Free Webinars on Typography

I’m not a typophile. I don’t have an opinion on Frutiger vs. Helvetica vs. Clearview. I can put two typefaces together and see if they look pleasant, but it’s visual trial and error all the way. I’ve been wanting to rectify this deficiency in my design diet. I guess the typography gods must have been bored because they’ve granted my wish with two new courses being offered by Creative Live.

If you aren’t familiar with this online training powerhouse, their model is simple: Offer courses taught by industry experts for free while they are being broadcast live and offer the course for sale afterwards. In fact, I’m an instructor over at Creative Live (please don’t hold that against them) but I’m always excited when I can be a student. I’m excited to pick up my #2 pencil and composition notebook* in October when I tune in for Ilene Strizver’s typography courses.

With Typography: The Fundamentals, Ilene, founder of The Type Studio and noted typographic guru, promises to teach the student type identification, appreciation, and aesthetics. She also seeks to guide the student to make more sophisticated type choices. Well, okay, if spending three hours matching fonts in InDesign on a Friday night isn’t a good use of my time, I suppose I could try Ms. Strizver’s approach. I look forward to hearing about “the most common type crimes”—and secretly wonder if my face is on wanted posters in art schools across the country.

The second course, Typography: Fine Tuning & Finessing, will help you shape those well-chosen fonts into a visual feast for your readers’ eyes. Ilene will impart her wisdom on kerning and tracking—lest our spacing sins end up on social media—and discuss best practices for working with figures and fractions. With such enticing typographic topics, I hold out hope that even *I* might learn and expand my typography horizons.