Note: This series of articles are a work in progress. It’s in the process of being written, so there might be corrections along the way, as well as new articles.

Index

Introduction | Learning To See | Overshooting | The Stroke: Optics

I own a lot of books. It’s my consumerist pitfall: whenever I go to a bookshop and don’t find anything of my liking, I get upset. And since I rarely read fiction, my collection ranges from neuroscience to economics, from art theory to politics, from hypnosis to type design.

And, maybe for professional reasons, typography books are the ones that annoy me most. With all the hype of typography around the web, type-related publications are everywhere. But most of them are superficial font catalogs, recipe books that tell you not to use Adobe’s optical kerning and other things like “this is a stem, this is a bowl” – “and now that you know this, you’re in the 1% of the graphic design population that are good in what they do”.

But I always have a look on what bookstores have on typography. And there are priceless gems: The Elements of Typographic Style is a must have, Counterpunch is a delicious read, The Stroke is fascinating from start to end, Size-specific Adjustments to Type Designs is worth every penny, Cómo Crear Tipografías is a good read, and the list goes on.

Every time I feel that these books give me some insight, no matter how niche they are, I get happy. Maybe the feeling that a 40-year-old woman gets out of the latest Richard Bach book is the same that I get out of a ultra-niche type-related technical book.

And yet, I still have lots of doubts.

The métier of producing type is a constant doubt-and-choose-and-doubt process. So, this series of articles is my personal view on how I tackle (or try to!) these daily things, an ongoing exercise on thinking what I do.

Hope you enjoy it!