Look under the fold for the next installment to my Visual Typography Project. Read Entire Article…
…and the serious creepiness.
Here’s a link to a National Post story about the city of Toronto, my neighbour if you remember, delivering their latest Fun Guide. Political correctness has never thrilled me at the best of times, and now thanks to this magazine I know the worst of times makes my blood chill.
I love typography to death. Then I love dissecting it’s entrails. Of particular enjoyment to me is learning all the jargon associated with typography. Lucky for me there’s a lot of it. But I’ve noticed something.
I’ve looked at the websites. I’ve read the books. And through them all, they’ve been lacking one critical connection. Putting faces to the names, as it were. Or names to faces. It seems that most sites that talk about typography are very good at talking about it, but aren’t so great on giving picture examples. Other, less typographically-focussed design websites will post up a random smattering of letters and maybe describe a few of the terms. Maybe. Throw into that confusion that different sites will give the same term different meanings or the same features different names and soon nobody knows what to call anything.
I have problems with that. It has kept me up some nights.
I’m a major comics reader. And I choose what comics to read based on what superheroes I like. I know that others tend to gravitate towards certain writers or certain artists, but I’ve been wondering if logotypes can also make a difference in a book’s perception. So what I’m looking at here is four series of comics I’ve been reading off and on for last few years and giving you my perception of the title designs.
One of the problems of living in a suburb, like I do, is you’re always reminded that your city is always looked upon as being inferior to the metropolis that borders it. While out here, in the hinterlands of the Greater Toronto Area we call Mississauga, we may not have an inferiority complex, we do have a lack of architectural personality.
For the longest time, Mississauga had been all about sprawl. Look at any point on a map and you can see we’re less a city than a collection of subdivisions and shopping plazas. I think we have more space devoted to parking lots than roads…but I’m getting off topic. Sprawl. As recently as 1995, our city had many tracts of old farmland, so it was nothing for our city council to rezone it for residential and build a few hundred detached homes, add a grocery store somewhere in there, and move on. No condo skyrises, no commercial towers, just backyards and No Exit signs. I think once the city’s population zoomed past 600,000 they realized their plans were no longer sustainable.
Short post.
The new theme is up and running and I’ll be adding the rest of the functionality over the next few days. I’m planning to add bits of my portfolio, a store where you can order business card design and other services, and the advertising block. Yes, I’ve heard all the arguments about monetizing a blog too early (i.e. you shouldn’t) but I’m not doing this to be greedy. Using the sevices of Project Wonderful to put advertising on this site, it’ll be up to me to boost my popularity enough to earn more than their base rate—zero. Yep, you will never have to pay for ads here unless you want to pay.
Keep an eye out for things to come!
Excuse the look of the blog right now. I realized after getting this far that most of the HTML and CSS I learned in college has buried itself deep into the bog that is my memory and my old notes and textbooks are proving to be a poor shovel. But progress will come.
The goal of this blog is to showcase tools, tips, and techniques that may help you, the reader, become a better graphic designer. Lest you think me arrogant, I’m not saying I’m better than you. As I start to upload some of my portfolio that will become readily apparent. So when I say it may help, know that I am really hoping it may help me.
So, let’s get started.
