My sophomore year in college I took my Graphic Design II class, which was all about typography. There was one exercise where we were given a printout of a typeface and a sample paragraph. We would grab our roll of tracing paper and trace the letters, while kearing the paragraph. We'd then critique each other's work (3 hour studios are LONG) and go back to get another paragraph. This went on for a couple weeks. You either loved the routine or dreaded it. I hated themonotony of this exercise. I loved the working with type. I think it was at this point that I started to fall in love with letter forms.
I've created a few typefaces in the past, one was even shown at the ATypI conference in 2003, but ever since getting my feet totally immersed in web design, my "typophilia" has been put on hold. It's not something I'm proud of, it's just I never had to time actually start caring about type on the web. I would define my "font" attribute in the CSS and that was that.
It's mainly out of this frustration that I've decided to redesign this site with a greater focus on the typographic elements. This is a blog after all, a place to read content. It's not going to be big type (aka Shaun's new redesign) it's going to be more focused type (it'll also include a few new features). Maybe this time I'll get around to that About page as well.
And that's where I've been for the past month.
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