The True Art of Fonts and Typography

Yesterday was my last Art of Fonts class at Emily Carr. To date it's been my favorite and I had a lot of fun exploring and experimenting. In my opinion the course was a little on the short side but luckily my teacher (Kara Pecknold) is teaching a full typography class starting in Spring 2010 so if you're interested, take a peek at Emily Carr's latest course offerings. You won't be disappointed!

Throughout the course we touched on many different subjects and were given some really fun projects to reinforce what we learned that day.

One of them was to create a typographic journal by collecting type/font samples to present on our last day. For this project I bought an ecojot journal with the words "ReThink" on the front as I wanted to use this opportunity to really 'rethink' the way I conceptualize and execute my ideas. I also decided to hand draw the fonts I found to reinforce this 'rethink' process and remove me from my every day technology.

Here is one of my samples.

For this one, I chose the Guitar Hero font designed by Michael Beruit because of the pure typographic genius behind it. After reading about the development and execution of the font, it is now one of my favorites of all time. The use of negative space, the integration, and composition of each letter brought together to form one unified piece, leaves me breathless each time I see it.

The before and after (below) will give you a better appreciation of the work that went into the re-design; this is the true art of typography.


In addition to our typographic journal we were to design and present a poster for a fictional event called "Design Culture Now". Since designers would be the target audience for this event, I knew the names would draw them in more-so than the event name so I wanted to make those a prominent part of the layout.

The designers speaking at the event were (and are) 'stars' of the design world; inspirational, revolutionary, and somewhat rebellious, breaking the rules at some point in time. With this in mind, I concluded that my poster could resemble a movie poster with towering type that commanded attention but it would also have to break the rules in someway to further communicate what these designers are about.

After many sketches and a lot of thought, this was the end result.

Now that I have a hightened awareness for fonts, typography, and the art involved in communicating with type, I now believe all good design begins and ends with GREAT typography. It is most definitely an art unto itself.

Maybe You Should Get Out More.

Has anyone been a couch potato lately? If so, you've probably seen this commercial created by DDB Toronto. My boyfriend actually told me about it and got me to watch it with him. When I finally figured out what was going on, boy...did it ever make me want to get out of the house! Especially since I knew what a Snuggie was.

(Did you know they have Snuggies for dogs now? Now that one REALLY made me laugh. Maybe the dogs should get out more too!)

The Future of Selling Design : Blair Enns

I had a fabulous change of scenery today attending a morning lecture put on by the GDC called "The Future of Selling Design" presented by Blair Enns.

Blair Enns is the founder of Win Without Pitching and a business development consultant to marketing communication agencies.

When Blair began his presentation, the first thing that I was impressed by was his public speaking skills. I've never been very strong in public speaking myself so watching him speak, motivated me to improve this skill.

Throughout his presentation Blair continued to impress by shifting my thinking. He made some great points about the future of design and how we, as designers, should stop selling something clients can get anywhere and start selling specialties relative to the demands. Sure we design wonderful things and have a certain flair for it but how can we remove ourselves from the "mushy middle" and separate ourselves from the "me too's" ?

Well, pick one.

Specialize (add value to your product/services and find your USP) or generalize (reduce production costs in order to compete). My creative mentor always told me to specialize, which I always agreed with. I never did like the concept of knowing how to do everything because it's just impossible.

To explain this theory, Blair used the analogy of pouring a bottle of beer into a casserole dish vs. a tall beer stein. With the casserole dish, you cover alot of area but the expertise is very shallow. With the beer stein, you're narrowing your focus and deepening your expertise, which in turn adds value to your business or service. That kind of expertise can't be bought for $99.

These concepts worked well in conjunction with a book I'm reading called "Green Graphic Design" by Brian Dougherty. Brian's book focuses more on a designers responsibility to the environment and being sustainable and innovative with our creative solutions but both are thinking from a marketing standpoint rather than a creative standpoint. Yea a brochure is good but what kind of value does it have? Why should people care? What's so different about this that can't have been found anywhere else?

Seemingly, there are boatloads of designers and not enough jobs to go around so each one of us has to specialize and offer something more than what can be bought online for next to nothing. This is how we, as designers, can put the value back in our work that clients are willing to pay for and not worry about reducing our cost to compete with the sheer number of designers that are out there. The truth is that the Walmart's of the world offering design templates or the Craigslist post offering a logo for $99 won't go away, so all we can do as designers is take the control back and differentiate ourselves from that.

I could go on for hours spewing ideas, thoughts, insights inspired by my morning but I won't. I will suggest, however, you visit Blair's website : Win Without Pitching. It's got some great articles for designers, firms, and businesses.

Hope you enjoy it as much as I am.

Desktop Wallpaper : November

Another month gone by...whew, what a fast one it's been.

Only one more until the end of the year. What goodies will the new year bring?

In the meantime, here are some goodies for your desktop.

A lot of them are themed around the up-coming Thanksgiving holiday but because I'm Canadian, that holiday is long-gone for me. So in keeping with my own status-quo I chose something fun and colourful instead.