Here is another article you should read in it’s entirety! But to sum up why I think it’s important for a student is that the really cool jobs you want like those at Wieden + Kennedy and Pentagram, just to name a few, are full of really smart people, who know design history and typography and can spot its misuse a mile away. So you really need to stop and think if your choice of typeface is appropriate or if not appropriate, that the decision was purposeful and can be defended vigorously. Here is a snippet of the article, the rest can be read over at Deign Observer.
“What made you choose this typeface?” I inquired of a lovely young woman whose senior project involved a series of book jackets for Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams.
“I liked how modern it was,” she replied.
“Did you read the book?”
She blushed, shook her head no, and looked down at her lap.
I tried a different approach. “Do you know what year this book was published?”
Again, she shook her head, and apologized for the lapse in research. But I wasn’t so interested in the apology (a common refrain, particularly among students) as I was concerned that she was about to graduate and had no fundamental knowledge of design history — a failure of the curriculum, and by conjecture, of the faculty. I explained that when Freud’s book was published in 1899 (and in it’s first English edition the subsequent year) it’s impact was significant — that the whole notion of addressing the subconscious was seen as wholly unprecedented, even radical at the time. And yes, broadly speaking, such a novel concept might be considered to be “modern” — and what might that entail, typographically? I could see that an abbreviated lecture on the rise of modernism in America would be about as pointless as quoting George Santayana — or even Harry Truman — and besides, the next student was already awaiting his turn for review — but the bottom line was: why Futura?
“I just kind of liked it.”
Clearly, designers make choices about the appropriateness of type based on any number of criteria, and “liking it” is indeed one of them. There are an infinite number of considerations to be taken into account, from readability to copyfitting to concerns over what works on a screen to what translates into other languages. Followers of the Beatrice Warde school of thought believe that typography should be invisible, while an equal argument can (and should) be made on behalf of expressive typography — type that extends and amplifies its message through more robust gestures in form, scale and composition. (Guillaume Apollinaire’s caligrammes preceded Renner’s Futura by more than a decade: might not these be considered modern, too?)
