Why typography should matter to everyone
One visual storyteller discusses her fanaticism for fonts and the difference that a given typeface can make in conveying a message.
Graphic designers love typography.
More specifically, graphic designers love to love typography.
In a career field that consists of “make it yellow/bigger/jazzier/into a giraffe,” the subtleties of type are the last bastion left for a designer to nurse his or her need to tweak, beautify, and control.
And do we ever. We have magnified an apostrophe by 800 percent. We have adjusted the kerning between 1’s on a thousand occasions. We have tried all 66 available faces of Gotham on one business card.
If none of that made sense to you, well, you’re not in the club.
That doesn’t mean you’ve escaped the influence of anal-retentive, coffee-fueled type designers and the years they’ve spent sculpting descenders, because obsessive designers and typographers out there have had their way with pretty much all the text y¬ou see anywhere. You might try to tell us all that effort has gone right over your head, but we know that’s not true.
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