People like Paul Renner, who design and draw typefaces, have always known about the intri­cacies of human perception and how to work in service of it. To illustrate all of this, let’s look at Renner’s 1927 typeface Futura. Futura is what is known as a geometric sans-serif – a type­face that looks as if it was drawn with a ruler and com­pass. It is made out of straight lines, sharp corners, and seemingly perfect cir­cles and semi-circles.

You might think it far-fetched to draw a con­nec­tion between ty­pog­ra­phy and architecture, but the two fields are actually more similar than you might have expected. The typesetter or ty­pog­ra­pher has to plan a layout and a structure in which ele­ments like paragraphs, pictures, and head­ings fall into place. Similar to the dif­fer­ent parts of a building, these elements depend on one another to work both aesthetically and tech­ni­cal­ly. And just as a building’s foundation defines the constraints for what can be built above it, the choice of typeface – and how it is used at its small­est size – usually defines the layout grid, and thus how the rest of a book will be typeset.