Wow. According to Wikipedia, old Aldie also invented the pocket book and italics.
Criminy. Imagine having that on your CV.
What are you guys going on about? One part of this thread seems like it’s a discussion of font aesthetics, one part is about the general nature of “design” as both a craft and a concept, and one part sounds like you all went to some party where women wearing “Bitches with Dictionaries” baby doll T-shirts were running around smacking poor spellers, sentence manglers, and adjective abusers upside the head with giant wobbling penis pens.
You evil, evil man.
I would literally walk out of a meeting that was arguing about the font. If it’s that artsy, then I don’t have anything to contribute. I deal with facts and even verbal impressions, but if the art nerds are going to argue like the people here about “what would win, the Enterprise or a Star Destroyer?”, then I’m out. If my eloquent vocabulary choice and turn of phrase can’t win your heart, and you need a font, I probably don’t need your support.
I’m a designer. But the person who harbors contempt for me has been banned?
Did I uh… well, I’ll just come out and say it… did I do that with my mind?
Behold the power of art.
I keep telling people that you just don’t fuck with designers, but they never listen.
‘sigh’, if ONLY that were true, my life would be a blessed one indeed.
Instead I slog for hours, getting screwed on costs by clients who carry views frighteningly similar to the OP and who use their 10 year old as the last judge of my work because they just won an art prize in class.
I actually watched that documentary about a month or so ago - on PBS? It was indeed a bit pompous and self congratulatory.
At any rate, regarding FONTS:
I teach at a college and many of my courses are in graphic design. You cannot imagine how difficult it is for students to begin working with various fonts.
First of all, you have “newbies” who get carried away and start using fonts that are almost totally unreadable, and then they add a thick stroke around it, fill it with some bizarre color and make the letters too tiny to read. (They also seem to love having only a solid black background.) Usually, all I have to do is say, “Stand up, step back two feet and tell me what you see. Would this be a good sign or magazine cover?” Only then do they realize it is often convenient for people to be able to read something from more than 6 inches from the page.
I have others who see no problem with slapping 10 or more different fonts on a single page…their philosophy is: “If fonts are there, I must use them all!” It winds up looking like a kidnapper’s note cut out of magazines.
Then there are others who use the same boring, default font in every single thing they do.
One of the courses I unfortunately don’t teach is Typography; it is a very valuable course and one of the things students have to do is create their own fonts from scratch. Whenever I have a student who has taken that course, they suddenly seem to “get it” and I start seeing some really interesting presentations.
The point is, it might be easy to look at something and say, “that’s crap” but it does take some time for student designers to experiment and learn what works and what doesn’t work - depending on the project and purpose. Eventually, they start to develop their own styles - some great, some good, and some - in others’ opinions, still crap. The goal is not to please everyone - but create something that that exceeds the expectations of the client as well as be something they can be proud of creating.
Yes! There seems to be a perception that the creatives who come up with logos, theme lines, ads, etc get rich from the really successful ones. Just to clarify for anyone who doesn’t work in the industry: we get paid a salary, or if we’re freelancers we get paid for our time, but we don’t get royalties from our ideas. If we design a brilliant logo that helps the company make a gazillion dollars, we get our salary, and possibly a small bonus.
If they exist they’re probably stupid.