As of June 4, 2009, the material on this website is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States license.
That means you can copy and distribute the material or adapt it for your own purposes, with the following conditions:
- Attribution = you have to attribute the material by mentioning my name, the name of the website, and the URL;
- Noncommercial = you can’t use the material for commercial purposes;
- Share Alike = if your work is adapted or derived from this material, you can only distribute that work under a similar license.
I hold the copyright in the material on this website. I’ll consider other uses (for instance, commercial uses) on request. However, this license doesn’t limit fair use under U.S. copyright law.
I use WordPress to publish the website. I use a heavily modified version of the veryplaintxt theme. For Windows visitors, the text font is Cambria, the headlines are Rockwell, and the menu is Calibri. For Mac visitors, I’m now testing out TypeKit: the text font is Athelas, and the headlines are FF Tisa. The rest is good old Helvetica Neue and Optima.
I love this website! Am I a nerd?
A nerd with exceptional taste.
I am a professional typographer/graphic designer and have never seen a more useful client site than this one. I have many attorney clients and will be recommending this site to them whenever diplomatically feasible.
One suggestion and one request…
Suggestion:
Mention that Alt commands (Windows) won’t work unless the Num lock key (or its equivalent) is active. While it is the default state, a perplexed user might have turned this function off.
Request:
Combine all of the helpful keystrokes and keyboard hints into two charts, one for Windows and one for Mac. Place the charts in an appendix for easy reference and a great printable desk reference.
Thanks for providing this outstanding website. If you could only make it more generic (not geared to the legal profession) I might actually get my other professional clients (doctors, accountants, executives, etc.) to apply the same excellent typographic advice to their documents.
With much appreciation,
C. E. Geiger
Once additional suggestion…
Desktop shortcut?
Add an easy way to place a shortcut to this site (with your logo as the icon) on our desktops. I know how to do this (sans your logo) but I would guess that most visitors will not have a clue. (Adding the URL as a “favorite” is often useless unless you happen to remember the name of the site. Not to mention that out of site [no pun intended] is out of mind.)
Thanks again,
C. E. Geiger
I really want to thank you for taking the time (and spending the money) to create this site. As a new addition to the legal profession with a little amount of design sense, I’ve been having a hard time with my supervising attorneys and their hideous writing choices. This site hopefully will provide some of my suggestions with credibility (or at least stop my boss from using center-justified comic sans for memos!).
Dave
Thank you, but see above comment about “recommending this site … whenever diplomatically feasible”.
This site is the singularly most helpful resource I have ever come across for typographical advice with regards to professional (i.e. not designer/typographer-centric) work. I will certainly recommend it to my colleagues!
Hopefully that will get them to change their tradition of hosting content on our intranet in the standard “Barial” size 13 font… (sorry no ellipsis)
I am glad that fontshop directed me to this useful site; I often find myself proclaiming the quotes gospel to young and bewildered professional designers that think me unhinged just because they grew up with Times New Roman… now I will perhaps direct them here and tell them that if even lawyers can tell monospace from proportional, more so they.
On 8/17/2009 E.W. wrote “I love this website! Am I a nerd?” (using his one exclamation point for a three-page document). If E.W. is a nerd for loving this website, then so am I. I found it on TechnoLawyer this morning and started reading straight through. Before I got half way through, I was so excited that I called Scott Moise, writer of “the Scrivener” column for the South Carolina Bar, to share my joy. She was also excited. After writing this, I had to go back and remove the extra space between sentences, contrary to what Miss Culp taught in my typing class in 1957.
This is a great resource with wisdom that extends beyong typography. Professinalism, appearance, and even dress are addressed. Thanks for a geat work.
Would you consider educating us as to other aspects of typography for lawyers?
My business cards, foisted upon me by the government agency for which I work, are embarrassingly unattractive and difficult to read. Our office letterhead is not much better, but it fortunately doesn’t include 4 different typefaces in addition to that found in the agency’s seal.
Even if you choose to not expand its scope, this site will remain high on my list of favorites. Warmest thanks!
Email me a scan of the offending item and I will use it as a case study …
This isn’t just for lawyers. This should be mandatory reading for all working professionals. Thank you.
An earlier comment suggested adding a chart of diacritical marks for Mac and PC. I’m not sure if this is all of them, but it’s certainly a lot:
http://www.power-glide.com/newsletter/e-correo/archive/volume02_issue17/howtotype.html
Great site, thanks!
I concur with all the kudos extended for this site. I am not a lawyer or working with/for lawyers. I teach at a university and am working on a text. I am doing the graphic design for the book, learning Indesign. The book is small 81/2 by 51/2, almost all text, with a lot of sections of italics. The text needs to be very readable for older adults. A professional recommended Constantia but it does not kern well for the size of page (relatively narrower column) and size of the font needed (11 in Constantia, 12 in TNR). The next person I asked recommended TNR instead as being one of the more readable. I do want every aspect of the book to reflect excellence to the extent I can do that. You do not seem complimentary toward TNR in that regard. Do you think Mercury will kern as well as TNR, would it be worth paying for to increase the appearance of the book? My concern is that I could buy it and then find out it will not do as good a job as TNR.