Summary: (http://knowtech.tv/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/if.png)we often hear "designers" making fun of the classic typefaces. fonts (as they are mostly known as now) such as Comic Sans, Tekton, University Roman, Frankfurter, Souvenir, Bank Gothic and even good old Helvetica are the things we've grown to loath. thing is a just having your way with a font does not you a designer. it's so much more than just a pretty face. how you use type is what makes your presentation, report, brochure and even your website stand out. the "computer" is not a designer all by itself it has grown into a tool that is very good at type. but as good as it can be it's normally setup to mimic a typewriter very, very well. and this the first thing you have to get over. when I taught at the Academy of Art I had to make rules about fonts. I had to forbid use of certain typefaces. it was intended to make projects look better. to force the idea that you should think about type in your movie. fonts by name displayed in their face. Chicago and Geneva where on the list. these were System fonts and had no business being used in production art. the exception to this was if you were using the typeface in the context of how it would really be used. thus if you designed around the pixel blocks of Chicago it could look really good. but I also banned a lot of common fonts that you'd find in everyday use like Courier and Times. I even banned Helvetica. again the thought was to force somebody to make it look better and make them consider something else besides the safe. in the podcast I told a story about how my friend Brad had paid a designer friend of his to teach him to use three fonts. and how it paid off. everything Brad did look like it was designed. not because he was a designer but because he followed the rules that his designer had set up for him. the problem was that it looked like Brad. you could tell that he made it as it always looked that way. my friend Paul does stuff that looks like Paul. which is no coincidence because Paul incidentally met Brad who told Paul the theory of three fonts and Paul adopted it from Brad. and it didn't matter if it was print, video or motion graphics both made things distinct and identifiable to them. the push back from the art students was they didn't like my rules. that they wanted to be lazy and not have to manage fonts. they didn't want to have to install fonts each time they use a different lab machine. I might have changed my rules to allow Helvetica at some point just because I couldn't take the whining. but that came with rules like kerning, tracking, size and weight. and surprise, they didn't like that either. why? the multi-media track didn't have a class on typography and they we're allowed to take the classes offered to the designers. it was a generally refusal to learn type because it wasn't offered. it was really odd. nothing says "I don't care at all about typography than using normal quotation marks." those two "marks" next to the Return key (that's the Enter key for most of you) are a left over from the days of typewriters. the "proper" quote marks can can be made for you automatically or by typing Option-“ and Shift-Option-” on your Mac (you'll need to look it up on the other platforms kids). any doing that every single time is just a pain. so if the quotes make you lose your mind turn on Smart Quotes in your favorite werp. there are a whole bunch of other practical rules for "doing type". all of this is covered in a book called Mac is not a Typewriter (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0201782634?ie=UTF8&tag=knowtech-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0201782634)(http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=knowtech-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0201782634) written by the non-comedian Robin Williams. the book is old, but then so is type. get a copy if you don't have this already. after you learn what there is to learn pass it on to the next type nerd to be.
