When readers notice your typography, something usually went wrong. Good typesetting is invisible: it guides the eye without pushing to the foreground. The text flows, pages turn as if by themselves, and nobody thinks about font sizes — that’s exactly the goal.
Line spacing creates the calm
The most common cause of tiring reading is line spacing that’s too tight. Lines set too closely make the eye slip; too wide breaks the connection. The right spacing — usually 1.4 to 1.6 times the font size — creates the calm in which reading becomes effortless.
Typography is the art of directing attention without demanding it.
Line length decides fatigue
Too short — the eye jumps back too often
Too long — the next line gets lost
Ideal — about 60 to 75 characters per line
Margins aren’t wasted space but breathing room
Details that reveal professionals
It’s the small things that make a book feel professional: real quotation marks instead of straight ones, dashes of the correct length, no single words at the end of a paragraph, no heading alone at the foot of a page. Inconspicuous individually, they add up to an impression of care — or, when missing, of amateurism.
The best thing about good typography: today it can be captured in rules and enforced automatically. What used to need the trained eye of a typesetter becomes a consistent default — page after page, without slips. The craft remains, only the drudgery disappears.