Top 10 Typography Tips

OK... so I have changed the title from Top Ten Terrible Typefaces to Top Ten Typography Tips. Obviously in the real; world I could not have done this! But unfortunately, it fits the work I have actually produced much better.

The short essay this quote comes from is all about the Crystal Goblet, which is the most effective typography. Typefaces are supposed to be transparent, and not detract from the message of the content.

This title also gives it a more educational slant, which was intended all along.

More detail...
More 4 have commissioned a educational series for designers focusing on the fundamentals. The series will run for 5 weeks and consists of a weekly episode documenting top tips for that week’s topic.

1. Typography
2. Image
3. Colour
4. Print
5. Digital

My title sequence and idents will be produced for the episode on typography. Also, each episode would start with a appropriate quote which would also relate to the top ten tips. The other epidodes would use a similar identity by keepiing Helvetica Neue as the font, but all other aspects would vary to support the topic.

Type specific episode...

Beatrice Warde explores serious typography as a magnificent metaphor titled “The Crystal Goblet”. An exquisite vintage of wine can be showcased in either a clear, thin and transparent glass, or one of solid gold, covered in pattern. The Crystal Goblet is the perfect typographic dream, to communicate to the reader without being acknowledged. By being inconspicuous, the reader can receive the message, without being distracted by ‘noise’ created from the typeface, “Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.”. If we decipher her intricate story, we understand that the wine is the content and the glass is the typeface, for which is designed to be transparent and revel the contents, “the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it.”. She terms perfect type as ‘the transparent page’, meaning that the typography is not what the reader focusses on, but infact gets lost in the message. Those ‘popular’ excentric designers of our world will probably pass off ‘serious’ typography as a boring and meaningless task, which only matters to typographers themselves, however “there is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page.”