Typography is one of those mysterious crafts I realize is deep, but know next to nothing about. I brought the subject up with an illustrator I know who noted it is a careful and deliberate artform and its application is filled with controversy unknown to most of us. Modern PCs can offer easy access to over 100 fonts, but few of us have the knowledge to make proper use of them. We find a few we like, pick a font size and plow on...
A few days ago the illustrator sent an email noting a review on a new work on the subject by Cyrus Highsmith - apparantely a hotshot font designer.
Inside Paragrphs looks lovely - not a full treatment of the subject, but never-the-less deep in areas written in a conversational jargon-free style. It may not be exactly what the curious beginner needs to be more clueful in how they use their tools, but it might be fascinating none-the-less.
On the backs of giants.
I believe not so long ago the following had been pointed to on this website:
“Reed College [where Steve Jobs enrolled for awhile] at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them."
And then there was Donald Knuth "The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done. A huge gap exists between what we know is possible with today's machines and what we have so far been able to finish."
Posted by: Roger | June 15, 2012 at 14:09