Thinking with Type

Lupton's classic is the friendliest serious introduction to typography ever written. It walks through letters, words, paragraphs, and pages — alignment, hierarchy, scale, and grids — with hundreds of visual examples and a running wit that makes the technical material genuinely fun.

Read it early and read it again later. The first pass teaches you the vocabulary; the second teaches you judgment. Nearly every design program in the world puts it on the first-semester reading list.