As I’ve noted on my personal blog, the newest entry to the excellent book series A Book Apart is Tim Brown’s Flexible typesetting, which is about exactly what it says it is. It’s a clear indication of how much progress has been made that such a book could be published now, and that it could include so much up-to-date and useful information about doing truly responsive typographic design. Brown also notes all the areas where we haven’t gotten there yet. It is still very much a work in progress, but the playing field seems to change on an almost weekly basis. We can do a lot more now that we could when I reviewed one of the first of the Book Apart volumes, Ethan Marcotte’s Flexible, adaptive, responsive; can that really be seven years ago?

What Tim Brown is writing about is exactly what I’ve been talking about all along. We’re getting near the point where the design of ebooks and the design of websites overlap, and we can incorporate the best parts of both to work together and make reading better.

July 24, 2018