Tuesday, February 23, 2010

A Lesson in Typography

I have found the class for me. It is four hours long on Thursday nights and it flies by. It's Visual Editing (aka Design) and I love it. We spend the entire class working on layouts - what works, what doesn't work... basically stuff I would be doing on my own time anyways, but with this I get to be dorky and talk about how amazing the counter in the "a" of Helvetica looks with 25 other people and still be cool! Oh yeah, and we watched a documentary entirely on the Helvetica font. And yes, I was obsessed. But I digress. Anyways, probably the main reason why I love this class is my professor, Jim Fisher. If you're a Comm major at the U and haven't taken a class from him yet, take one. I realized just how awesome he is when we were going through the fonts on our computer. Turns out there are forbidden fonts: Papyrus and "The Z Font." Like Voldemort we cannot even utter the name, but I have shown it below. If any professor ever makes a Harry Potter reference in regards to typography he gets an A+ in my book.
Don't you see how amazing Helvetica is?! Like Jim promised, though, this class has ruined me. All I ever notice anymore are the fonts and designs of everything from road signs to textbooks. I, however, couldn't be more stoked. Everything I've been learning in that class has also been super helpful with this project I've been slaving away at for my friends who are running in the student election. More information is forthcoming.

5 comments:

  1. YESSSSSSS!!!!! You're not lame at all. I'm glad someone loves Helvetica like I do! The lower case e's in Helvetica are absolutely perfect. Especially when you compare them to Arial. Rather than cutting it off and being a diagonal at the end, it comes all the way up to be parallel with the rest of the horizontal line on the e. It's amazing the difference font can make. Will you help me with layout stuff though? I'm not as good at that and they expect us to know how to do layouts amazing in arch. Let's have a tutorial. I'd love for you to teach me!!!

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  2. hahaha i am not joking when i say that as i read through this i thought, "i could see this post as being something lauren would like." sure enough, lauren had commented. haha love you steph, i wish i had your eye for design!

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  5. so I posted a link and then it didn't work, I'm trying one more time...that's how much I love you.

    everytime I see papyrus, I shudder. this poster is hanging in the lab of our comms building:

    http://www.creativewhirlwind.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/promise_poster.jpg

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