Whether it’s a set­tle­ment agree­ment in PDF, a com­mer­cial lease on pa­per, or a terms-of-ser­vice agree­ment on a web­site, con­tracts are a di­verse class of doc­u­ments. There­fore, my ty­po­graphic ad­vice is more a prin­ci­ple than a prescription.

Let’s move past the self-serv­ing myth that ty­pog­ra­phy in con­tracts doesn’t mat­ter be­cause peo­ple must read them. Wrong. As I said in why does ty­pog­ra­phy mat­ter, read­ers are al­ways look­ing for the exit. So the most we can say is that peo­ple are sup­posed to read con­tracts. As writ­ers, we can en­cour­age them. But can we force them? No way.

In fact, it would be wiser for drafters to as­sume that most con­tracts go un­read. Why? Be­cause no one wants to read a con­tract. And most con­tracts are poorly de­signed. There­fore, it doesn’t mat­ter that peo­ple must read them. At best, they’re read­ing op­por­tunis­ti­cally. At worst, not at all.

For in­stance, the other day, a cer­tain mu­sic ser­vice made me promise that I had read their 20,551-word con­tract—3,276 in all caps—be­fore I could buy a $1.29 song. What do you think I ac­tu­ally did? Right. What would you do? The same thing. And every­one else? They’re no different.

Here’s what I did when I had to write my own soft­ware li­cense. We see these all the time. They’re re­li­ably care­less and awful.

1. Bor­ing sys­tem font.
   Line spac­ing too tight.

2. Small page mar­gins cre­ate an il­leg­i­ble line length.
   No space be­tween para­graphs or first-line in­dents.
   Un­nec­es­sary use of all caps.
   Para­graph num­bers hard to see.

A con­tract is ir­re­ducibly com­plex in terms of the el­e­ments that must go on the page (head­ings, words, num­bers, etc.). Thus, im­prov­ing con­tract ty­pog­ra­phy re­lies on two ma­neu­vers. First, max­i­miz­ing the vi­sual ef­fec­tive­ness of ex­ist­ing el­e­ments. Sec­ond, us­ing white space when­ever pos­si­ble for struc­ture and em­pha­sis, rather than adding more elements.

1. Columns cre­ate a more com­fort­able line length.
   Eq­uity for body text; Con­course for the headline.

2. Cleaner para­graph num­ber­ing, with space be­tween para­graphs and log­i­cal indenting.

3. Line spac­ing loos­ened.
   No caps. Spar­ing use of bold or italic for emphasis.

Ar­guably, a larger point size would be op­ti­mal—the body text here is set at 10 point—but I wanted to fit every­thing onto one page.