On type.

[CAUTION: The following may strike you as unbelievably boring and nerdy.] As some of you may know, I finished what I consider to be my 'true' senior project last week: Jayhawker, the Annual MMV. After taking over the yearbook in September, I hoped to restore some lustre to it and while creating "the People's Yearbook", would also have something that I could personally be proud of after spending the better part of a decade in scholastic journalism.

All of this is by way of saying that my most agonising decision, more than staffing or copy or which photos to use, was typography. I asked the advisors to let me splurge a bit and buy some fonts from a professional foundry, rather than keep relying on free stuff, and they allowed me to do so. After looking through the foundries on the Veer website (which is a great site/service and veeerrry time-consuming), especially the fonts from Fountain, I decided to stick with Hoefler & Frere-Jones out of New York City, from whom I already had Didot and one of the several Knockout series; in addition, I got Cyclone and some of the Gotham line of fonts. Though I was going to have some structure for the book as far as captions and other elements are concerned (that is, keeping them consistant throughout the 160 pages), I decided to use the fonts interchangably and keep the book as different from spread to spread as I could.

Anyway, as we all know, once you buy something then you immediately see other things that you think you'dve rather bought instead. Throughout the year I kept seeing other fonts and type families that I could see using in the book, but I actually did stick with my three 'exclusive' fonts and am very much pleased with the final product. Until I saw These. Three. Fonts. So bold, so inspired (yes I seem to be on a kick of using that word lately with everything), so modern yet betraying a very classic heritage.

Not that any of that matters because the Annual is done and it's being printed as I write and thus this is all academic. But the thought of those typefaces dancing across the pages of my book is at once breathtaking and disquieting, like nostalgia for a thing that you know never happened. And never will.