I’m reading Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, and with each section—Why does typography matter?, hyphens and dashes, letterspacing—I think, ahhh, so that’s why I love the way The New Yorker looks. They are attentive to every tiny detail of publishing. The finished product is gorgeous as a result.

Our son gave me a subscription to The New Yorker for Christmas. While I waited for the first issue to arrive, I downloaded the app. I opened it and blurted, “It’s so beautiful!” I love the shapes of the letters, the clean layout, the negative space, the humor of having to scroll to get to The Lede section. But mostly I love the shapes of the letters.

Every week when my physical issue arrives, I get a jolt of pleasure to see the iconic New Yorker font on the cover, with its crisp, tall characters and jaunty flips on the toes of the Rs and the K. I love the curls in the 2s in the date, and the ampersand looks like it should be holding a martini or smoking a cigar.

When I read the pages, I appreciate the clean columns, the perfection of the punctuation, the addition of white space to break up large blocks of text, and precise layouts that end every article or short story at the bottom right of a page, finished off with a small black diamond. Each piece is self-contained and immersive, without interruption or “continued on page 28.” The writing in the New Yorker is thoughtful and in-depth, and they honor the quality of the writing with careful attention to what it looks like on the page.

Typography is the visual component of the written word.

Matthew Butterick, Practical Typography

I read a book last year, Get the Picture by Bianca Bosker, that had a point that still resonates with me: any piece of art is a series of deliberate decisions. As I learn more about typography, I realize now how intentional every single choice is in the New Yorker. As evidenced by the number of chapters in Butterick’s book, there are scores of typographical decisions to make when creating a publication. The New Yorker makes all the right ones for my personal taste—it delights me that they use ö in words like coördinate or coöperate—and it executes with perfection.

As a person who writes online but has zero experience with typography, other than to know what I like when I see it, I now have a much deeper appreciation for all the choices that go into making the software I’m using to write this blog. As I read Practical Typography, I’m learning a million new things—including how to make a proper em-dash, which I’ve now done three times in this post because I’m so excited by my new skill—and I was also overwhelmed by the rules and possibilities for line, word, and letter spacing, font choices, line length. My blogging theme (Livro, by Automattic) does all that for me, and for that, I am grateful. All my respect and appreciation to the designers who bring beauty to online publishing through choices I didn’t even realize were choices to make.