Essay #4 Part #2: Typography
Typography is mandatory. You can’t print text without doing so with some rhetorical information stored in your graphic design. For example my school gives out a standard résumé template that says ‘I’m thorough and not trying to show off but I’m not a designer here’ so I made one that says ‘look at my numbers look at my numbers look at my numbers’. So they saw my numbers because I wrote the dates in shorthand, shrunk the headers and puffed in the margins to make the whole thing a pleasing summary with my numbers on it.
I saw a truck with a Copperplate Gothic logo so I knew that company was going for a sort of classiness by using the business card font but they weren't too classy because their designer was using a font I recognize. Font really isn’t a big deal. Somebody else makes the font and you borrow it. All that matters is you don’t pick one that’s nasty or everyone is already sick of, like how seeing Times New Roman feels like hearing the default iPhone alarm clock sound.
On the ground floor, typography is legibility and saying something through your references to a shared culture and visual principles. It becomes artistry as things become art but I can’t claim to be able to do that yet. It's a visual design so it's all about light and space like painting or photography. About all I know of photography is to think about catching the light, not printing your vision. With text it's how you want to read, tightly bounded lines into boxes and boxes stacked into related figures. A paragraph follows with some distance to show a lack of relation, then a new heading is bound tight to the next, only needing the minimum increase in visual weight as to be easily seen by searching the page. Hyperlinks tend to be a bright blue breaking the old black and white only conventions of print. I like to tone them down to maybe just italics. When they are links it is obvious from context and a sporadic inline link is only about as important as a footnote.
I apologize for the indirection and constant changing of my web design. I have no objective here other than to present something I want to see. You the audience at this time are likely trustworthy people. I don’t want to waste your time by signing my name on some mess of a corn maze. However you are probably not like the résumé people, indifferent to me and in need of strong targeted rhetorical design. But while résumé writing has an agenda, it’s not lying propaganda. I’m working with the reader to give them what they want to know. With you (the audience) I want to help you navigate like an airport but you are here on your own free will and volition. I just like how airports can be designed. Here I am trying to present my best work radiantly with no target. It's easy to imagine a pointed meaning weapon; here it lies just to be, waiting on nothing.