Techy? Sometimes. Funny? Often. Relevant? Always.

It’s typography week! While this is an exciting topic for me as a designer, hopefully by Friday you’ll be able to see the value and appreciate the power of well set type.

Typography includes the act of arranging type and the art of designing typefaces (which you might know as fonts). While that may not seem like a prestigious career path, I believe type designers have one of the largest roles in shaping the direction of advertising. While you may not be designing your own typefaces, if you’ve ever written an email, typed a report, or scrawled “Yard Sale” on a piece of bristol board using a sharpie you’ve taken part in the powerful but often misused practice of typography.

The awareness of good typography is starting to reach a much larger audience thanks to efforts of people like Gary Hustwit, who filmed Helvetica, an entire documentary on a single typeface (a family of fonts). Even in the lowest form of advertising on the planet—car commercials—type is finally being used as the great communicator it always has been.

Consider the word “Worthwhile” displayed in the following ways:

Looking at each of those individually, what would your thoughts be about Worthwhile based solely on the typeface selection?

Here are my first thoughts:

(1) A Bridal Shop

(2) A Western Ranch

(3) A Financial Group

All of those are very cliche uses of these typefaces, but not without a reason. I probably wouldn’t want to use any of these if I were trying to promote, say, a construction company. That’s an extreme example, but notice how what I’m trying to communicate affects what typeface I select. That’s also not to say that you should always use the most obvious of font choices either (in fact I’d discourage against it, be different!).

Much more effort goes into effective typography than simply choosing a font from the list your Mac or PC displays in Word, but the principle can still be applied: What you want to communicate affects how you communicate.