An enthusiasm by Richard Rutter

Hello. I’m Richard, a designer, author and speaker living by the sea in Brighton, UK. I’m co-founder of Clearleft, a digital design consultancy.

I love all things to do with human-centred design, typography, music and cycling. I occasionally write about them here.

Latest Posts

  • Retrofitting fluid typography

    As part of my forthcoming Patterns Day talk I decided to rebuild the newly redesigned Creative Boom article page using Utopian fluid typography to replace its multitude of breakpoints. This is the story of why and how.

  • Responsive typography and its role in design systems

    Later this year I’ll be talking at Patterns Day. Jeremy asked me to weave responsive typography into his narrative of the day. How do I explain something as all-encompassing as typography within something so potentially granular as a design system?

  • Pagination widows, or, Why I’m embarrassed about my ebook

    The handling of widowed headings across pages in Apple Books is of particular concern. Since 1997, CSS has had properties to handle this, and yet browsers including Safari and Firefox still don’t support them – why not?

  • Preventing too-short final lines of text blocks

    At the end my previous post, I said I’d settle for direct control over widows and orphans in text blocks. It turns out not to be quite as a simple as one might think, with lots of discussion over the years. I created an experiment to test a solution.

  • An end to typographic widows on the web

    Currently shipping in Chrome Canary, and thus soon to be in Blink-based browsers including Edge, is a relatively new CSS declaration which promises to virtually end typographic widows.