Welcome To Typography

The official inaugural post on Designorati:Typography

It doesn’t take long, once someone decides to study design, to start to be distracted by type. When the critical eye is developed, one suddenly becomes aware of what type is and truly aware of what it does.

American Typewriter has a sort of rough and ready feel to it.

Garamond and Palatino seem to be timeless classics.

Comic Sans is used way. Too. Much.

Type is more than merely marks on a page. Type carries weight, intent, and attitude. Take Comic Sans, for example. How seriously will you take a caution sign printed in that? Could you sign a contract printed in it without wondering about the professionalism of the person who printed it?

Type can be over used. Helvetica, when it debuted, with its clean simple lines and honest shapes, took the world by storm. It has been used so much since then, though, that it is associated with lazy design. All the character has been leached out of it, so much so, that Robin Williams once opined that, as with other trends, “Helvetica will be back in style–in about 200 years” (in Beyond The Mac Is Not A Typewriter, Peachpit Press, 1991)

The point of all this digression is to try and give a suggestion of the rich tapestry of typography, that these glyphs are so much more than little marks upon a screen or on paper. They generate passon. People love typefaces; I adore Gill Sans. Adobe typographer Robert Slimbach, for example, developed the new Adobe Garamond Premier Pro after 12 years of work.

The aim of this topic is, as in my other topic (cartography) to be an exploration of where it came from, where it is, with an eye on where it’s going and an awareness of how design happens. I plan on lingering in places and surveying others, but typography is a lifelong love. Sometimes you don’t know it until you are shown it.