IDSA Typography Workshop
2024.02.13
Being a general board member for the CU Boulder chapter of the Industrial Design Society of America, I had the chance to help give back to my Environmental Design (ENVD) program. I wanted to help spread awareness in my program about how important typography (fonts) can be used to help strengthen your designs. Typography carries so much emotion and is a great opportunity to strengthen the story of your work.
For every project we do in the ENVD we have to make a poster, so we practice a lot of graphic design over our 4 year program. These posters are some of the best way to immediately get the message across, the vibe. We only have 2 mandatory classes that discuss graphic design principles so I identified it as a place that the program as a whole could use improvement.
I wanted to make a resource that these students could use for years to come, so I decided to make a webpage full of resources. Next time they have to make a poster they can come to the webpage and revisit all the stuff from the talk. There’s a long history of typography so I wanted to briefly go over some of it to help emphasize how incredible this technology of written language really is. Examples are one of the teaching tools that helps me a lot, so there’s plenty of that in there too. Terminology can be a fun thing to memorize and also really sound like you know what you’re talking about, so I helped everyone brush up the most important typography terminology. Finding a font to perfectly match your project can be a long and arduous process, so I gave plenty of free and paid resources for finding the perfect font for you. Lastly, I wanted to show people the power of editing fonts to express exactly what they should, through an Adobe Illustrator tutorial.
Since finishing the talk, I’ve had multiple people tell me how they’ve used the website and how it has actually helped them land on good fonts and font pairings faster than they normally would, which was super gratifying to hear. I’m excited to be able to give back to my design program more in the coming years and to be on the iDSA board again next year.
-Nick Lankau
