Typophile - Why you like type. - Comments

…because there is

Fisheye — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 05:34:06 -0800

...because there is something awfully compelling about being the practitioner of a craft with such rich and varied traditions.

...because few creative careers reward the patient and virtuous soul.

Because it offers you

timd — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 04:17:45 -0800

Because it offers you storage for books:)
http://www.set26.ch/offen.html

Tim

(Among other things here

manard — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 03:51:53 -0800

(Among other things here already said I’d like to add) Because taking care of the details with love is like saying ’Thank you’ to our Creator (pretty religious today I am) :)

Letterforms dance on the

cerulean — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 01:54:21 -0800

Letterforms dance on the boundaries between tangible and intangible.

The fascination starts young, seeing letters made solid on Sesame Street. Here are these people holding a shape made of plastic or something, and they tell you it’s an “A” and it’s in a lot of the words you say. Even at such a young age, this raises all sorts of philosophical questions: Is that really what comes out of your mouth when you talk? Why can’t you see it? Are the ones printed on a page only pictures of “A”? Does “A” exist? Such ideas tripped up Plato.

Douglas Hofstadter has said that the essence of the study of artificial intelligence is in the question, “What is the letter A?” This is because symbols are crazy shapeshifters. Set an “A” each in Stop and LCD and ask yourself, what do these two things have in common? Almost nothing... except a lot of context that lets you recognize both as if they were the same thing. A precise, inclusive definition of the shape of a letter can never be more definitive than “May contain one or more of the following...” Yet we recognize them so easily that typography is practically an invisible art.

So we’ve got these almost paradoxically malleable things that wouldn’t exist without us. We can imbue into them other intangibles, like moods, by playing with them the right way. Testing the boundaries of what is and isn’t an “A”, and what makes a better “A”, is a lot like testing the boundaries of one’s own identity. It’s a puzzle with no hard rules but with concrete results. It’s magic, and it’s fun.

For as much as I’ve tried,

thomasng — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:14:13 -0800

For as much as I’ve tried, I still can’t sing. But my type keeps getting better, so I’m sticking to that.

I love type for the same

thomasng — Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:06:33 -0800

I love type for the same reason that I try to be articulate and good humored. Also because type won’t go away until people stop talking to each other.

There can be no history

seml — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 15:09:07 -0800

There can be no history without writing.
It is known that the first language ever to be ’written’ was pictographic, but then the process and the abstract made it a complex of symbols. Then the symbol returns to the image, but this time, in your mind...
Have you ever thought about the way “typography” is linked with the abilities of the human being?
As I usually say, “typography is the witness, the scream, the silence, the blank and the colourful” and why? Because it grew with us. It was there when history passed. It has the essence of the time where it was drawn or written. It represents the beliefs, the beautiful, the truth and the lie. Have you noticed the power within it? It is the most beautiful and complex mélange of history, art and communication.
By choosing the typeface, your giving it personality. By choosing the weight you’re augmenting or silencing speech. You are making it clear, or confusing it. You are playing and conjugating social and aesthetic codes that can please or hurt. And not everyone can decode it. As it has been said before, it is also a cycle. It reinvents itself, still, it has always been the same for centuries.
It’s not cast in wood or metal anymore, but the form and countershape is still the result. It helps the reader to understand text almost like an icon: by showing the analogy between the shape of the images that you conceive by reading, and the shapes of the letters.
The way text is set gives it speed, tone. I believe that when text is set it has a personality of its own. It is a living being that lives in history, passes from reader to reader, it is understood and pictured. It is the witness of its environment.
That is why it is so rich. That is why it invokes such responsability and attention. It is easy to be lost, to get frustrated when you’re setting text. It always seems that it isn’t good enough to match the meaning. Although time cannot touch it because it in away that it can only give a social context to place it in, time is simultaneously what mutates it.
It’s a quest. A passion and an obssession.

How can you not love type

Sergej — Wed, 2 Nov 2005 12:30:06 -0800

How can you not love type when there is so much of it to hate!?

Eic Your animated pic is

jim_rimmer — Wed, 2 Nov 2005 11:17:36 -0800

Eic

Your animated pic is sheer film festival quality. I love it.

Jim

the amazing details behind

gordon — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 21:06:21 -0800

the amazing details behind all the fonts that we have today, placing them in a design for some known or visible reasons are pretty much fulfilling.

and its a pretty obscure, but someone has to do it right?!

I love digital photography.

vinceconnare — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 05:29:47 -0700

I love digital photography. Spotting black and white photos was a real pain especially working for someone else who didn’t clean their negatives. Spotting a digital photo or scan is easy.

I love printing and darkroom but hated doing it as a job where your doing 100 prints a day and having to hit it the first time. You get real good at looking at the density of a negative but it gets a bit boring.

But in the fashion world the stylists hate digital photography since the photographers shoot too many photos too quickly. It doesn’t give them time to prepare the clothes for the next shoot.

I find shooting 10 shots on film you are more careful but you can experiment a lot more and it’s cheaper in the end with digital. Most of my clients need digital images for the web and many castings ask for .jpgs and not 8x10 or A4 prints. Only the print media require hard copy usually but some like my Nivea job asked for a high res image for a 2 mitre print.

I love type just because

TheMark — Fri, 28 Oct 2005 02:04:20 -0700

I love type just because then I can be a part of typophile with all you nutters...

:o)

Vince, at last I know

rs_donsata — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 20:27:33 -0700

Vince, at last I know something more painstacking than type design, God bless digital photo.

Héctor

-For me it tells me a lot

vinceconnare — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 07:02:00 -0700

-For me it tells me a lot about the history of society.

-Because it always had wicked technologies that were interesting, from flicks of metal to binary code.

-because putting points on outlines in a dim lit room was better than spending 8 hours a day, by yourself, processing 50 rolls of news film and printing 60-100 news prints in red lit darkness.

beautiful proportions, it

edwh — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 14:26:57 -0700

beautiful proportions, it can set a tone for what you want to say, it enchances the message (if well used). I feel like a smartass during the act of type selection for a project but usually end up feeling like a jerk because my type library is pathetic (along my knowledge of type that is). But I love when talented folks use it, it can be soo beautiful. Its facinating too in the respect that it also closely ties in to cultures ... and thats all i can muster ...

Why you like type.

Eric_West — Mon, 24 Oct 2005 11:43:41 -0700

I’m interested in writing something to go along with my senior project (typeface) and I love type. But I don’t know why. Other than maybe my personal draw to functionalism. ( but that’s not long enough)

Or, maybe ideas how to isolate and verbalize my thoughts?

I’d like to hear from whoever is up for it.

ThX