The Use of Moveable Type

‘Typography’ is a word that gets used pretty freely to mean a lot of different things that aren’t exactly typography. Yesterday, @okaytype tweeted, “What is worse: not knowing the difference between Type and Lettering or not knowing the difference between Typography and Type Design?”

I’m not much of a purist. I have strong opinions but usually lack the endurance to follow through. So I guess I don’t really care that ‘typography’ is an umbrella term for type, actual typography, lettering, and type design, except when that’s voiced by graphic designers.

I teach typography, and by ‘typography’ I mean the use of moveable type, which is of course to say moveable digital type. Like I said, I’m not a purist; there’s no lead involved. What I teach is how to use type: beginning with identifying and acknowledging the anatomy and structure of letterforms, and proceeding to composing individual words by teaching how to explore scale, mass/weight, orientation, legibility (or, how much of a letter needs to be seen in order to identify it, which is not to be mistaken for readability) to communicate an emotive message.

And I teach that, gruelingly, for a full semester in Typography I, with only a scant venture into sentences, paragraphs, leading, and the stuff of multiple pages. 

I teach this way because I think that too much of the other stuff, like type design and lettering, gets in the way of the nuts-and-bolts craft of ‘setting’ good type. Students (and let’s face it, a lot of working designers) often rely too much on stylized display fonts to do the communicating and drop the ball on both craft and subtlety.

That’s why I also give my students this other definition of typography: the visual manifestation of language. 

More on that lovely statement, soon…