Types for Life

Typography is both fun and challenging for designers. Selecting the appropriate typeface to communicate the message is not as easy as it seems. I see bad use of types everywhere from bathroom posters to Vietnamese album covers. Most often, designers just slap on new and fancy fonts just to make their works look cool. If you are one of those designers (you know who you are), Imin Pao and Joshua Berger’s 30 Essential Typefaces for a Lifetime is an invaluable investment. The book featured fifteen san serifs (including Avenir, Futura, and Myriad) and fifteen serifs (including Bembo, Minion, and Times New Roman) that you might want to use for your projects. With a brief history, purposes’ suggestion, and well-chosen, real-world examples of each typeface, the book should not leave the designers’ desk. I know it won’t leave mine. And just to show a quick inspiration from the book, I played around with my banner’s assignment for Vassar’s October Break. The experimentation is nothing fancy but gets me to think about communicating with types.