As you’re reading this sentence and the ones that follow, consider this: in typographic design, as in nature, the whole consists fundamentally of basic parts.
Type & Language is the first of many type courses you’ll be offered in GD. It is a course led by experimentation where you’ll examine the internal and structural energy of type form, the harmony and relationship between alphabetic characters, the relative tonal value of type that exists in all messaging, and the significance of typographic hierarchy as it relates to greater understanding.
Each letterform consists of space and line, solid masses and their absence. When combined (and even individually), we find ourselves confronted with words and passages that express tonal value, textures, planes and compositional tension. The value of a written word and the meaning we take from it are supported and often culturally enhanced by its dedicated visual representation – as a lone wolf, in proximity with other words, accompanied by imagery, by how they’re arranged in space… the list goes on.
So what does all this look like? The projects in this course are essentially a sampling of what is to come in the following semesters: anything from a simple ad to branding, web design, and motion.
“Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages” Steven Heller