There you are, doing your best to impress people with your designs. You tinker, go over your stuff meticulously and almost border on the extreme before you’ll let anyone even have a peek at them. That could really be a description of me, and a ton of other designers in the world. I check pretty much everyone’s bio when a designer follows me on Twitter and says hi. It has become such an automatic thing to do, and I am always surprised at how many freelance designers there are out there. No wonder this industry is tougher than most to get a good buzz going. There are simply too many amazing people out there that are uberishly good at what they do.
However, when it comes to typography, the number of people out there radically decreases, and you can’t find many people, at least from what I have seen, who have it in their Twitter bio that they design typography for a living. Maybe that isn’t a real job, or there is simply not enough work to solely do that, but I am equally surprised about the lack of people fronting their awesomeness when it comes to typography.
So what exactly is typography? I can tell you that some hot shot designers don’t even know the difference between type and font, so you shouldn’t at all feel awkward or irrelevant asking that question. As a matter of fact, there are surprisingly a lot of designers who use these terms in the wrong way and still get understood because of the misconception that they actually mean what they think it means. Is this complicated enough? Well, just have a look at this really inspiring video from PBS Arts, and you will have all the bits and pieces in the right place before you know it. It’s a 6 minute long explanation about what typography and type are all about. See, I might even have gotten it wrong there… but I guess I’ll just let it slide for now. What is your favorite type?
Via: [PBS]
COMMENTS