Ukrainian soldier in the trenches.
Narbut wasn’t a habitual rule-breaker. He’d trained in imperial St. Petersburg, but when he came back to Kyiv in 1917 to help define what Ukrainian visual identity would look like, he used the rules to do it. He just bent them in service of something that didn’t exist yet.
The same goes for Kazimir Malevich, who painted Black Square in 1915 — often described as the moment representational painting in this part of the world cracked open. But he didn’t start with a black square either. He went from academic figure work to impressionism to cubism to his own reduction. The square was the pinnacle of a long argument with everything he already knew how to do.
The Executed Renaissance — the Ukrainian writers and artists murdered in the 1930s — weren’t rule-breakers in the way we usually mean. They were rule-masters. They chose to write in Ukrainian when Russian was the imperial language. They experimented with form as socialist realism was being installed as the only acceptable mode. They paid with their lives. The work they left is still the high-water mark of Ukrainian modernism a century later.
When to break the rules
Apply this to typography, and you get a useful test. Are you breaking the rules because you don’t know them, or because they’re getting in the way of communicating your idea?
If it’s the first, no excuse, sorry. Curly quotes, proper dashes, real ligatures, line lengths between 45 and 90 characters. Pick a good body face. Stop using Times New Roman. Simple rules — 80% of the result for 20% of the effort.
If it’s the second, trust yourself. Set the headline in a face that’s technically too heavy if it makes the argument punch harder. Break the grid if it’s muffling the point. Use an em dash where convention says you shouldn’t, if the rhythm needs it. The rules were always there to serve the reader. If breaking them serves the reader better, break them.
But this freedom is only available to people who could have followed the rules. Otherwise, it’s just rebellious ignorance.
A note from where I grew up
I grew up in a country where, until recently, almost every book on the shelf had been laid out under one approved set of rules. The typography wasn’t bad, exactly. It was unanimous. Every book felt like every other book — a quiet sameness I didn’t register as a child, because I had nothing to compare it to.
The first time I saw a Western paperback up close, what struck me was how playful the pages felt. Different leading, different paragraph indents. A typographic personality with room to be wrong — which meant room to be right, too. I didn’t have words for it then. But I do now.
That’s what made Butterick land for me. I don’t see typography as a subjective field pretending to be objective anymore. It’s a discipline with real rules, real history, and real consequences for the reader. And like any discipline, it rewards the people who learn it well enough to know when to ignore it.
So train the eye first. Then let yourself off the leash, but only on purpose and
with style.