Blathering about typography

[Don Kiyoti]

I got my degree in graphic design (SIU called it Visual Communication) in '83, before the Mac changed everything. I'm glad I had a chance to learn typography that way. I could never draw worth a damn so I couldn't rely on illustration in my work; I got good at type. We did some exercises that many would now find silly (we thought so too sometimes), like drawing a large-scale Helvetica lower-case A by hand and inking it in (no tracing from a Xerox!), spending time on calligraphy, etc. I loved what the Swiss designers did with type and we had several assignments along those lines. We used a lot of press type for our comps. We used those broad wedge-tip pencils to indicate type in our thumbnails and roughs which I think was a great way to get a feel for how a block of type works as a graphic element. We (sort of) learned how to spec type for a typesetter. My first job had it's own Compugraphic machine. I never learned how to use it though. But all that did make understanding how to use Quark a lot easier.

I've lost a lot of the technical stuff I knew but I still flinch when I see bad type design. I flinch a lot these days!