Sept 09, 2022

The Greatest Lesson Typography Taught Me Was Balance

Diana Varma RGD, Toronto Metropolitan University

About this video

Description

We all need balance in our lives. Too much of a good thing (no matter how creatively fulfilling or inspiring), can impact our well-being in the long term. Diana teaches typography within The Creative School at Toronto Metropolitan University; she strongly believes that important life-lessons about balance are encoded within historical and modern typography. Balance in marking and spacing. Balance in selecting headline type and body type that will work well together. Balance in discovering how to make a unified anatomy when designing a new typeface. This talk is part history lesson, part typographical how-to and part philosophical musing. By dissecting typography within the Gutenberg Bible, through to experimental typography of the 1950s and modern long-document examples, Diana shows us that if typography can teach us one thing above all else, it’s balance.

In this talk, you will learn:
1. How the typographic choices within the Gutenberg Bible can teach us when to make tradeoffs and throw the rules out the window for the greater good of the whole.
2. The ways in which typographic experimentation of the 1950s can teach us how to balance form and function, fun and frivolity, in our own lives.
3. How modern typeset documents and, specifically, the use of whitespace may be a reflection of our hopes and desires as a civilization.

Diana Varma RGD

Toronto Metropolitan University

Diana Varma RGD is an award-winning design educator by day and a podcaster by night; getting creative with creatives about all things creative. She is a woman in STEAM who operates a traditional offset printing press, a variety of digital press technologies, as well as engaging in exploratory print-making practices such as LEGO letterpress. She teaches within the School of Graphic Communications Management (GCM) and the Master of Digital Media (MDM) program at Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as through digital learning platform, Domestika.

Diana has written 150+ published articles in Graphic Arts Magazine and through the Association of Registered Graphic Designers, as well as 170+ episodes through her podcast called Talk Paper Scissors, speaking with global experts about design, printing, typography, branding, books and publishing.

Diana holds the position of VP of Education on the RGD Board of Directors for Canada’s largest professional association for graphic designers and she’s actively involved in organizational initiatives, chairing the RGD’s Education Committee, regularly speaking at conferences and conducting workshops.