Two: Shinzo's Dead (07-08-22)
Living in America during times of turmoil in other countries is an interesting experience in so far as it is the only time Americans experience the level of disconnectedness from news reporting that is a daily feature of life elsewhere in the world. Shinzo Abe's death by assassination is entirely meaningless to Americans, and yet the shock and awe of gun violence and political assassination in the orient will grip American's attention for at least the day's news cycle. Boris Johnson's clunky resignation, while more likely to have an impact on American economics and trade relations, is too complex and procedural for American audiences to understand or care about.
Onto the original destiny of today's timekiller: Fonts. This font is Times New Roman, a vestige of the rudimentary internet where computers were seen as a tool to produce simulacrums of older technologies like typewritten documents. Serif fonts have fallen out of fashion in the age of the slick website and short-form content, where they are seen as needlessly ornate and inappropriately anachronistic. Other fonts that once formed the adolescent written personality of the internet include Papyrus, any number of kitsch handwritten scripts, Impact, and the ever maligned Comic Sans. Now Sans-Serif fonts that do not attempt to replicate the conditions of the physical typesetting past or handwriting are ubiquitous and almost required in any professional setting. Times New Roman or other similar serif fonts are often adopted by the button-up desperately professional fields like law and financial services, where the irony of using a faux-physical type is lost on salarymen whose main interest is preserving the air of difficulty and expertise long exported to software.
My day job is paying $12,000 a year to teach myself architecture. One thing I've learned, besides that the adage of a C-student doctor still being a doctor is true for architects and engineers, is that graphic design is apparently not deceptively simple or intuitive. It is comical how often other students will use some of the aforementioned presently unprofessional fonts for projects that serve no purpose other than demonstrating their creator's ability to see past present design trends into the ether of "spacial design". Using a fancy Ye Olde Scripte Font for a project located in a historical neighborhood is the sort of obvious design decision that should immediately be disregarded as fluff, not only detracting from the presentation of the architectural design, but distracting from good composition. Using Impact for a title block is more excusable as without its white interior and black border from image macros, it could be mistaken for a regular bold Sans-Serif. However- the brain notices even if the subject does not, and the associations of Impact and inane humor are forged into the subconscious so deeply that using this font for architectural presentations, or any professional display, will immediately override any intended effects to produce a strange air of expectation of satire despite no satire existing.
To the point of subconscious noticing, the project that sparked my frustration with naivety around font choice by using Impact for a title block was also titled "Sol Library" by its student creator. This student explicitly stated that their high rise, tilted planes, PV cell coated building was inspired by London's Shard and dubbed "Sol" as an ode to its solar absorption. Sol, of course, being the Roman personification of the Sun, is again an obvious expression of the solar power design focus of the project through a short and punchy name, but there is an apparently less than obvious shortcoming to this name: it makes no sense. Sol, the sun, emits light rather than absorbing it, generating energy rather than converting it. Naming the project Sol Library succeeded in attracting attention to its main focus of extensive PV arrays, but subconsciously confused an audience and potentially demonstrated a lack of higher thought in the creator to the jury.
I present this incredibly minor gripe about naming convention and font choice as a concrete example of the need for totality in design and presentation. Obvious choices should be met with skepticism, and easy associations usually lack extensive justification that would bolster the quality of the source design. This level of basic effort is endemic to the architecture program at my middle-rank state school, and a barrier to the artistic success of its students. Perhaps this is only a microcosm manifestation of the Bell-Curve middle intelligence of the majority of Americans, and to nag is to show a lack of maturity in dealing with people who are making design choices ultimately more informed and considered than Nancy McHumanResources's powerpoint transition selections. More likely and less pessimistically, these uniformed decisions are the result of poor education by disinterested educators. I'm the snobby, know-it-all nitpick here, and students making choices about Font and names that to them best express their design intentions don't necessarily have to sweat over the level of accuracy that their choices achieve. The real winner in this case is the student who picked a less- than-perfect name and used a stereotypically humorous font and yet still received the same high grade as the students who made more snooty and involved choices.
The solution to the dilemma of pursuing deeply informed design and receiving little recognition even adjacent to seemingly poor design receiving equal recognition is not to lower to the level of poor design or to further waste away pursuing a perfect, flawless and infinitely iteratively justifiable design, but to simply not care. Architecture professors show up to their jobs to receive a paycheck, and would not be professing architecture if they possessed the necessary skills to practice it at a level warranting them to share their knowledge.
So that's my thoughts on Fonts. They're silly and fun, and knowing how to use them is useful but totally unnecessary. Most importantly, the first hour of my workday has passed without accomplishing anything considered work. Guess who's going to read wikipedia for the rest of the day.