Roberto Blake | Typography | Graphics Design Is

Many designers, have and will continue to underestimate the amazing power and range of typography.
There are several reasons for this, but the reality is that typography is essential to a design skill set.
When stacked against photo-manipulation, digital painting, vexel artwork, and animation, the prospect of working with type, doesn’t sound all that exciting to most people.
Truthful, its because they don’t know any better.

All of the above mentioned techniques/skills can be incorporated into typography or used to balance it.
The range of design styles to which typography can be utilized is nearly unlimited, in fact there are very few designs that would not benefit from having typography introduced to them at some level.

So how can typography make me a better designer?
By getting used to the idea of conveying your message visually with type you can save yourself a lot of time creatively. The process for a design that uses a lot of photographic elements, or elements that are hand drawn, or digital illustrations is extensive. This does not even include the time it takes to develop inspiration or the process of experimentation. The work in editing and adjusting your images before you actually even start designing is very involved.

With type you can jump right into things without having to extract, adjust levels or curves, or work within alpha channels. The fact that if you’re working with Adobe Illustrator, all of your artwork is scalable and easy to reproduce, or move over to work with your other elements doesn’t hurt either.