Post originally appeared on the Iguana Inc blog.
How did you first get interested in typography?
College is really when I learned to love and appreciate typography. In high school, everyone types their papers in Times New Roman, and when yours doesn't meet the 3-page requirement, you switch it to Typewriter and BAM! all of the sudden your paper is twice as long!
One of my first projects in Desktop Publishing (the initial computer-based design courses in the graphic design program) was to go through every font on the computer, type out every character, print it out, and turn it into a little reference book for yourself. That way when we needed to choose a typeface, we could look through our reference book and make a conscious choice. Either Font Book on the Mac didn't exist then, or our teachers purposely didn't tell us! From there we would have a couple assignments per week that involved taking a page of the newspaper or a magazine, laying a piece of tracing paper over top, and figuring out all of the type specifications on the page including font, weight, point size, leading, etc.
After Desktop Publishing, I took Typography I and Typography II, which as you can guess, is an in-depth study of all things related to type. In addition to memorizing characteristics of various typefaces, we also had to create our own, and I ended up creating 2 very different typefaces. When you really study type, you learn that it is so much more than text on a page; when used correctly, it can be more expressive that a picture!
Care to share a recent type project of your own, and someone else's you admire?
Right now I am really into hand-drawn lettering as a style, which starts with drawing the letters by hand and then vectoring them into a work of art. I took a Skillshare class taught by Neil Tasker on the art of hand lettering, and it was amazing and incredibly enlightening.
My completed Skillshare project.
One of my (recent) favorite typographic pieces of work is by Dylan Roscover, formed by actual Tweets about the product.
