Pick a typeface you can defend
Work from the brief and the content rather than the mood board, and say out loud why this one and not that one.
What you'll learn
Six things you will be able to do afterwards
Not "understand" or "appreciate" — do, on Monday, in the file you already have open.
Build a scale that holds up
Set a modular scale in code, then know exactly where to break it when a real screen demands it.
Set long text properly
Measure, leading, hyphenation and the punctuation you have been getting wrong since school.
Make dense screens readable
Tables, labels, numerals and truncation — where typography stops being decoration and starts being load-bearing.
Meet accessibility properly
Contrast against strokes not boxes, spacing requirements, and reflow at 400% without a horizontal scrollbar.
Ship it and keep it
Subsetting, fallback stacks that do not shift the layout, and writing the type section of a design system.
Curriculum
7 modules, 34 lessons, 11h 26m
Tick lessons off as you go — it is remembered in this browser, with no account to make. The planner works out when you would finish.
01 Reading type before you set it
Before any of the craft, the part most courses skip: learning to actually see what a typeface is doing.
- 9 min
- 14 min
- 17 min
- 25 min
02 Choosing, and defending the choice
How to pick a typeface for a reason you can say out loud in a review.
- 11 min
- 13 min
- 16 min
- 12 min
- 30 min
03 Scale, rhythm and the vertical grid
The module people come back to. Building a type scale that survives contact with a real product.
- 15 min
- 12 min
- 18 min
- 22 min
- 35 min
- 14 min
04 Setting long-form text
Measure, hyphenation, widows, and the parts of CSS text layout nobody teaches.
- 13 min
- 16 min
- 11 min
- 19 min
- 40 min
05 Interface type at small sizes
Labels, tables, numerals and the dense screens where typography is load-bearing.
- 14 min
- 12 min
- 17 min
- 10 min
- 35 min
06 Accessibility as typography
Contrast, spacing and reflow — the accessibility work that is genuinely typographic.
- 15 min
- 13 min
- 14 min
- 18 min
- 30 min
07 Shipping and defending it
Getting the work into production and keeping it there after you move on.
- 21 min
- 16 min
- 19 min
- 90 min
Your progress
0 of 34 lessons
Left to watch
11h 26m
Who teaches it
Marit Halvorsen
Marit has spent eighteen years setting type on screens — six of them on a banking app used by nine million people, where a 13px label being wrong meant someone misread their balance.
She is not a type designer and says so early. This is a course about using type well, taught by someone who has had to defend every decision in it to an engineer, a lawyer and a brand team, often in the same week.
- Teaching since
- 2018
- Students
- 4,100
- Average rating
- 4.8 / 5 from 812 reviews
- Answers questions
- Herself, usually within two days
The line-height module rewrote how I brief engineers. I had been asking for the wrong thing for six years.
Nadia Osei
Design lead, healthcare
I came for the scale-building and stayed for the punctuation lesson, which I have now made three colleagues watch.
Wes Tremayne
Product designer
It never once told me a rule without telling me when to break it. That is the whole difference.
Priya Anand
Front-end engineer
Enrol
One price, everything in it
- All 34 lessons, 11h 26m of material
- Seven exercises with worked examples
- Written critique of your final project
- Lifetime access, including future revisions
- 30-day refund, one email, no conversation
£180 one payment
Or three payments of £62. Students and anyone between jobs pay £90 — just ask, no proof needed.
Frontend-only demo form — nothing is sent anywhere.
Questions
Asked often enough to answer here
Anything else, write to marit@syllabus.example — it goes to her, not a queue.
Do I need design training to take this?
No. It assumes you can already build or design an interface and that nobody ever taught you type. Engineers take it as often as designers do, and the code sections use plain CSS.
How long does it actually take?
Around eleven and a half hours of material, and most people finish in six to ten weeks. The planner above turns your available hours into a real date rather than making you guess.
Is there a deadline?
No. Access does not expire, the exercises have no due dates, and nothing is drip-fed. If you disappear for four months your ticks are still here.
Will I get feedback on the exercises?
On the final project, yes — a written critique within ten working days. The other exercises are self-directed with a worked example to compare against.
What if it isn't for me?
Full refund within 30 days, no form and no conversation about it. Email once and it is done.