Thursday, January 8, 2009

Type Teacher Transcribes with Tact and Toughness

This is an excerpt from a packet I received on my first day of Type II at the circus.  It was not written by my teacher, rather her teacher, and she passed it along to us.  All I can say is I wish this guy was my teacher, because, based on his writing, he is a tough-ass who would no doubt make you better at type (yes there is a lot to it for those of you who don't know).

In all cases your typography should be superior. You are competing not only with each other, but with several other schools as well, whose students would gladly toast your professional demise with goblets of you own life's blood over cheap canapés in come corny, half-modern post-grad crash pad, with Groove Armada playing in the background for extra faux-hip effect, a glimmer of evil reflecting in their nerd-chic Armani horn-rimmed spectacles, while reading aloud from Wallpaper*. And so it is my sworn duty to protect all of you from these pretentious, greedy assholes by providing you with typographic ammunition with which to destroy them. While some of my rules may sound quite draconian, they are for the sole purpose of preventing you from making the kind of mistakes that will make your work suck.
The reason I seem like such a fascist is because I have to assume that you are taking this class to learn something. Since there are so many fonts out there, I am trying to make it easy to choose type, particularly text faces by eliminating your ability to use bad ones.  This will help you choose the right face from a selection of superior ones. That way, you will be halfway there. Fact: if you have a good typeface to begin with, it will be that much easier to make good work. These judgments of bad faces are neither arbitrary nor a reflection of my opinions. They are based on factual typographic notions.  You must never use them. This course is designed to help you make the right choices, so trust me. In time  you will be able to select type out of your head.  But for now, this is a rough list of faces to start with.  

I wish I knew his name so I could give him credit for his eloquent prose. He pegged like half of the designers out there in that first paragraph. Wallpaper is a design magazine btw, and yes, that asterisk is part of the title (smug).
 

1 comment:

  1. ...typographic ammunition with which to destroy them.

    Brilliant.

    incognitoast

    ReplyDelete