Thinking with Type (3rd Edition, Revised and Expanded)

A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students

by Ellen Lupton

“Thinking with Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is to physics.”—I Love Typography

The best-selling Thinking with Type in a revised and expanded second edition: Thinking with Type is the definitive guide to using typography in visual communication. Ellen Lupton provides clear and focused guidance on how letters, words, and paragraphs should be aligned, spaced, ordered, and shaped. The book covers all typography essentials, from typefaces and type families, to kerning and tracking, to using a grid. Visual examples show how to be inventive within systems of typographic form, including what the rules are, and how to break them.

This revised edition includes forty-eight pages of new content with the latest information on:

• style sheets for print and the web
• the use of ornaments and captions
• lining and non-lining numerals
• the use of small caps and enlarged capitals
• mixing typefaces
• font formats and font licensing

Plus, new eye-opening demonstrations of basic typography design with letters, helpful exercises, and dozens of additional illustrations.

Thinking with Type is the typography book for everyone: designers, writers, editors, students, and anyone else who works with words. If you love font and lettering books, Ellen Lupton’s guide reveals the way typefaces are constructed and how to use them most effectively.

Fans of Thinking with Type will love Ellen Lupton’s new book Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers.

Paperback | 224 pages | Princeton Architectural Press | 2024

Ellen Lupton is a designer, writer, and educator. Her books include Design Is Storytelling, Graphic Design Thinking, Health Design Thinking, and Extra Bold: A Feminist, Inclusive, Anti-Racist, Nonbinary Field Guide for Graphic Designers. The third edition of her bestselling book Thinking with Type launches in March, 2024. She teaches in the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore (MICA), where she proudly serves as the Betty Cooke and William O. Steinmetz Design Chair. She is Curator Emerita at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City, where her exhibitions included Herbert Bayer: Bauhaus Master and The Senses: Design Beyond Vision.