Today I've gone a little more into detail on the design assignment for ds106 and have decided to talk about typography! Typography, if the name doesn't automatically give it away, is font related design. There are thousands of custom fonts out there and some of them are really amazing! I've made this an intro to typography, so I'll be sharing a photo and a video with you, along with a few interesting blogs!
(It may not be Friday yet, but since this will probably be read on Friday, it seemed appropriate!)
There are also a few bloggers out there who have really informative posts. For instance, I Love Typography shares an array of information, from TEDx talks to trailers for documentaries related to typography, as well as some gorgeous fonts of the month!
Typography Daily is a less-traditional blog that groups together images of fonts and displays them as collections. The most recent (as of 18:00 Thursday) is the Comic Book Mastheads collection. These are designed to inspire designers (because authors aren't the only ones who get blocks! Someone has to make fonts for those authors to write in!) and show different layouts of products, advertisements and images.
The final blog I'd like to share with you is Typographica. Typographica is an almost newspaper-style blog, where several people work together, reviewing fonts, their designers, books and so forth for others to see and, hopefully, to give promotion to the better fonts of the cyber-world (because there are some horrid fonts out there...Comic Sans, anyone?).
Typography is insanely fun! (I'm kind of obsessed and download at least 2, if not more, fonts per week...Opening MS Word, Photoshop, Illustrator, PowerPoint, etc. is always fun because my font list takes a million years to load.)I hope that, in future, I'll get better at designing my own fonts (and maybe get myself a tablet with which to do so, because being neurotic with a Magic Mouse is so difficult)and maybe, in time, end up on Typographica as, hopefully, a well-reviewed designer or font!
I hope that you learned something new and exciting about design today! (It's always exciting to learn how things you see everyday- pop up ads, billboards, commercials, etc..- are designed and learn the tricks behind them! At least I think so...)
(Also, sorry, I had to have this centered...It drives me mad when pictures aren't centered.)
I wish I knew more about managing fonts and choosing appropriate ones. I appreciate the typography blogs you've shared - now i can try to start learning more.
ReplyDeleteAs for the centered text, I think it's possible to have the image centered with text left-justified. I do it on my blog, though I'm not exactly sure how.
Fonts can be tricky, especially for websites & ads- you don't want something that's unreadable, but you want it to catch the readers' eyes.
ReplyDeleteI know you can do it separately, but if it's done that way, it just looks off to me (you should see me at work when I have to stack a tray full of cups to take to the bar- takes me forever to get it balanced out correctly, haha). But I also realize that paragraphs are a bit harder to read when they're centered since sentences can go over & one word will end up on the next line.