Ten Tips for Typography

Whether writing a letter or composing a blog post, the following tips will make your prose look more professional:

1. One space after periods. Always.
2. Don't use ALL CAPS or small caps.
3. In a single document, use three or fewer fonts, including significant variations.
4. Keep line lengths short−60 to 72 characters per line.
5. Use “smart quotes” and em dashes. Avoid hyphens and primes except when required. In HTML, use proper entity codes.
6. Set leading, the vertical spacing between lines, to a multiplier of 1.2.
7. Use readable fonts. Ban Comic Sans.
8. Use hyphenation.
9. Left-align or full-justify your body paragraphs. Centered text is hard to read.
10. Replace underlines with italics, but use italics only when required by your style guide.