Picture: typographica.org

Do photography and typograhy have more in common than the "ography"?

I remember back in high school I used to doodle my own fonts on checkered paper instead of paying attention to the math lessons. And not just individual letters, I drew entire alphabets. Numbers and special characters and all. Many of them were quite similar, rather geometric, and I distinctively remember trying to make them look well balanced and getting the distance between the individual letters right.

This all came back when I ran across an article on typographica.org titled Making Geometric Type Work.

I knew almost nothing about typography back in high school, and it was years later that I started to read up on the subject. However, what I did know was what I liked. And I tried to figure out why I liked things.

Typography is everywhere. Look around you, the world would be quite a different place if you removed all the written words from it.

Typography is about design as much as it is about helping to convey messages. If you talk to type designers, you'll hear them use words like balance, width, joins, alignment, spacing - the exact same terms that we photographers use in the context of image composition.

And yes, it isn't that much of a difference - actually learning about typography and other visual media will inevitably influence the way you compose your pictures. Mind you, not always in a conscious way. I often catch myself almost accidentally having applied some of these principles when I revisit my images later.

Having made these principles conscious while learning about typography has helped slip them into my subconscious without me even knowing it.

And when I notice the results, it makes me smile.

Do you have anything visual that influences your photography? Let me know in the comments.