Sure there are lots of things you can do to improve yourself as a typographer, like reading books and becoming a generally more observant person. And there’s no getting around that. You’ll eventually have to do it and it’ll take time. “But what can I learn right now?,” you ask.

I first presented these ideas in 2014 as a talk to students of art and design at Cal, just up the street from my last place in Berkeley, California. The talk was called Five things you can do to improve your typography now. I’ve done my best to recreate the demo portions here with screencasts. Let’s get started.

1. Take on serious work

By that I mean do work that matters — great work. That it represent a big brand or an important social cause isn’t necessary. Make your work matter by putting in the effort required of greatness. License and use current fonts, the ones you hoped you might get to work with someday. Create and commission original art to use in your designs. Collaborate on projects with designers you look up to. Explore materials and processes you haven’t worked with before, and design to process. Isolate specific areas in your skills that need sharpening and build exercises into your projects that give you those skills. It will cost you more to do more, so be resourceful and plan for those expenses, selling ideas to and billing clients where applicable. Especially to young designers to whom this kind of work sounds difficult: this advice is for you. These are the kinds of experiences that will turn you into a better designer, so start making your big plans a reality by doing something that gets you moving today.

2. Use a baseline grid

Baseline grids iron out lots of the little bobbles in text layouts and reinforce a consistent structure throughout the document you’re working on. How they work: first, the designer sets a standard horizontal line increment for the document (the baseline grid), and then sets each paragraph to align to it. This best serves the designer after she has done plenty of testing to determine the desired relationship between text size and line height of the smallest elements in the document, and between these and the body and larger typographic elements. Line heights should all be multiples of each other. Learn more about baseline grids

Using baseline grids on the web, or at least getting a similar result, is possible. It requires setting up your styles’ line heights and margins, etc. to enforce strict adherence to the desired grid increment.

3. Let styles cascade

This sounds like advice that applies mainly to web design, but the principle of not repeating oneself also has direct bearing on the way designers set up their paragraph and character styles. Arranging these properly helps keep your design flexible, so you can do things like change the typeface in one paragraph style, and all the rest of the styles in the document follow suit. I call this behavior cascading since I think print designers stand to learn a lot from good CSS.

In this example I’ll use Adobe InDesign, because it’s my preferred tool for setting lots of text in multi-page layouts. Begin by noting how applying styles works within text. You can apply a paragraph style by just clicking with the text tool anywhere in the middle of a paragraph, and then selecting the style from the Paragraph Styles panel. You don’t have to highlight anything. The style is applied between paragraph break characters (also known as hard returns).

To apply character styles, you have to select (or highlight) a character or range of characters first. That’s because character styles are designed to work as exceptions to the rule on a per-character basis. That’s a good question to consider overall when working with styles: What’s the rule, and what’s the exception?

Setting up your styles like this saves you a lot of time, additionally letting you explore lots of options more quickly.

4. Check proofs at scale

If you’re designing a print piece, get into the habit of regularly checking your work on paper at its intended size. This is an indispensable step as you work out the first important details of the design: typeface, type size, line spacing, column width, and any tracking values, if applicable. As you begin to get a sense for what the final dimensions should be, trim the page to match the final output so you can see how it will work at scale. If the end result is multiple pages, such as a book, test the dimensions you’ve proposed by making what’s known in the industry as a ‘paper dummy,’ a fully bound book block made with blank paper. This lets you flip through and get a sense for the dimensions and how well your page compositions work in their environment.