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.