Bullets are supposed to break up the natural flow. That is what they are there for! If you look at nicely typeset material, the bullets are typically indented slightly rather than lined up exactly with the left margin, which gives a visual cue like the indent on the first line of a new paragraph (or a vertical space between paragraphs).
Hanging quotes fully in the margin is poor, too. The point of hanging punctuation is to optically align the margins so that they look straighter to the reader, because small glyphs like quotation marks and hyphens don't fill the space as much as typical letter forms. The idea is to avoid a distracting "bump" where the text appears to have a small indent, even though mathematically it doesn't; thus the technique complements the sort of thing you should be doing with bullets. But this is a subtle effect, and hanging punctuation fully in the margins like that certainly doesn't achieve this goal: in fact, it's probably just as bad as not hanging at all. (If you want to do it as a stylistic/aesthetic thing on block quotations or something, I'm not complaining, but this article presents it as an absolute rule for normal text.)
The whole Fibonacci/golden ratio thing is just silly, too. Who says these things have a natural elegance? Where is the research, or even the study of more than the three people in the room, to back this up?
Then there's what should have been a good point about emphasis, which completely misses the point of different typographic effects. Italics are subtle effects that show emphasis as you read without grabbing the attention, so useful for indicating things like stress or distinguishing foreign words. Heavy type, on the other hand, affects the typographic colour and draws the eye across the page. This makes it very bad for the uses of italics above (which are unhelpful out of context) but excellent for highlighting key words being defined or headings. Underlining in printed material is almost always a mistake (it distracts the eye and slows reading speed, and is unnecessary when we have proper italics available anyway) and on web pages should probably be reserved for hyperlinks since anything else clashes with user expectations.
I'm sorry, but this really isn't a guide to good typography at all, beginner or otherwise. It's just yet another list of dogmatic rules that have no sound basis, and the typography world has more than enough of those already.
I disagree. I think it's a nicely succinct collection of relevant guidelines that, if used by a beginner, would yield a more aesthetic result than if they just winged it. I'd rather someone read Bringhurst (there's a cool version of the book applied to the web here: http://webtypography.net), but unless a person is serious about getting into design I doubt they'd spend the time.
I'll concede it's not the best - but most of it is decent advice. The only real exception I take is with his suggested practice of underlining text for emphasis; obviously that's a no-no, especially on the web.
Also, I think we can reduce the author's assertion that one should use Fibonacci numbers as a model for type size down to something more basic and useful: choosing to use a mathematical sequence to inform structural design decisions can assist one in creating work that has stronger internal relationships. If there's a rhythm and harmony to type size that is congruent with the spacing of the underlying grid, I think the work will tend to feel tighter and more elegant than if there's no underlying intelligence informing those decisions. Not to say that one can't shoot from the hip and win a few, or that a little chaos isn't beautiful - but using a regular system will tend to produce more regular results, particularly if it's one (like Fibonacci numbers) that are visible in the world around us and have been informing art for hundreds of years.
Common sense says that a culture's views on what is aesthetic and acceptable are largely informed by its environment and history. I don't think we necessarily need a study to tell us that the Fibonacci/golden ratio thing has a certain inherent beauty; the evidence is out there in all the art that's been produced using those numbers as a foundation.
Perhaps we will just have to agree to disagree then. Personally, I would rather someone did wing it (or just use the defaults in their application/browser) rather than shove all kinds of marks out into margins, force overly small type with overly narrow leading, set lines too short for optimal reading in any standard book or screen format, use underlining for emphasis, and start choosing things like text sizes based on arbitrary mathematical patterns rather than what is most legible and readable, all of which are the direct advice given in that article.
Hanging quotes fully in the margin is poor, too. The point of hanging punctuation is to optically align the margins so that they look straighter to the reader, because small glyphs like quotation marks and hyphens don't fill the space as much as typical letter forms. The idea is to avoid a distracting "bump" where the text appears to have a small indent, even though mathematically it doesn't; thus the technique complements the sort of thing you should be doing with bullets. But this is a subtle effect, and hanging punctuation fully in the margins like that certainly doesn't achieve this goal: in fact, it's probably just as bad as not hanging at all. (If you want to do it as a stylistic/aesthetic thing on block quotations or something, I'm not complaining, but this article presents it as an absolute rule for normal text.)
The whole Fibonacci/golden ratio thing is just silly, too. Who says these things have a natural elegance? Where is the research, or even the study of more than the three people in the room, to back this up?
Then there's what should have been a good point about emphasis, which completely misses the point of different typographic effects. Italics are subtle effects that show emphasis as you read without grabbing the attention, so useful for indicating things like stress or distinguishing foreign words. Heavy type, on the other hand, affects the typographic colour and draws the eye across the page. This makes it very bad for the uses of italics above (which are unhelpful out of context) but excellent for highlighting key words being defined or headings. Underlining in printed material is almost always a mistake (it distracts the eye and slows reading speed, and is unnecessary when we have proper italics available anyway) and on web pages should probably be reserved for hyperlinks since anything else clashes with user expectations.
I'm sorry, but this really isn't a guide to good typography at all, beginner or otherwise. It's just yet another list of dogmatic rules that have no sound basis, and the typography world has more than enough of those already.