Category: Design

Why typography matters

At its heart, all design is about communication, but the simple fact is that you cannot communicate anything if you have not gotten the other person's attention. Other elements of design may grab your attention, but typography will hold it.

I can try to be the best writer I could be. I will try to hold your attention for as long as I can. But words can only go so far.

In many way , there has never been a harder time to be a writer. People's attention span's have not changed. There just happens to be a lot more distractions than there used to be.

Bad typography really doesn't help. If you want to lose your reader's attention the last thing you need to be doing is exhausting them.

There are the obviously terrible choices, like Comic Sans or Lobster. But those are just awful typefaces. Bad typography is a lot more insidious.

All graphic design is an exercise in communication – no more, no less…

If design doesn't communicate, it's not design.

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The Condition of music?

All art aspires towards the condition of music. Why? Perhaps it's because music is the only art-form which is non-representational. Music needs nothing but itself.

Emmanuel Kant dismissed music for this very reason. He called it enjoyment rather than culture.

It is important to note that not all music can be treated this way. Richard Wagner drew a distinction between abstract, or absolute music, which needed no themes or meaning whatsoever, and program music, which was thematic.

The quote at the top of this page comes from the Victorian art critic Walter Pater, who was commenting on the trend for pictorial arts to move from representational forms to more abstract forms. Music never had that need as music has no need to represent anything. What you hear is what there is.

This applies to the Beatles as much as it does to Beetheoven.

The rhythm of typography, the tonal shift of colour.

Why so many famous graphic designers started off doing music covers.

famous albums and their stories

When does illustration become design?

Can an illustration be a design, or the other way around? One is usually an exercise in expression while the other is an excercise in communication. Are those things contradictory or even mutually exclusive?

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