The Importance of Good Typography

by Christa Zinner

I think if you want to make it as a designer, you to have live beyond fads and styles in the design world. There will always be a younger generation who will know how to look up a tutorial and just copy what’s popular in current trends. Knowing design that is classically and fundamentally sound design will get you far in the design world. This goes hand-in-hand for all elements of design, and more specifically good typography.

The beauty of typography is that it's not something you can just physically read, but the letter forms themselves are extremely expressive and should be reflective of the message you're trying to convey. A font should be engaging and compliment or add to your design, not distract from it. You should always keep in mind that fonts and typography have the same capacity for expression as colors and images do. Type should never be overlooked or used as a last-minute addition to a design. The most important thing you should remember is that type gives subliminal messages to the viewer, which is why creating (or choosing if you don't have time to create your own) an expressive, appropriate font is so critical to good design. Working with a font inappropriate for your design can completely ruin and take away from an otherwise well thought out and beautifully executed design.

An excellent example of how important unique, appropriate type is in designs can be found in a mini compendium put together by Adam Ladd on his personal website, www.ladd-design.com.


Adam Ladd, www.ladd-design.com

A great resource (if you don't like my favorite way of doing it: pencil and grid paper) to get your feet wet in the world of creating your own typography is a neat new webapp called fontstruct, created by the people who own and maintain fontshop. While fontstruct has its own problems, mostly from working in brick forms, it can be an excellent tool to help get the process of creating your own type going.

Where else would we be without one of my favorite places for inspiration? After all of the basic principles of type are learned, one should go hog-wild and delve head-first into the world of expressive type. Some of the best typography is stand-alone, with very little imagery, or itself is an illustration. Typography Served does just this and more, delivering inspirational and sometimes down-right amazing applications of type in design.


Yulia Broadskaya, http://www.artyulia.com/

Never again should we see typography as a flat-expressionless mode for conveying additional information in our design. Instead, we should see type as its own element which possesses character, form and emotion.