Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. The choice of a single letterform — its serif, its weight, the negative space inside its counters — sets the temperature of an entire page. Designers spend their careers learning to hear that temperature on first read, before a single word has been parsed.

Sometimes the smallest decision in a layout — the size of a drop-cap, the leading between lines, the texture of a paper stock — is the one a reader remembers years later, long after the article itself has faded from memory.