“Type Matters” by John Boardley—event writeup

• In: ブログ
• By: Oli
• June 3, 2010

Presented at Apple Ginza on May 19th, 2010 (ATND page)

Web Directions East was honored to present John Boardley, the international typographic man of mystery behind www.ilovetypography.com (plus www.welovetypography.com and The Font Game). John talked about typographic history and the importance of typography, while giving some guidance on how to improve our designs.

The speech began with John describing the pervasive nature of typography, and the awesome significance of this invention. He then took us back into the distant past, covering the rationalisation of pictograms to pure symbols, due to the pressures of writing ― from hieroglyphs and cuneiform, through rune-like Phonecian then Carolingian miniscule, to the latin alphabet. Many people were surprised to discover the alphabet originally lacked the letters G, J, U and W.

He then presented everyone in the audience with a piece of movable type(!), before describing Gutenberg’s contribution to history, and the process of printing in those days. I was really surprised to see ancient progressive enhancement at work ― the space to be occupied by beautiful versal (drop cap) letters initially just had the desired letter in small, plain script, to indicate to the Rubrician where to add the bling. The beauty of these ancient texts, and the strength of their typography, is impressive.

John then demonstrated how different typefaces convey different emotions, and affect communication. The Comic Sans-entitled Audrey Hepburn photo, and series of different movie genres conveyed using the same photo, were strong and humorous examples. He then described his “keys to good typography”, using the initialism CSHW:

In particular John felt that many designers have a fear of white space, especially in Japan (he described the blank white slide introducing white space as the most important in the presentation! :-). Taking care with these four will give a solid typographic base for your design.

After briefly touching on letter spacing, John mentioned the websites of Craig Mod (日本語), Jason Santa Maria and Information Architects Japan (日本語) as examples of excellent typography. He then took questions and gave out a bunch of nice swag.

Thanks for a great talk John!

You can follow John on Twitter at (strangely enough) @ilovetypography.

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