It hadn't really occurred to me when I decided to go into the UXD field and undertake a master's degree in it that part of the course of study would include a study of typography, but I was more than delighted to find that out. I have been fascinated with typography, hand-lettering (calligraphy/sign-painting, etc.), the histories of letterforms, and the use of type/lettering in art and design for as long as I can remember. In gradeschool, I would regularly take out big books of lettering styles from the library, and spend hours at home trying to learn to use Speedball calligraphy and lettering pens to try to reproduce the various kinds of lettering styles in them. I have always appreciated the use of words and letterforms in fine art as well as in the commercial graphic arts, and in my own personal artwork have long incorporated hand-lettering of all kinds. So it's been great fun this week to get some quick exposure to the ways in which type is utilized in the field of User Experience Design, and learning some of the more technical aspects of how typography is formally used in a UXD project.
As much as I feel like I already knew quite a bit about typography just from my own personal research and interest in it over the years, it was interesting to learn specifically about how different styles and different versions of typefaces can convey the specific roles of the words being set in those typefaces, so that users can just intuitively understand what is going on with the words when they see them in relation to other typefaces in the same document (or other application): just by looking, you can tell right away what the title or headline of a piece is, or that this separate block of text is a "pull quote" from the article, highlighting something that you will see in the context of the body of type, etc. etc. -- or at least, you should be able to, if the type system has been set up in a cohesive way to do so.
Type is one of those things that is so ubiquitous in our society that it is easy to take everything about it for granted. But as soon as you start paying close attention to it, you begin to understand that there is a lot more going on than you might realize to make it easy to take it for granted!
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