Teaching Taste through Typography: American Pedagogy for a Consumer Culture
Thursday, February 13, 2020: 9:30 AM
Williford B (Hilton Chicago)
Typography is the art of organizing text in an effective visual structure. To teach this art,
educators describe methods relevant to contemporary technological tools, stylistic trends, and rules that have been passed along for decades. Much of what we teach is taste—a kind of connoisseurship of font selection, appropriate page layouts, and a discerning eye between good and bad typography. This presentation will examine three post-Bauhaus books that were (and to some extent, still are) influential in American design education, comparing them to commercial typographic expressions of their time. Emil Ruder’s Typographie: A Manual of Design (1967) offers a series of formal, organized, and elegant typographic exercises with numerous methodical iterations. Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type, 1828–1900 (1979) reasserts the significance of 19th century typography at a moment when it would have been out of fashion. Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (1992) catalogs a range of rules and etiquette for postmodern designers seeking to confront an eclectic professional design landscape. Each of the texts includes inspirational examples of contemporary typography as a tool for consumerism—from postage stamps to event posters and typeface design—creating a canon of typographic form which informed both students and practitioners. Using comparative analysis and social contextual research, each text will be considered next to contemporary design trends to infer relationships between typographic education and professional practice.
educators describe methods relevant to contemporary technological tools, stylistic trends, and rules that have been passed along for decades. Much of what we teach is taste—a kind of connoisseurship of font selection, appropriate page layouts, and a discerning eye between good and bad typography. This presentation will examine three post-Bauhaus books that were (and to some extent, still are) influential in American design education, comparing them to commercial typographic expressions of their time. Emil Ruder’s Typographie: A Manual of Design (1967) offers a series of formal, organized, and elegant typographic exercises with numerous methodical iterations. Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Type, 1828–1900 (1979) reasserts the significance of 19th century typography at a moment when it would have been out of fashion. Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style (1992) catalogs a range of rules and etiquette for postmodern designers seeking to confront an eclectic professional design landscape. Each of the texts includes inspirational examples of contemporary typography as a tool for consumerism—from postage stamps to event posters and typeface design—creating a canon of typographic form which informed both students and practitioners. Using comparative analysis and social contextual research, each text will be considered next to contemporary design trends to infer relationships between typographic education and professional practice.