Typographical Treatment

Pleadings and motions usually aren't pretty. So civil litigator Matthew Butterick?a former typeface designer with a degree in art from Harvard?has created a website to walk attorneys through some of the visual elements of legal documents. The Los Angeles?based sole practitioner acknowledges that "good typography won't rescue bad legal writing," but it can, he argues, help an attorney appear more professional and persuasive. His Typography for Lawyers site tackles such topics as curly quotes, kerning, and hyphens v. dashes. With the examples below, he makes a point about attorney letterhead design. (Nice work, Anastasia.)

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