Pre-Ramble:  The following post was recently written (by me, as a contributing editor) for the PUSH Institute.  Founded by visionary Cecily Sommers, PUSH is an organization that monitors under-the-radar technologies, markets, people, and ideas that are pushing the future in new directions, and divines their implications for business, government, and nonprofit sectors in the years ahead … all to foster and promote “strategic foresight.” (And who couldn’t use a little of that?)  Check out PUSH at the link above!

So, here is the post.  It’s about the role of typography in the modern marketplace … (this kind of thing is really fascinating to us “designer types” … )

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I was blown away the first time my accountant used the “f” word.  Since when does a bean counter talk bold face and italics?

B.C. (before computers) the word “font” was exclusive to graphic design.  Basically, unless you were a card carrying “creative,” you never had meaningful access to the secret society of typography. (Afterall, there are rules about this stuff … when typography falls into the wrong hands, all kinds of illegible things can happen.)

Anyone who has practiced the fine art of graphic design prior to the main-stream presence of word processing knows what I’m talking about. If I start waxing on about “keylining” or the living hell of “type spec-ing” you have my permission to slap my wrists with your pica ruler (google it). Let’s just say that, like nearly every aspect of our modern way of life, the design field, and specifically the manipulation of typography, has been literally transformed by technology.

In his classic tome, Designing with Type (1971), James Craig reveals the back story on all things typography — symbolic pictographs, ideographs, and early alphabets like Phoenician, Greek and Roman. Craig discusses the anatomy of a letter and common font terminology like: uppercase, lowercase, x-height, ascender, descender, counter, serif, san serif, boldface, italic, condensed, extended, leading, point size, punctuation marks, and the beloved “ampersand” … &.

When it comes to specific fonts, Craig has his favorites and goes into great depth on five classics that he believes provide a “standard by which to judge/evaluate all typefaces” — Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, Century Expanded, and Helvetica. I’m guessing that he would look askance at some of the fonts I’ve uncovered in my research here.

I’d invite Prof. Craig to contrast the Bodoni cap “S,” for example, with a cap “S” configuration designed by Estonian font designers, Vladimir and Maksim Loginov, made out of biscuit dough (biscuit alphabet shown above right). The brothers Loginov specialize in developing “unique, untraditional fonts.”  From the myraid samples offered on their website, I’d say they have exceeded this expectation.

The Take-Away: If you’re still thinking that nothing could be more pedestrian than font design, fasten your seatbelts and take a look at the iQ Font project by Pierre Smeets and Damian Aresta. I’d bet large sums of money that the genesis of this idea occurred in a dorm room somewhere.

iQ font – When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.

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