Reflection: Typography
In high school, we spent a lot of time doing projects. Some were writing projects, some were hands on projects that had to do with building- but most of the projects that I encountered in high school were poster board/advertisement projects, where you would present your topic, but in a “fun” kind of way. I never really thought of it as anything until we did this typography assignment in Learning by Doing. A lot of what we did with these posters/projects could have been considered typography- the art of writing and making things look appealing.
I enjoyed experimenting with the different activities we did. One thing I thought was interesting was the metal typing- I thought that was cool. I then translated my learning of this into doing it. I wrote my name in different fonts and sizes on Adobe Illustrator. I think that this application will be useful for me in the future when I’m writing letters or even just projects for other classes when I want to emphasize something. I also think that typography could be coupled with artificial intelligence to do some awesome things. Another part of the activity that was appealing to me were some of the prompts like “How would a construction worker sign their name?”. This made me think. Obviously, I had to think about this and create my example, but I was interested in how artificial intelligence would do it, so I put the same prompt into the search bar. It gave me a picture of the word “construction worker” almost in a cursive, but it looked like it had been written with dirt. Now, I probably could’ve thought of that and illustrated that on Adobe Illustrator, but I thought it was fascinating that ChatGPT could do that.
I learned quite a bit more than I had already known about typography by doing these activities and assignments. I forget what I used when I was in high school, but it wasn’t as innovative and interesting as using Adobe Illustrator. I plan on using this in the future for projects, essays, and creative writing. Something a little more specific- I have an essay that is due in the beginning of October for my OSEH class, and I plan on using typography to emphasize some important things: its focus is on safety so there will be plenty of subject matter to emphasize, I’m sure. I might mess around with it a bit on ChatGPT as well just to further dive into typography.