Typography lecture, part one

Okay, here is my official first foray into informative blogging. Please, critique me, because I've always been crap at writing well-organized non-fiction essays.


The purpose of typography is to communicate clearly. The type you're looking at right now communicates little relative to the type itself. The clarity of information is mostly limited to my own writing skills and possibly the font settings of your browser. (Are you trying to read this in dark red type on a black background? Are you masochistic?) But with the magic of typography, I could emphasize different points (as I will farther down. Behold the power of lists!) That involves more subtle stuff that I'll talk about later. For now, I'm going to start with type you see everyday, in branding and logos. Everyone wants to communicate with us for their own purposes. In the case of most logos, they want our money. Obama, with his distinctive logo, wants our vote. (And I'm not dissing him for that. I can't think of any other candidates who've used typography, graphic design and the marketing arts like he has. The guy knows what he's doing.)
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