Blog of the Week: I Love Typography
As an Interaction Designer who spends most of my time limited to the fonts that come standard with Windows XP (Let’s see, should I use Arial or Verdana today?), I relish the opportunity to play with type. I just don’t get mean. As a result, my typography chops probably aren’t what they should be. I was recently turned onto John D Boardley’s blog, I Love Typography, which does a good job of refreshing my knowledge. It teaches, inspires, and simply brings awareness to type design and design with type. In John’s own words:
iLT was born from a desire to bring the subject of Typography to the masses. All too often, articles on typography are rather bland and, although informative, do little to elicit feelings of wow.
So, iLT is designed to inspire its readers, to make people more aware of the typography that is around them. We really cannot escape typography; it’s everywhere: on road signs, shampoo bottles, toothpaste, and even on billboard posters, in books and magazines, online…the list is endless, and the possibilities equally so.
From history to type-inspired toys, font reviews to typesetting rules, iLT is a great source for everything type. While John runs the blog, many of the posts come from other authors. In one recent post by Paul Dean titled eXtreme Type Terminology, we are reminded that the common terms “Upper Case” and “Lower Case”, which we have heard since kindergarten, were derived from the drawers in which the metal type was kept. Another common phrase’s origin from the days of letterpress was also explained:
The expression “mind your p’s and q’s” probably comes to us from the tedious and exacting job of sorting metal letters after printing a page and returning them to the type cases. The raised letter on a block of metal type represents a letter that prints in the opposite direction, so a metal p resembles a printed q and vice versa. P’s and q’s were particularly tricky.
If you love type, you’ll love I Love Typography.
I can’t explain it; I just like looking at type. I just get a total kick out of it. Other people look at bottles of wine or whatever, or, you know, girls’ bottoms. I just get kicks out of looking at type. It’s a little worrying, I must admit.
- Eric Spiekerman