Typography

At the heart of typography is a massive paradox: the hallmark of good typography is that it should go unnoticed, yet there has never been more demand for the sort of typography that grabs the reader's attention and excites the retina. Does this mean typography is the new illustration?

Typography is a pretty reliable guide to a nation's character. Typography in Tokyo is feverish and urgent; typography in rural France is languid and traditional; Dutch typography is intellectual and restrained; typography in the United States is strident and omnipresent.

It is not only a sense of place and nationality that can be conveyed through typography. So recognisable is its footprint that entire eras can be defined in a few stray letterforms. All we need is a few characters of an Art Deco font and we are propelled back to the 1930s.

We live in a world where communication is conducted on many levels, and typography - its style, size and colour - is one of the ways in which we convey added 'meaning'. Its no longer enough for type to be type. It has to impart resonance and depth to the messages it is delivering. We see this most clearly in brand names that have no obvious meaning. How we identify these 'brands' is through the typographic rendition of the name; change the type, and the brand 'value' evaporates. this makes type a powerful force in the modern brand economy.

Graphic Design: A User's Manual by Adrian Shaughnessy