desktop asked type lecturer, Peter Ogden, to share his thoughts on the industry.

Finding the time to push yourself further with your typography, taking it from being purely functional to something more expressive (when called for) will forever be one of the challenges when you’re just starting out, largely due to the time and effort it takes simply to learn the rules in the first place. The ability to digest a piece of text and to then bring it to life in an emphatically meaningful fashion comes through research and practice, and that will always take time – something that is increasingly lacking in many designers’ schedules.

One of the best things about being a student is that you are afforded time and space in which learning through mistakes and discovery is very much encouraged. The experimentation that is at the heart of expressive typography is the driver to these discoveries and, without setting aside sufficient time in the process to play around and flout the rules a little, you run the risk of producing a lot of safe design solutions. Some would argue there’s nothing wrong with safe design – which can be true to a degree – however, unless your portfolio can actually demonstrate that ‘passion for typography’ youspeak of through a degree of experimentation, then you’re really showing very little in the way of potential – something employers are always on the lookout for.

It goes without saying that research plays an integral part in typographic development. The ability to work with type, as Ellen Lupton puts it, “with wit and wisdom,” requires a good understanding of how various typefaces came to be.

Indeed, having an understanding of how those typefaces can also be manipulated, reappropriated and given new life also benefits from research, for which we can give thanks to the proliferation of graphic design-focused blogs. The risk with these very blogs, of course, is that their tangential whims can starve you of even more precious time in your design practice. As important as it is to look, it is arguably more important to do. Or, perhaps more pertinently, to play.

As children, play allowed us to develop into richer, more rounded individuals. Arguably, the more valuable lessons learned through play were those that resulted from the testing, tampering with and negotiation of the rules that had been instilled in us. This illustrates just how valuable play can be, and perhaps how critical it is in our profession that time is set aside for it. Your abilities as a truly creative graphic designer can only be realised through enriching your experience in play. This is where you get your hands dirty – you afford yourself the ability to develop and hone your craft, you make discoveries and you begin to realise your potential.

Now, as ever, it is what you do with the time you have that matters most. With your typography, you will find it gradually becomes easier (dangerously so, in fact) to work with a tried and tested set of type principles and choices; however, to really feed that inner desire to create the ‘new’ – perhaps the most primal of a creative’s instincts – you need to ensure you’re taking the time to have some fun.

shillingtoncollege.com.au

From desktop magazine.