A number of the design blogs that I read talk about typography a lot.  This is a field that I'm a complete novice in, but I feel like I need to start working on it because it's one of the main things holding back my graphic design abilities.

I'm slowly learning about font types, sizes and styles, but I'm not ready to write a post about anything too interesting.

What I can write a post about is a common problem with typography decisions.  The problem occurs when people don't define their priorities.  If you don't know what elements on a page should be the focus, you'll end up trying to make everything the focus which is a mess.

My dad has a Deep Purple cd with a section where they're doing a sound check and someone says something to the effect of, "Everyone turn up louder than everyone else."  This is exactly what happens with text and typography in a lot of design.

For an example, look at the text from this new Dos Equis ad campaign.  Maybe I'm a nerd, but the first time I saw these commercials, I was incredibly distracted by the lack of focus.  Every single word is either in all caps, or italicized.  Even worse is that there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to why a word is formatted the way it is.  I guess the important words are in all caps and the less important ones are italicized, but then how do you explain the main catch phrase:

"STAY THIRSTY, my friends"

It just doesn't make sense to me.  Italics and all caps are meant to emphasize certain words.  You can't emphasize every single word on a page.  You can't make everything bold.

The new Zane Benefits corporate page that I talked about earlier this week shows my attempt at emphasizing the important words.  I used italics on the words "solve" and "Health Benefits" because the main thing this page is trying to convey is that we offer a health benefits solution.  If I had italicized, bolded, underlined and used all caps randomly throughout the page, that would make the important parts blend in with everything else.

I'm not trying to say that I did an amazing job with the typography on this page.  Everything except for the logo is a relatively plain Arial font and I really don't know enough theory to do anything interesting.  I'd rather not be interesting enough than be too interesting (like Dos Equis).

Stay tuned for some real typography posts (hopefully)