Anyone who knows me knows how much I love typography. So when I came across an article titled "Text is Beautiful" on Donkey Ink’s blog, I wasted no time reading it. Donkey Ink is a Vancouver-based design shop run by my friend and fellow graphic designer, Jamie Purches. I enjoyed his article so much that I asked him if I can share it with my readers, and he was nice enough to let me do so. Now, without further ado, here it is:
Typography is a very important part of design and if executed correctly it should either stand out immediately, or be virtually unnoticeable. If you're like me you both notice, and love, typography. There is nothing worse than seeing a typographic error in an otherwise well designed and attractive print (or online) piece. For me, that's the sticking point and it doesn't matter how much I like the rest of the design, if there's too much space between a couple of letters in a word, or if the baselines of two columns of text aren't aligned, that's all I can focus on. It hurts my eyes and makes me want to break inanimate objects with other inanimate objects. I recently stumbled upon a great resource to assist in making the most of your typography. It's a poster called Thirty Four Typographic Sins, produced by Jim Godfrey, a graphic and web design instructor at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah. His website features the poster copy and offers the option of a PDF download. A lot of the thirty four sins are pretty easily avoided if one knows what they're doing, but I was surprised at how many of these I recognized as having slipped by my discerning eye in the past — proof that I will benefit from referring to this guide myself on occasion. I can even see myself referring to this list when I'm feeling naughty and looking to break some rules.
Regardless of how one wants to use it, I thought I'd post it here so my fellow designers are also able to add it to their resource arsenal if they wish.
On another typography note, I thought I'd share with you the Colloseotype project by Cameron Moll, a fellow designer (and drummer even) based in Florida. In Cameron's words, it's "an artistic endeavor to reimagine the (Roman) Coliseum with type." The website features closeups of this amazing piece of work and a video documenting the printing process. Producing the "If You Love Type..." image at the top of this article was far more work than I thought it would be when I started it, so I can only imagine the labour of love (and perhaps, at times, less-than-love) that must have been undertaken in order to produce Cameron's masterpiece. Nice work indeed.
