Typography

Typography has always been something that is aesthetically pleasing to me. I love when a magazine or poster just picks the perfect font for the point they’re trying to get across without being too obvious about it. With that being said, however, I have never really taken the time to study fonts or the design aspects that go behind them.

I played three typography games that proved how little I knew about fonts in the first place, but I think that they ended up being very beneficial and taught me a lot.

The first game I played was called Type War and was the most frustrating game I’ve ever played. I never knew how little I knew until I played this game. Basically you are given a letter and two choices as to what font it is in. If you get it right you get more points and advance more quickly through the levels, if you get it wrong, you lose points and it takes a lot longer to level up. It took me about 30 minutes to get to level 10 (for the extra credit that was up for grabs), but I finally did it and can successfully say that I know more about fonts because of it.

The second game I played was called Shoot the Serif. I liked this game a lot and learned a lot about what is considered a serif font that I didn’t know before. It turns out a lot of the “fancy” fonts are serif even though you don’t really realize it. I also liked this game because of the cool shooting noises that happen when you get an answer right.

The last game I played was called Kern Type. In this game, I learned about spacing between letters. I learned that when a word is well-spaced, it makes a difference in the overall look of the word and, therefore, the design. I liked this game a lot and learned that the eye is hard to train sometimes.