Arbenting

Part 1 – Afterthought Typography, Blogs and Websites
Part 2 – Good Type Gone Bad, Tutorials and Tools
Part 3 – The Kerning Curve, Free Fonts and Other Resources

If how you say something is often times more important than what you say, then more focus needs to be paid to the how and less to the what. And it seems, most designers have this figured out.

In some cases, as above, the entire piece is a flawless collection of type and words.

Good Type Gone Bad

Just because you paid $200 for a font, doesn’t make it the right font for every job you do. Sure you want to get your money’s worth out of the it, but at what true cost? Some designers fall into this trap very easily, and risk the chance of the type becoming overused to the point that it renders the typography to a less expressive role than it should play in the overall design.

This repetition of type choice can also give your designs less of a unique styling, and remove the feel of originality it should convey. If a majority of your designs are committed to one type choice, then they start to have a similar feel after a while. I’m not saying that everyone’s work that happen to use the same font will all have the same feel, but when it continuously comes from one designer, in piece after piece, then those works can start to speak to the viewer in the same way. Each design sharing it’s voice with the others, and again, losing that feel of uniqueness.

If all else fails in the search for the right font, you could always create one as has been done wonderfully here.

Again, let me be clear, that this is not always the case. Some designers are quite adept at still giving each piece a singularity that cannot be taken away, but this is not the case with everyone in the field. So it’s important to be aware of these subtle trespasses that can hinder your designs more than it aids them. So make the right choice for the piece, to prevent good type from turning on you and your work. Simply becoming a signature of sorts, speaking for the designer, rather than speaking for the design.

Tutorials

So after scouring the interwebs searching for some of the top typography tutorials to share in this post, we decided that we were going to keep those to ourselves, and so we found these others to put in their place. Totally kidding, these are some of the finest tutorials in the typographical field that we have had the pleasure of coming across.

Five Simple Steps to Better Typography

10 Examples of Beautiful CSS Typography and How They Did It

Typography and Page Layout

Web Typography Tutorial

Digital Design Manual’s Typography Course

Text as Design

How To Make Your Own Fonts

Web Type 101

Typography Essentials

Big Typography Snowboarding Poster

Super Cool Frilly Bits Typography

Logo Design Project Step by Step Walkthrough

Dynamic Recessed Watercolor Typography in Photoshop

Create a Trendy Typographic Poser Design

3D typographic effects in Photoshop

Dramatic Text on Fire Effect in Photoshop

Create a Spectacular Grass Text Effect in Photoshop

Smooth Glass Type

Simple Burnt-in Text

Tools

They say that it’s human beings’ ability to use tools that help separate us from most animals, and while that may be true, I tend to think it’s human beings’ tendency to act like tools that help make that distinction. Regardless of how the segue works, we have gathered a set of typography based tools that will undoubtedly help craft champion designers who are easily distinguishable from animals with absolutely no design skills whatsoever.

Typetester – Compare Screen Type

CSS Type – Web Safe Typography on Screen

Font Tester

Color Contrast Check

Lorem Ipsum Generator

Identifont – Identify Fonts by Appearance

What The Font – Identify Fonts from an Image

Inspirational Typography

As if the rest of the post wasn’t inspiration enough, we felt that we’d throw in some inspirational typography examples we’ve come across lately, just as we did in Part 1. Hope you enjoy these final five, and that the rest has proven useful as well.

A Final Word

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