How being introduced to good typography ruined me.

Studying any subject for an extended period of time is going to change the way you approach anything even remotely related to it. As an art director, I live eat and breathe design, technology, pop culture, and anything else I could potentially use to relate to an audience or utilize in a future campaign. As at least two of those subjects (technology and pop culture) make up the majority of any 23-year-old’s life anyway, and my studying them for work forces me to critique almost everything I consume.

Every designer or artist is going to find his or her personal pet peeves, elements of their craft that have to be done just right, or we consider it completely wrong. Mine is typography. I’m not about to declare myself brilliant at it, but I can easily say, every design is better with proper typeface decisions and attention paid to kerning and placement. It’s also a very subjective field, so for every piece I sit in my corner and worship the artist who created it, there’s probably a blog post ripping it apart.

That being said, I think there are some things we can all agree on: there is a tone to every typeface and it has to match the tone of your words. In case you all haven’t seen The Hunger Games (and you should really rectify that anyway), this is a recreation of the opening to the movie.

It introduces a barbaric game where children are forced to kill each other to ensure their own survival. It’s also written in Century Gothic (I’m like 98% sure, and if it’s not, it’s close enough). You may recognize Century Gothic from logos for The Ellen Show, The Discovery Channel, and Weezer. Obviously the introduction of a movie about the struggle to survive and murder are going for the same tone as Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show.

My point is every typeface choosen has a great deal of impact for the mood the viewers are in when they consume any ad/poster/movie/whatever piece of media. I acknowledge that I am a special case, but it took me a great deal of time to get into the movie after this intro, because I wasn’t ready to take anything seriously. The type didn’t match the words, didn’t match the music and I was too busy fangirling at a midnight show to be ready for the seriousness of the first bits of the film.

Bad type kills ideas.