Empathy is the ability to share the feelings of others. It’s what makes us good at creating products for other people as we can better understand their problems and create solutions that fit their needs. It’s always easier to create products for people who have the same needs as us, since we understand our own requirements—and the reasons behind them—better than anybody else. Many successful products are created when people “scratch their own itch.”
The problem with creating products to suit only our needs is that, in the tech industry, we are largely people of similar ages, abilities, backgrounds, and educational and financial statuses. We end up creating products for people just like us, forgetting that other people may have requirements that differ from, or even conflict with, our own. To create more useful, usable products, we need to understand and care about differing needs.
There is a tendency to think that to delight someone with design is to make them happy. Indeed, the work may do that, but more appropriately, the objective is to produce a memorable experience because of its superior fit. The times that design delights us are memorable because we sense the empathy of the work’s creator.
We feel understood, almost as if by using the work, we are stepping into a space designed precisely for us.
Since early in the 20th century, researchers have documented that individuals respond differently to text format. More recent research has shown that small changes to text format can improve individual reading outcomes. Adults can improve their reading speed by as much as ten pages per hour by changing the font alone. For children, Readability Matters has seen an instantaneous change to reading fluency, the speed of accurate reading, of up to 50% or more. (Advancing the Reading Ecosystem) Personalized reading formats are not just a solution for struggling readers. While a small number of readers did not benefit from a change to the alternative formats offered, both of these studies demonstrate results for individuals of all reading ability levels. In a proof of concept conducted with Adobe, improvements occurred for students reading at the 23rd and 99th percentile of their peers. Strong readers and struggling readers, adults and children, all have the potential to experience improved reading outcomes using a technology-enabled model of reading with personalized text formats.
Hey, I started a podcast. 10m long, super casual, may not keep it up. But close friends said kind things, so I’m gonna publish and see what happens. RSS, Spotify, Apple, Overcast.
Possibly the most basic and necessary feature of any living process is the fact that it goes gradually. The living structure emerges, slowly, step by step, and as the process goes forward step by step there is continuous feedback which allows the process to guide the system towards greater wholeness, and coherence, and adaptation. This is obvious, of course. To a biologist or ecologist it is self-evident.
Yet in architecture it is far from self-evident. Neither the process of design, nor the process of construction in modern conventional processes work like this. Instead there is a conception of a desired end-state (the design), and the system of architectural and constructional processes is geared up to producing this desired end-state, efficiently, and at all costs as it was initially defined — almost entirely without realistic feedback and improvement and adaptation while the processes are going on.
Originally published in 2018, Flexible Typesetting has sold thousands of copies and given a new generation of designers fresh mental models to craft meaningful, multidimensional typography. It is required reading in elite design programs and has encouraged the rethinking of core curricula.
Few things in my career have been as rewarding as writing and sharing this book. I’m so excited to give it to you for free. Download the PDF.
I hope you’ll recognize the significance of this moment we share together in the living story of graphic design.
Many people think of the web as just another medium, like print or film, and glamorize each new platform or device as the next big thing when, in reality, these are mere happenings in a vast new layer of our world — a plane where human beings should enjoy greater power, individuality, and dignity.
Flexible Typesetting is my attempt to guide you in the practice of design on this new plane. From Chapter 1’s philosophical framing, to Chapter 2’s prioritization of text and reader, to the multidimensional considerations in later chapters about picking fonts, shaping text, and managing compositions, this book blends vital typographic tactics with rhetorical questions that challenge the reader to reason deeply about beauty.
Although I’m proud of having written this book, and although it continues to help me drive product work at Adobe toward accessible, readable, respectful outcomes, my goal has always been to find you and inspire you to contribute to our shared story.
It’s the first how-to book on contemporary typography that keeps its promise.
My sincerest thanks to A Book Apart for starting and growing one of the finest brands in design education, and for inviting me to take part in the journey. Many thanks.
To my fellow ABA authors: It has been my great privilege to be in your company, it’s an honor to have first published my book in a collection alongside your fine works, and I look forward to supporting your inevitably awesome future efforts. Solidarity!
It saddens me that ABA has closed its doors, but all things end. This was a special experience that I will always appreciate. Later, I may reformat Flexible Typesetting as a web reading experience. For updates, get your copy of the book.
🪕 May 25th. It’s a warm, lazy Saturday and I’m sipping 1Q84 which I don’t love, but which like other Murakami novels puts me in a mood to appreciate music — that, I do love.
Then I happened to check my friend Donny’s blog and learn about Remembrance. Thanks to the magic of my favorite streaming service and some nice little speakers, lively, soulful banjo and piano now float through my living room with the gentle breeze of the ceiling fan and our dogs sound asleep.
🌷 May 3rd. Bright and breezy. Bears and bees have woken up, with warm sun over the past few days. Sparrows, woodpeckers making their morning noise. New growth abounds.
As I mentioned in a recent interview, inventing typographic intelligence technologies is what I do at work. So I thought I’d elaborate: Imagine spell check for design, with advice about choosing fonts, setting line spacing, rearranging text, and more. I’m guiding a small team as we decide what to check for, how to make changes, and how manual/automatic the controls should be.
The hard part is, well, all of it. Design decisions are interrelated, and there are no correct answers (despite what snobs may say). Landing an acceptable user experience is tough. And the deafening roar of “AI” makes it challenging to focus.
But although it’s difficult, creating smart typography tools is worth doing because human beings need to take better care of one another. Better tools can help designers scale their empathy and show the business value of being more considerate.
Good typography means many different things to many different people. While there is no “correct”, there are contexts, conventions, and cultures. By designing from many different flexible, multiscriptual, accessible points of view simultaneously, we can craft compositions that respectfully respond to fit individual readers. Practically speaking, this is unreasonably complicated. But with assistance it becomes possible.
If a computer is a bicycle for our minds, then typography is a bicycle for our words, helping them to reach further and have a greater impact. Smart typography tools will let us go up a few gears, providing sensitive, high-level controls to manage low-level details. The algorithms that power these controls can be fine-tuned by experienced users, and can provide targeted domain-learning materials to help everyone stay sharp.
Typography is way too hard these days. While doing a good job should require some effort and investment, it often feels like we waste our energy and money poking through nests of angry features, trying out fluffy apps that claim to save us time, or setting up (and maintaining) elaborate systems that aren’t much fun. There must be a better way to apply our skills and knowledge.
Flexible, digital creations could match and, over time, even transcend the design quality of history’s finest printed works if we exercise care, honor diversity, and elevate the baseline functions of our design tools. Typography can show us the way.
The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive. — Watterson
You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. — Jobs
To do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. — Graham
Stories forthcoming.
About
Hello, I’m Tim Brown. I’m a designer and toolmaker with 15 years of product leadership experience.
My special interest is typography, a fancy word that means using fonts. I’m Head of Typography at Adobe, where I work on design tools and help people stay sharp.
I live and work in New York State’s Hudson Valley with my wife and college sweetheart Eileen, our three daughters, and our dogs.
Please feel welcome to email and connect on social.
Featured
Flexible Typesetting is a book about how to make websites and apps look great at different screen sizes.
Flexible Typesetting
Practicing Typography Basics