A picture...oh, uh, strike that, a LETTER is worth a thousand words!

Whoever first said that writing is a form of expression should have added a little note to give credit to typography too.  Sure, when reading a sentence, paragraph, advertisement, or story, you can use your voice to inflect emotion and character, but when you are only given a visual, designers rely on typography to get the point across.  The size, shape, and font of the text matter.  The color, the flourishes, and the placement of the text have a difinitive impact on the way that text is interpreted.  In advertisements and logos, text is crucial to the product and the company.  In class, we looked at the Hummer® logo, and tested out different fonts o

n the word, but none seemed to fit besides the bold, Sans Serif text that we all recognized as the real thing.  The letters are bold, bulky, and in all capitals, creating an overpowering sense, such as many feel on the road with one of the big, tank inspired cars.

If we looked at a poster for any one of the 

infamous "Saw"

films, even without any visuals besides the text, we would instantly recognize it as a horror film because of the spooky text.  Text is one way that we use to draw associations with brands, movies, places, or emotions.  Other examples include Verizon, which features an added descender to the "z", and Walt Disney,which, without the distinctive lettering, would not be as recognizable.  Both brands are instantly recognizable by the text, which proves that a picture, or in this case, a font, is worth a thousand words.   Lupton stresses that everything–stems, bowls, ascenders, descenders, and everything else that makes letters in different

fonts look like they do–are important.  Whether the reason be because the letters were created for digital display, like Matthew Carter's Verdana type, or Times Roman, originally created for use in a London newspaper, each font and the individual letters involved are important to the way the message is both read and conveyed.