This week I attended Australian Infront’s Typecast talk. Luca Ionescu (Like Minded Studio) was accompanied by Gemma O’brien, Keith Morris and Wayne Thompson (Australian Type Foundry) to discuss the process of creating typefaces and letterforms and the future of typography. For those of us who are type enthusiasts a typeface can be the key to bringing a project together to perfection, but a bad typeface can just as easily make you run away from any shop that has its store name set in Comic Sans. There’s no doubt creating a typeface (complete with glyphs and punctuation) is a timely process where typographers intensely labour over every detail making sure every component fits together uniformly. These days however, there are free websites that allow anyone to create their own font and a plethora of font foundries to choose from, but where do you draw the line between a good typeface and a really bad one?
Typography these last 5 years has seen a resurgence of decorative lettering and much more illustrative rather than creating type for bodies of text. A common trend seen in typography today favours the old hand crafted look, as type connoisseur Erik Spiekermann perfectly puts it:
The state of typography has always been a good indicator of the general state of affairs. The trends were all pointing back in time, pastiche being the operative word, nostalgia the main trend.
I think it’s safe to say typography will always be typography; it’s the medium in which it is presented that changes. Although the current trend points back in time to nostalgic hand scripted lettering, it is being presented on print and screen, the next stepping stone will perhaps see type more heavily influenced by moving image and animation, which of course adds a whole new dimension. The way letters appear and transition will become an integral part of the design process. I personally love hand crafted print work, so for now I am going to enjoy the revival of letterpress and hand drawn calligraphy.
♥ BC
