If anyone guesses the lyrical reference, coffee is on me.
HISTORY
So, I can admit it took a while for me to legitimately love typography and fonts in general; crazy, right? I started playing around with Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash (I'm aging myself here!) when I was 12 years old. I would go into our middle school media labs after producing our news show and spend stupid amounts of time trying to learn-as-I-go. Granted, I was extremely proud of those first few naively created projects, but I never paid any mind to type in the beginning of my initial delving into design and visual media. To me, font was too tied up in essays and I wasn't about to legitimize that.
Then, I got into high school. In high school, I was a producer on our Student Produced Television (SPTV--clever, I know). We basically covered all sports games and did a three day turnaround on highlight reels, morning talk show with students on 'school issues', a DJ program, and produced the school's morning news segment daily--yes, it was a lot of work beyond our academic curriculum but we had keys to the school so we didn't mind basically living there.
This is when I started getting confronted with type. I had to make informational banners that would essentially work as a slideshow before we went live on air. So, before, my personal design projects belonged to me--and only me. Now, I had to broadcast these designs to a daily audience of 4,000 students plus faculty. That was a LOT of eyes on my designs! Even though they were simple designs such as "The Weather for Today" and "Lunch Menu," I wanted to bring edge to our programming. That meant giving a crap about fonts.
And I did--to a mild extent. All I knew was that I wanted to stay away from Times New Roman because it was the Essay Font. Plus, Serifs didn't read well on TV. I hated Scripts right off the bat--I have grown to purposefully love Scripts, but at the time I was trying to be an edgy teenager, and it was so contrary to what we were producing. I pretty much stayed within anything Sans Serif, and to make it look less boring, I would add layer effects to the type:
-Outline (and thick, too)
-Drop Shadow or Add Outer Glow
-Bevel
Absolute madness. I will defend myself and say that I was a kid, and I hadn't had any formal training at that point--so everything was from a teenager's awful taste. I didn't think that perhaps Google or the library would have good design resources--nope, just winging it. Luckily, I wisened up and stayed open to critique and learned post high school. If I find remnants of my designs from that time I might share it. Might.
Kind Regards,
Alisa Longoria
Next time I will delve into my favorite fonts by category. Category is: Children's Designs.