I've again run across the "typography as a graphic design exercise" type of people.
The design schools have been perpetrating this type of nonsense for many decades.
We need to stop it as much as we can.
The basic concept of the course content is to use the actual graphic shapes of various letters and various fonts as a graphic element in our designs. I'm not arguing the relative merits or beauty of these efforts. Typographic illustration can be very compelling and wonderfully graceful & elegant. But that misses the point.
Typography is the art of laying out pages in an easily readable manner that effectively guides the reader's eye from the original statement of benefit to the final request for action.
Beautiful fonts and superior graphics normally have little to do with typography. Take that very popular font on the Mac side: Zapfino. It is almost completely illegible without quite a bit of work and very large point sizes. Yes, it is very beautiful. No, it does not make typography easy or simple. It takes a lot of work with alternative glyphs, hand kerning, and much more. Zapf himself (in an article I cannot find now) said that Zapfino was what he always wished he could design—a calligraphic font with no restrictions. He tried many things that are knowingly (on his part) not contained within normal typography.
Many of the most stylish designs push far beyond typography into fashion. Fashion is commonly incomprehensible to the average reader. We've all seen the barbarisms of extensive huge letterspacing, narrowed glyphs that easily bypass legibility let alone readability, color combinations that dazzle the eye and obscure the content. These designs have little or nothing to do with typographic excellence.
Excellent typography communicates easily and clearly. Yes, you are encouraged to use the most beautiful fonts within your personal library. Yes, the layout needs to be clean & clear without superfluous decoration. Yes, you must take risks and break out of the enormous pack of layout lemmings. Without breaking a rule here & there by design, your designs will be boring at best.
There is nothing wrong with decoration. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that it is part of the typography of the design. Again, the standard rule for any item on your page is simple. "If you cannot find a good reason for that piece to be there. Delete it!" This certainly applies to decorative gestures on the page as well as grandiose, pompous, or irrelevant copy.
Typography must be the core of what we do as we assemble pages to use for print &/or Web.
enjoy autumn! It is already arriving here.
