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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Ok guys, how do I get “into” this?

I can respect the impact that the right typography has on a document or graphic design

But actually evaluating and synthesizing outcomes based on what I know about font families and specific nuance of letter formation is foreign to me

And every comment on this thread reads like satire to me

I’m really sitting here like “who cares”, like always when it comes to font and typography discussion. But I at least want to know how the rest of you all got here. Where to start?

I’m a little beyond “I dont know why I like this logo/site” but quite a bit before “Ah yes, obliques! Touch me, Senpai~”

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There are a lot of different things to be interested in. At one end visual/graphic design is interesting because, like engineering, it's seeking optimum performance among constraints. Neue Hass Grotesk might technically "outperform" other specific fonts in specific contexts, enabling you to find, say, a restroom at the airport faster and with less effort than if the sign were in Fraktur.

On another end of it, there's the recognition that what often starts off as efficient or economical in one context will form a cultural symbiosis with that context, carrying it around for decades or centuries to follow. That's why Cooper Black might remind you of cheerful commercialism from the 70s, but it also explains how seeing Eurostyle on a fried chicken menu will give you a very specific idea about how much you'll be paying and what the condiments will be like.

In between, there's "crazy lizard brain stuff" like the Bouba/kiki effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Typography, and more broadly design, have a big impact on the way you perceive things. The rabbit hole is endless, but I recommend three entry points:

- The Design Trilogy of films, made up of Helvetica, Objectified, and Urbanized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Trilogy

- The book Universal Principles of Design by William Lidwell

- The 101 Things I Learned In... series. There isn't one for typography, unfortunately, but the Fashion, Urban Design, Architecture, and Product Design books cover similar territories.

I suggest “The Elements of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst. Already the first 5 pages come with a quick guide to typographic elements and history that made me fascinated.

This is the book, can't recommend it high enough. It works for those who are just looking for the intro and those who are knee-deep in the subject already.

An absolutely fantastic read and a pleasure to look at. Also, some editions use Touche paper for the cover, so it got a very nice feel to it too :)

My entrypoint was "Thinking with Type" from Ellen Lupton which gives a very nice and broad introduction to typography. Highly recommend it

I also discovered https://practicaltypography.com/ in a HN commment a few years back, it's brilliant and may give you a quicker start.

There aren’t only the functional aspects to consider when choosing a typeface: the cultural and formal aspects are also pertinent for the (hopefully erudite and passionate) designer.

Does the font originate from the beginning of the previous century? Is it an Italian or an American design? Is it a new edition or a redesign of a classic version? Is the historical context of the font relevant to the meaning of the text? Sometimes it may be just a formal choice: a particular glyph has an interesting, funny or pointy shape and this could help setting the mood of the text.

The questions is: what characteristics can be expressed with the choice of a particular typeface? Of course for the reader the contents of the text can be accessed without knowing any of these details, but there are more layers of information (and beauty) available.

I’m absolutely no expert in font matters but for me the interest started by reading the history of design and its actors: the Trajan's Column, Gutenberg, Bodoni, the industrial revolution, mechanical typesetting, OCR, PostScript, etc. History is also marked by how text is represented and reproduced.

Bringhurst has already been mentioned, but before that what helped me was to learn the vocabulary. Knowing what Spur and Spine are, being able to distinguish between Counter and Eye, having an idea about Humanist and Rational, etc. The point is not so much the terms but learning their meaning makes you see a world you didn't see before. It will even be impossible to "unsee" it once you have it. It will help you to understand a lot of typography talk and help to distinguish between serious arguments and the nonsense talk, which undoubtedly is prevalent in design discussion.

My school in this regard was the early fontblog.de, but this was 15 years ago and I couldn't find a good example in their archive. It was all in German anyways, so not so helpful for most here. A more recent resource is maybe Stephen Coles' "The Anatomy of Type" which gives a compact overview of the important terms, has tons of examples and a good introduction to a basic set of standard typefaces.

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