Sheep go to Heaven

I'll be honest, I still don’t understand the deeper meaning behind Eric Spiekermann’s book Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works. But I think I get the concept. Bad typography is just unethical.

I tend to agree, though I am still struggling with my battle to not steal sheep. Every day for my job I set type on Microsoft Word, the most dreaded of all programs, and I struggle with the idea of what good type actually is.

Cut to : image of the high and mighty inscription on the trajan column. For the time, this was the most beautiful type setting (or chiseling) imaginable. The Trajan font is still considered one of the most elegant - and as a result, institutional - fonts available today. Which is why, in their elegant wisdom, The University of Kansas decided to have our basketball team go from wearing the left . . . to wearing the right














No one seems to care that both the circus and the trajan lettering is OUTLINED! This is a disgrace on the KU community, whether it knows it or not.

But really, that is not the point. The point is that a change in typeface doesn’t automatically add credibility. It just means a change in typeface (or is it “font”? I never know).

Spiekermann goes into a short, honest rant about the abuse of good, credible design to deceive shareholders and customers in annual reports and brochures. The company’s words look ethical, even though they are lies. They look credible, they look austere, and they all look the same.

I have studied public relations and marketing. These fields taught me to realize the importance of truthful words. Even if you think you got away with your lie, you are wrong. Look at Enron and what happened when they tried to lie with words. Content is important. It must be genuine and it must be truthful.

The truth in words doesn’t stop with the actual combination of characters you choose to use. It also lies in the face you give them. Would you believe a woman who is talking to a bunch of high-school students about inner beauty if she looks like she spent at least two hours on her hair before she came to talk to you? Does it fit for an AP stylebook to have typos?

The point is, don’t lie to your viewers/readers. If you sell children’s toys, don’t use Bodoni in your logo. If you are a stock broker, please avoid comic sans. Actually, if you are a human being, with a heart that beats, pleas avoid comic sans.

Every day, on Microsoft Word, i set ugly type. I admit, I have used Comic Sans, and I have used two serif families in one document and I usually send documents in pt. 12 font. I know it is wrong, but sometimes you have to conform to your situation. I consider it my way of keeping the brand consistent.

I work for an office that has a low budget. They cannot afford a designer, and they certainly cannot afford color prints for every marketing material that I push out. Most of my co-workers are kind, intelligent, hardworking people to whom “good design” is a very unfamiliar term. To advertise ourselves with a tight-looking brochure, in full-color, produced with actual design software would be a lie. To use humble, friendly, Word-processed material is just honest.

This may sound like a selfish justification of why nothing I make in that office is going in my portfolio, it is. Let’s leave that aside so I can get to my real point: design should be honest. If you are advertising for an office, it should feel like the office does and work the way the employees do. If it isn’t, than why would we even make it?