TyPAINgraphy: The Introduction

Typography-

Definition 1: the art of printing from movable type. The term typographer is today virtually synonymous with a master printer skilled in the techniques of type and paper stock selection, ornamentation, and composition.

Definition 2: A very tedious class that Kevo needs to get through for his major.

Like life, It's all just a game without rules.

• The Game

Maybe it’s too early to tell, but I don’t feel as adept to typography as the rest of my classmates. They seem to get it, the serifs, the swatches, line thickness, type volume, etc; it all makes sense to them, but somehow it doesn’t register in my brain yet. This is all brand new stuff to me; I’m neck deep in unfamiliar water.
I’m also not too crazy about type. I honestly don’t see what the big deal is; is it not just letters in different fonts? What’s so fucking great about it? Will the bowl of a lower case b ever feed me when I’m hungry, will the arms of an uppercase T ever pull me up from the ground, of course not, and they’re just letters!

• The Players
  
  
  

Professor Galactica (obviously that's not a real name)

Galactica's latest policy as of last class: every time you use the word ‘like’ during critique, he has permission to smack you on the back of the head. “The beauty of it is I get to smack you all, and if you smack me back you’re screwed!” A guy in my class got smacked five times. It’s a harder feat than you think, ‘like’ has been built into our brains for so long it’s uneasily removed, especially when we’re describing something. The whole point of this amusingly violent method of vocabulary building is so we begin to realize that our personal opinions don’t hold value anymore. A client isn’t going to care what you ‘like’; he or she is going to choose what they want. We work for the client; we are the client. For this entry, I would have been smacked three times.
During another critique Galactica told a girl she had committed a mortal sin for making the horizontals of the letter ‘E’ heavier than the verticals.

Me, Kevo, slave to the trade often times falling victom to projects with crazy deadlines costing endless hours of my time.

My peers, drones with the same goals and aspirations as my own only slightly more experienced. Fortunately this year's portfolio is more about my work competing with itself than others.

• The location:

Hell, the small hot room on the second floor of the art building.

Critique is an inferno. Once critique starts, the walls move in and I’m trapped. It’s so sweltering I swear Galactica is radiating heat. I try to hard not to sweat, but beads of perspiration start falling down my forehead. I already know there aren’t vents, but I look to the ceiling in a desperate attempt to find imaginary ones. All I see are putrid brown stains of I don’t know what. When it’s my turn, the heat goes up, and suddenly I can’t stop sweating.

Our Typography room was once part of a bigger room, but some genius decided one day to convert it to two. Apparently, they decided that one room (the other side) would have an air conditioner vent, and the other room (our room) would not. We swelter in our classroom; I’m usually sweating not only from the heat but also the nervous atmosphere of critique. The person who decided to split the room should be smacked; if they are dead they should be dug up, then smacked, and then turned around buried facing the earth.