There’s a free book (though you should pay for it) online called Practical Typography by Matthew Butterick. It’s not long, it’s beautifully typeset (as you’d hope), and it makes a deceptively simple argument: typography isn’t decoration. It’s the way you show readers that you care about what you’re saying, and, by extension, that you care about them.
Butterick puts it simply: if you’re someone who writes and publishes, in any form, you’re already a typographer. The question is whether you’re a thoughtful one. Most of us aren’t. We default to whatever the software gives us, never considering that the spacing, the font, the margins are all silently communicating something to the person on the other end. They feel it, even if they can’t explain it.
That idea, that details are a form of respect, isn’t new. But it’s one of those truths that’s surprisingly easy to lose track of. This matters more than we realize. Just try unsubscribing from individual Nextdoor emails/notifications to see this lack of respect in action.
Steve Jobs famously dropped out of Reed College but kept auditing a calligraphy class taught by Robert Palladino, a former Trappist monk. Jobs later said that if he’d never taken that class, the Macintosh would never have had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows copied the Mac, arguably no personal computer would have. It’s a great origin story, and people love to tell it as a tale about following your curiosity. I think the deeper lesson is different.
Jobs didn’t just appreciate fonts aesthetically. He understood that the care you put into the parts of a product that users can’t fully articulate, the texture, the rhythm, the feel, is what separates something people use from something people love. Typography was never the point. The point was that someone bothered. Someone sweated a detail that 99% of users would never consciously notice, and that invisible effort is precisely what made the experience feel different.
That’s the thing about attention to detail: the audience doesn’t need to identify it to feel it.
Which brings me to Van Halen and the brown M&M’s.
The story is famous enough to be apocryphal-sounding, but it’s real. Van Halen’s touring contract included a rider demanding a bowl of M&M’s backstage with all the brown ones removed. It sounds like rock-star excess, and for years, people told it that way. But David Lee Roth later explained the actual reason: their stage show was one of the most technically complex on the road, with massive lighting rigs and weight-bearing requirements that could be genuinely dangerous if a venue cut corners. The M&M’s clause was buried deep in the technical specifications. If the band arrived and found brown M&M’s in the bowl, they knew the venue hadn’t read the contract carefully, which meant they couldn’t trust that the critical safety requirements had been followed either.
The brown M&M’s weren’t about candy. They were a signal. A canary in the coal mine for competence. And the band cared deeply for their extended family and audience. Those are heavy rigs above everyone’s heads, after all.
I think about this often in the context of building products. When a user encounters sloppy typography, inconsistent spacing, a button that doesn’t quite align, they may not be able to name what’s wrong. But something registers. A small erosion of trust. And it compounds. If you didn’t care about this, what else didn’t you care about? If the surface is neglected, can I trust what’s underneath?
The inverse is equally true. When every detail feels considered, when the type is set with care, when the interface breathes, when the micro-interactions feel intentional, it communicates something that no marketing copy ever could: we took this seriously. We respected your time and attention enough to get the small things right.
Butterick, Jobs, and Van Halen are telling the same story from different angles. Typography is a form of respect. Design craft is a trust signal. And the details you think no one will notice are precisely the ones that matter most.