I thought I was over typography, we broke up years ago when I went chasing after a new love, as I call it, “The First One.” Never did font family inter-marriages, and bad kerning, or over-zealous drop caps, leave my inner aesthetic soul. It’s still inside, and I see cringe worthy examples, around, all the time.
In my car, at the stop light, I look up and see this sign. . .
. . . and drive off confused as to whether I’d be the giver or the receiver of that massage. Or would it be done by a criminal- the massage rapist. I just shook my head over the extra space between E, and R.
Much of the bad typography errors, and unforgivable graphic art pages, have been perpetrated by people who do not understand that with good design there is usually someone educated in good layout, font, and letter choices to enhance that design. With knowledge of kerning, spacing, and leading to help visually balance those words.
I once met a Hallmark card store, graphic artist, that had computers in the back of the store, who would lift card images from the cards, in front of the store, and plunk them down onto his layout pages, calling it his designs. Or former glitter pen aficionados who are now Zentangling all over Pinterest, making decorative, cutesy letters calling it creative fonts. Some of it is nice, but mostly over done, and lifting card images is as shocking as the terrible graphics that were the outcome of that bandit.
I love letters, words, sentences, and the stories that come about from the alphabet. And while I think I’m over, finie, with type or graphic design, it’s come back to sit comfortably with me, and hold my hand, and play again, this time on a computer screen, and in a world wide web playground.
I’m learning all over again, on updated hardware (computers), markup, styling, good design, and bad design. All this learning on all this modern equipment and hardware, has a language of its own, with an order, a hierarchy of placement. How it is placed, can make a page work or not work. I just wish that these new languages of html, and css, would run faster, in my mind, to catch up with what I know as a former graphic artist. Each week it is getting easier, and the most important thing I learned in week four, is just:
Go slow, read everything twice, and do one thing at a time, in the order presented.