Typography, it's Important!

As you’re reading this sentence right now, every word and letter is an example of typography. Typography is not a commonly known term. It essentially is the style and appearance of print, which includes arranging type in certain esthetically pleasing ways.

            What’s so important about typography? Font types and letter structures do not strike readers before the content of the actual text normally, which is its purpose. “If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page…when it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.” Explains Typographer, Adrian Frutiger.

It is meant to allow a reader to absorb the text without being distracted by how it’s written.

            Right now, this particular font, with this particular type style, influences the reader to feel that this writing must be educational and intriguing. Different types of typography persuade the reader to feel certain ways about what they are reading. In an experiment done by Kevin Larson and Rosalin Picard, they proved just that. Out of twenty participants, they gave half of them poor typography, and the other half good typography. Given twenty minutes to read the passage, one test group of participants were interrupted fifteen minutes through, and were asked how long they were reading for. The other test group was interrupted at seventeen minutes and asked the same question. Participants given good typography thought that they had been reading for an average of twelve minutes, both were interrupted after fifteen and seventeen minutes. Unlike participants given bad typography, who assumed a longer amount of time had passed while reading their passage. This experiment proves that the readers with good typography were more engaged in their text.

It is important to be engaged in the text, especially where readers spend most of their time being engaged. Computer fonts are the most common form of typography people encounter. It wasn’t too popular to have fonts until Steve Jobs created the first Macintosh computer. At Reed College, he had taken a calligraphy class, one of the best in the country, and never imagined its beneficial use in the future. He created beautiful typography for Macintosh fonts and since has made an impact on the elegance of fonts on computers. “If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.” Simply put by Jobs at a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005.