When the FontFeed featured a brief review of “Typography for Lawyers” a couple of days ago I finally felt encouraged enough to ask about something that puzzled me ever since I first saw the book. Matthew Butterick’s desk reference is commendable when it comes to mission, structure, content and style of writing. However, as a book designer (as well as a teacher), I have ambivalent feelings about the vast choice of typefaces applied throughout the volume. Butterick uses no fewer than eight type families, namely:

Lyon Text roman, italic, bold and small caps for body copy and subheads

Text roman, italic, bold and small caps for body copy and subheads Arno Display for chapter headings

Display for chapter headings Quadraat Sans on the cover and inside for tips, tables and info-boxes

on the cover and inside for tips, tables and info-boxes Cheltenham for subchapter headings

for subchapter headings Verlag Book and Black for cross headings, captions and marginalia

Book and Black for cross headings, captions and marginalia Alix for monospaced text

for monospaced text Amira Bold caps for captions to examples

Bold caps for captions to examples Whitney Index White Round for enumeration

Index White Round for enumeration plus more typefaces in samples which I will not list here

And again different typefaces on the website (via @font-face):

Concourse for headings (a new sans-serif by Butterick in progress)

for headings (a new sans-serif by Butterick in progress) Charter for Text

While all of the above are excellent typefaces, each of them suitable for a whole publication like this, I see no real need to combine them all in one book. Why not pick just two or three of them and make use of their full range of variants, styles and weights?

I tried to list the typefaces in order of appearance which usually resembles the hierarchy roughly but couldn’t clearly make it out. At some point a too diverse typography can also lead to confusion rather than guidance. What kind of text am I reading? What belongs together? Differentiation of various types of texts and structures is necessary but shouldn’t feel arbitrary.

So I asked the author and designer of the book, and got a wonderful report about dauntless eclecticism, orchestrating typefaces, and what happens when you work on a project over a long period of time (which I should know all too well). Now I feel like an academic party pooper. Matthew writes: