The craft of typography thirsts for education information. So it’s exciting to see the omniubiquitous Steven Heller has weighed in with a book titled The Education of a Typographer, joining his others of similar name (The Education of an Illustrator, Graphic Designer, and Design Entrepreneur). I haven’t read it yet — I’ll leave the reviews to the more literate JLT — but the list of contributors is fairly impressive. A glaring omission is Underware, whose workshops break new ground in teaching methods and online presentation. It’s a shame their thoughts aren’t part of what should still be a very revealing book.
I am 3/4 of the way through reading this (at the same time as I madly preprare and teach my first class), and it is now littered with post-it notes. As with any collection, there are some great things and some not-so-great things. But a couple of the essays have already influenced what and how I will teach my class (of note: Chris Myers’ “The Value of Narrative in the Education of a Typographer”) and others have been gratifyingly reassuring that I’m doing something right.
I read the book about a month ago. I skipped parts of it. Overall it’s pretty good, my biggest concern/complaint about it is that it fails to make it clear what a “typographer” is. Is it a typeface designer, is it a graphic designer that sets type really really nice, is it a combination of both? Who’s this book for: grpahic designers or typeface designers? (Yes, there is a HUGE difference). Most essays are ambiguous to this, it’s in the interviews where it gets rather iffy.
Other than that, the book is a complete and well-rounded overview like the rest of the series.