Lessons in Typography: Must-know typographic principles presented through lessons, exercises, and examples

Chapter 2. The Art of the Letter

Typographic Voice

Letters have voices. Visual voices that deliver thematic messages like strength, fragility, elegance, angst, conformity, and rebellion. Instinctually, we know about the inference-producing qualities of type, and are affected by them both consciously and subconsciously, every time we look at letters and words that are presented through typefaces.

Designers and nondesigners alike are affected by how fonts can make us feel, but it’s we—the designers of the world—who particularly need to raise our awareness of type’s many moods, since it’s we who are generally responsible for deciding which fonts appear before the eyes of others (and also for establishing the conceptually charged visual environments ...