Course Description: Provides hands-on artistry of the letterform. Design original fonts, artistic and technical formation, and relationship to page layout. Historical formatting of major typography families, terminology, and professional standards. Understanding of how fonts can provoke emotions and how font selection can push someone to take specific actions.
Students learn the basics of typography, where it came from, standard definitions of page layout, and how different styles of fonts are used. I focus mainly on the effects that typefaces and fonts have on consumers. We discuss topics around emotions. We have class discussions about how specific typefaces and fonts can persuade a person to believe that something can be true or false.
This class also does a special class project. This semester the project was the Affirmation Station.
Student design projects include:
Personal word cloud, The bad menu design, Product packaging redesign, Simple magazine story spread, Create your own OTF font, Signage for the Milwaukee Zoo, Vintage ad redesigned to a new billboard, and the final project: Student Organization Poster designed using nothing but typefaces. This class is also required to show their student portfolios at the school's Scholar's Day event.
Student project examples are shown below
Student Feedback:
"It felt like a safe space to be creative, make mistakes, and get help. I knew that the work I was doing was important, but I didn't feel stressed."
"The teacher was very opened minded an would not stop for anything to help us out if needed. Great projects and timing for them as well."
