A solid understanding of typography is one of the most important skills we must possess if we are to succeed as designers. There are already a number of great sites that provide more than enough information on typography and the links to the right will take you to some of the best. Do check them out, there are also numerous books on the subject and I have listed some of my favourite, and coincidently, some of the best on the market here too.

So if there are resources already out there why bother? Well, rather than go into exhaustive detail about the history, anatomy and aesthetics of type; what I want to do is give you a taster for the subject and, hopefully spark an interest to learn a little a lot more.

In today's digital age we use fonts, oops!, there I go, I have just thrown another term at you. Type, typography, font uppercase, lowercase and numerous other terms can become very confusing but it is important to get the terminology right. You will sound professional to clients and it will help you explain your work more easily to colleagues and other typo nuts. Ellen Lupton's excellent book and website thinkingwithtype.com will give you all of the information you need to become a real type nerd. While Phil Baine & Andrew Haslam wonderful book Type and Typography looks at the subject in similar depth.

So lets get started… hang on, why exactly do I have the word hedgehogs rotating in a series of different fonts? Consider this, say we are opening a restaurant and we are going to specialise in serving road kill, well someone or something is going to eat it, right? To give people an idea of the style of food we will be serving we should give them a clue, the easiest way would be through the choice of typeface for the restaurant name. What style of food do you reckon these restaurants are serving?

So whether you are an Italian, Mexican, Indian restaurant or American Diner, giving people a clue with the right choice of typeface will help customers know what you are offering. The same applies if you are a builder or a solicitor, children's entertainer or designer. The appropriate choice of typeface can go a long way to set the scene and help your audience understand exactly what you are offering.

There is a great little movie, Typomania, from legendary type designer Erik Spiekermann which helps explain further. The quality isn't great but the message is bang on target.

A (very) brief history

There is little point reiterating what many good books have already produced but it is worthwhile looking albeit briefly at the history and origins of type and typography. If you have a hunger to learn more (and believe me if you want to become a good designer you should) you should look at Baines and Haslam's Type and Typography Ellen Lupton's Thinking with Type and for an easy yet very informative read it's hard to beat Just my Type

So where do we start? Well before printing presses books were produced by scribes who were initially based in monasteries although by the 12th Century may lay copiers served the university market. Writing an entire book was a labour intensive process taking months to produce, a handwriten Bible could take a single scribe over a year to produce. If a dozen books represented a library, one hundred was an incredible collection.

Typography and typeface design didn't really begin until the mid 15th Century Europe with the introduction of movable type printing. Of course the Chinese were the original innovators of reusable type but that's another story…

German goldsmith, Johannes Gutenberg is credited as the first European to use movable type around 1439. He is also seen as the first inventor of the mechanical printing press. The Guttenberg Press, using wooden and later metal movable type, reduced the price of printed material making it more affordable and accessible to a wider audience.

There's more to come and will add content when I get a chance…