Lecture Three - The History of Typography

Okay I know most people who look at the title will probably just not even bother skimming the text below because it sounds so boring, and yes for most of the lecture I was quite bored and slightly falling asleep (sorry) but from what I understand from my notes it's not all that boring given that typography actually has a history and there are reasons behind why certain fonts look the way they do.

So the first thing that stood out to me was that type can be classified into 6 different "families", which are; humanist; old style; transitional; modern; Swiss modern and Bauhaus modern; contemporary. This could be extremely useful when trying to determine which type would best suite your work if you knew which type came under which family (unfortunately I don't), as you could match the type closet to your ideas or messages you are trying to portray throughout your work.

The second thing was that typography exists within both visual and verbal communication; typography is meta-communication, para-linguistics and kine-sics. I don't really understand all that well what this actually means at the moment and I should probably go on and read a little more into to it so I can get at least a well grounded basic understanding of the history of typography in order to be able to use it to my advantage. However, this lecture did give me an understanding into the power of type and how, when the correct type is used, it can draw attention to your work and work alongside it to make your message clearer.