Chapter 28: Treating Text as Artwork

Overview

Text can be beautiful, thanks to some of the innovative, engaging letterforms that type designers have created. So it makes sense to think of type as an art element, not just a medium with which to convey information. For centuries designers have used type as a design element, using beautiful letterforms to embellish the appearance of their layouts.

Desktop publishing quickly gave users much more control over typography, blurring the distinction between type and art. On a computer, type is represented mathematically as a series of curves, just as an illustration is. But it has taken almost 15 years for page-layout programs to manipulate those curves, whether for type or illustrations. InDesign takes this to a whole new level.

Although InDesign will not replace programs like Illustrator, FreeHand, and CorelDraw, it gives you many tools to handle illustration (see Chapters 25 though 27). How does this relate to type? You can use many of those tools to transform letterforms ‚ from the actual shapes to their use of color .