Well, someone must be reading this stuff. The other day, John D. Boardley, who runs the website I Love Typography, posted this Photoshop mash-up (it’s rather far down the page in his “week in type” for November 11). He was presumably inspired by my off-the-cuff remark a couple of weeks ago about the need for a Minister of Typography. Thanks to Jennifer Kennard, who pointed this out to me; it cracked me up when I saw it. And you certainly won’t find me complaining; I think I’m in good company.
Boardley made a connection between this notion and an idea expressed by Robin Kinross in Unjustified texts: “Could typography be a topic of regular and intelligent discussion in newspapers? […] If music, architecture, cookery and gardening have critics and columnists, then why not typography?” Kinross was taking off from an idea of Erik Spiekermann‘s (“The typographer Erik Spiekermann set off this hare in his book Rhyme & reason, in which he complained that one could never read discussion of typography there”), and it’s a point I’ve made myself when arguing for more public design and typography criticism. Although Boardley says the Kinross quotation is “not completely related – this is just how my mind works,” the connection seems logical enough to me.