Steve Jobs on Typography

“...Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.

If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.”

From his Stanford commencement address

This year's Pitchfork music fest logo

I really like it. It's an improvement from past years (see below) and has really strong design sense. It's extremely simple but works extremely well. My only complaint/question is; could the three text elements be tied together more completely? The treatment of "Pitchfork", "Music Festival" and "Chicago" almost divides them into individual elements rather than making the entire logo one cohesive element. As of right now the lineup for the event itself sparks little to no interest in me but kudos for moving away from these images:

For a comical opinion regarding the new logo, check out this post on the Hipster Runoff

Typography + travel + beautiful cities = great commercials

Check out these ads for EF International Language Centers. I love the typography in each of them and the overall creative execution. Not only that, but each video tells a story while teaching us common words. These remind me of studying abroad and soaking up different cultures, I must travel more! Which one is your favorite?










http://www.ef.com/

A new perspective on kerning

From typecastcreative.co.uk (Sept. 21, 2010):

There are lots of tips on the best way to perfectly kern a piece of type. As with all design, kerning can be subjective, but some is just plain right or wrong. One trick that stuck with me was from the esteemed Maggie Lewis who was the Head of Typography at J.Walter Thompson for many years. She was fondly nicknamed the “Queen of Type” by the industry. I had just finished college and was pounding the streets of London meeting as many agency Type Directors as I could. I was quite nervous about meeting Maggie, but she was fantastic, gave me lots of critique without making me feel I was on a hiding to nothing and was generous with her time. She paid particular attention to the kerning on my layouts. Before the mac, headlines were usually set on a typositorand were cut up by skilled paste-up artists, even to the point where serifs might be shortened to create a better space between characters. Something that can and should be done in Adobe illustrator today.

Anyway she said the hard thing about kerning a word is that you know what it says, and so the subtleties of bad character spacing aren’t immediately apparent. She suggested turning the type upside down, that way you don’t read the word, you merely look at the shapes the characters make and the space that’s created between them. On the computer you can even flip the word as I have done above.

It was a great tip, and one I still use today.

Type.

I Thought I would share a little bit of what I have been doing in class these first few weeks... Here is some typography work I did using Illustrator. The quality isn't the greatest after converting to jpeg format but you get the idea.

Here are some monograms I made using my initials in Helvetica manipulated in Illustrator:

Next I did some tinkering with the words "disruption" and "expansion" to show literal meaning, some more successful than others:

Lastly, some more word form work using the word "Typography". We needed to choose a word pertaining to the class and typography seemed like an obvious choice but proved to be quite difficult to execute. The word itself is already literal in regard to its definition but I think I managed to come up with some fun variations: