Letters and words with StYlE...

It absolutely astounds me how vast the human ability to create a work of art has always been. Now, I say art here, not necessarily literature because before I look at the content of a piece of hand crafted word play, I look at the pictographic appeal of it first. Thus the lovely invention of word processing both intrigues and saddens me. See, we have covered the idea of print versus handwriting already in class but I do feel that it is pertinent to this unit as well. The History of Typography wasn’t necessarily something I wanted to learn about but knew was necessary.
At first, I trudged along through the reading, wanting nothing more that for it to just go on and be over so I could move on to more interesting aspects of my education. But, my eyes stomped heavily across the words on the screen; I quickly became much more interested in what I was reading. See, they began to use diagrams that allowed me to not only see the technical side of the different styles of type, but the art in them. The different angles, minute variations in line angle, stoke size, they all pointed to the artistic flow of words in a visual sense as opposed to an analytical or intellectual sense. Things I had never really thought about were brought to my awareness and, even now, as I type this blog, I wonder if I could or would change the type to convey a mood, or perhaps just an abstract of my opinion.
I used to change the font on the computer according to “how I felt” that day, thinking it didn’t really make a difference and never really wondering where the different types of print even came from. But now I sit here scrolling through the different types of, well, type and I can’t help but see them in a new and much more appreciative light.