 What an interesting start. I met Claudia Rashman a few years ago at Type-Con discussing teaching typography online, and she won me over. Very, very memorable. And then to see this last bit about Ken Garland again, two influential people in my life. So it's quite appropriate for this. I'm talking about today the history component in an intro to typography course. So I'm going to leave off the exercises and projects in terms of using type, in terms of anatomy, in terms of classification, and all those things. And I'm going to just focus on what I do six hours a week for 15 weeks with these students. Since I have so much time, nobody really can debate what we need to cover. We can discuss how we cover it. The students want to know why we're covering it. So I'm very interested in finding a way that's going to be impactful, that they're going to love typography. They're going to have very early buy-in to type at this young age, that they won't have that senior regret of, I wish I had paid attention more in type one. So I'm in an institution where we just started this month. We will begin our first time having three levels of typography. I understand later today we'll be hearing from someone who's going in the opposite direction with removing typography courses. I'm anxious to hear about that. So we want to cover more and more type, and we're finding it necessary to have multiple classes to do this, as well as having it integrated in the other courses. I think the best way to discuss this is to just start with a little story. I have a friend of mine in Chicago, a graphic designer. He's also a musician. And he was very interested in jazz. And I think mainly because of the expression it allowed. But he wasn't from Chicago. He wasn't even anywhere from anywhere in America. He wasn't from North, Central, or South America. He was from Istanbul. And he viewed American jazz. It might as well have been from another planet. He didn't really understand it at all. He didn't know what good jazz was. He didn't even know what good meant. So we began looking at some of the important figures from the various movements in jazz. And we mainly not just performers. There's so many performers to list. But I listed composers. And I pointed out a few of their seminal works. And the ones that were truly innovative and changed the trajectory of music. This one in particular was a groundbreaking composition. I'm going to lower this a little bit. And it wasn't just a simple change of instrumentation. It didn't rely on studio tricks or even new recording techniques. It involved a drastic mathematical change in the way music was composed. So it turned everything on. It's here. Tommy Flanagan, the piano player who's on the album, Giant Steps, played was a seasoned bebop piano player played with Charlie Parker for years. And you watch him fail on this album. He can't do it. It's like watching a child learn to ride a bike. You just see fits and starts. And so this was new when it came out. And when I played this for my friend, the question here is, well, he didn't hear any of that stuff that I just talked about. He thought it sounded like elevator music. He didn't get any of those things. In my reaction, I wanted to strangle him. I thought, are you serious? But then I realized, yeah, he's so right. He was hearing it on small speakers, on a laptop at a low volume. And had no idea of the context. He had no appreciation of the achievement of what John Coltrane had accomplished at this point and what is involved to even play the piece properly. So untrained audiences all over the world will most likely hear Giant Steps and think of it as elevator music. They won't recognize its importance or significance. A little similar to what we see with this. It's known as the movie font. And most untrained audiences will see it that way. And they won't know its rich history and all of the people that were involved with bringing us a modern digital typeface that we know as Trajan. But this is how students come in, freshman year, sophomore year, thinking of type. And I honestly just got very tired of fighting it because I thought there is something here. And they are actually right as well. So that's the positive takeaway here. Excuse my cheesy rainbow moment here. But this is, I think it's important to embrace both the connotative of what I'm calling, we're dealing with semiotics here of type. But we're dealing with the students are coming in as experts on reading and classifying type and the emotional and descriptive qualities of type. Not the way we teach it, but they have a way of doing it. So I'll show you a few examples I'm going to just breeze through that I asked the students to do week one to offer a bit of evidence of this. So we'll go through a type and image match. All the students receive a folder of images and they are to pick any type faces they want, anywhere they can find them. And they match them in some appropriate manner, whether it's a formal echo of what's found in the line and forms and shapes in the image or any sort of cultural tie or aesthetic tie. Whether they know what is happening in the image or not, they seem to pick something that's always appropriate. And not everybody knew what they were looking at. But every student without fail seemed to handle this pretty well. The next thing they went into was a scavenger hunt out in the world to see black letter and unseal and just take photos of what they find. Not a problem. They can all classify based on the shapes. No one has an issue with this. Then they did an online image hunt to open up that you could choose anything that you associate with these type faces. So we see a lot of movies and music sports teams drinking, Harry Potter, all of these things. So when we talk about black letter history in a formal setting, these are the sorts of things that we would want students to understand about the rich history of black letter. But that ends up shifting a bit and moving up as an umbrella term. And I think we need to embrace the connotative and denotative because of the same thing I'm talking about with giant steps with music. The untrained audiences will see it one way. The trained audiences will see it another. And if we continue to train only designers to know the denotative side and fight them on the connotative side, I feel like it's a great injustice because the audiences they're designing for are going to see it both ways. And whether we're talking black letter or we look at Trajan, there are things that I want the students to know about Trajan, but they also see it as the movie font. They say it looks stable, it looks legal, it looks official, they like it for titling, and they're right. So these four words are gonna keep reappearing here. This is the first thing I'm dealing with is this idea of connotation and denotation, and I'm trying to find a way to get them to embrace both. And we can say we've checked those off. Now appreciation and context, those are much more difficult. So what would it take to have the students develop a deep appreciation of black letter and to understand its historical context and the connections and the significance of it? Well, we could go back to music and I could think what would it take for my friends who appreciate giant steps the way I do? And that is a term from the jazz world as known as woodshedding. Has anybody heard that term before? For any intense practicing? No, well, it's the little legend of Charlie Parker. He was laughed off stage because he played a piece of music, he played the melody of one song while the band was playing another song in a different key. He didn't even know you had to play the same song. He was boot off stage but it was a humiliating experience for him and he just locked himself up and practiced 11 to 15 hours a day. And that's what you do when you wanna learn to play like that and you do it at the expense of everything else, you live and breathe it. So what you gain out of that, it's not just muscle memory and drills, it's not just so much bootcamping scales and things, but it is to analyze and study the music that came before the piece you're working on, that is contemporary to the piece you're working on, to tear apart and put back together the piece and analyze it. To play it alone and with an ensemble, to learn the solo note for note, to analyze the solo and the scales to compose your own solo and improvise with a group. And then once you've done all that, you learn to do it in all 12 keys. I know one person who's done everything on this list. I've tackled maybe four of these things myself, but I know one person who's done all of that. So it's very rare and it's very demanding. So how do we woodshed for typography, the history of type? So we cut right to just trying to identify how do we foster a sense of appreciation? You can't force someone, yell at them to appreciate type, much like you can't yell at a dog and tell it to be a cat. It's the most stupid thing. I find talking about the history of type to students ridiculous. That's how I feel. Appreciate this. I mean, they won't. So context is another thing that helps them understand it. So we'll first deal with appreciation. I don't think one can appreciate this without this. I believe to have that appreciation, you need to first go without something that you used to have. It's gone. You can't rely on it. And the other thing is that you must have a firsthand experience, not a vicarious experience. So reading it in the book, seeing it online, being told doesn't seem to stick, at least I haven't seen anybody retain anything going that way. So the past few type conferences, I have talked about some daily or weekly exercises that I do in the course. So in order to understand Trajan and appreciate it, they paint the letters themselves. We used to do it just as a single day exercise. Now it's almost a week and a half. I go over the materials, the supplies, how to hold them, how to properly use them. And we go over the lettering diagrams and study the forms and they make them themselves large brush letters. And later, as you see how this all connects, they have now this personal experience that is now part of their own history that they can cling to like a life draft out there in the sea of type. They have some thing now that they can relate to. We also look at unsual and black letter. So as we study the history of type, they will then dive in and make a nib letter and understand the width of their tool and why the letters look the way they do is based on the tool and how it's being held. When we get to the mid 1400s and start talking about letterpress and metal type, I just built this letterpress shop. It's in its infancy, I'm still tripping over things and I have many bruises on my shins, which I'm embarrassed to say, I keep tripping over presses, but there you have it. So this, I have nothing to show on this one yet because that's what we will be doing this fall for the first time will be, again it's not to train them to be printers, they're mainly learning to set type by hand so they can appreciate setting type on InDesign a little better, plus they learn all the terms and the focus is much more on type setting than it is on printing. And I found this has been working really well. This is what they recall and remember. The context was a little more challenging. So I am in the middle of building an interactive timeline. It is a work in progress and nothing is interactive at this point, but what I think would help serve as a good roadmap is to go through and highlight for them the things that they've done. They've done Imperial Caps, they've done Unsealed, they've made the texture a black letter and they can look at those things now and have a personal experience in their memories and they even have a lot of materials that they've made, artifacts that they've made. The next step, a timeline is not only, chronology is a given, that you see things in the order they occurred in history, but it allows for a more formal study of classification and even if we embrace something like the VOC system, it's a nice entry point to classification but everything in this white rectangle is summarized as pre-Venetian in the VOC system. You don't really get into the minutia here of these different letter forms. So we can break up and look at different eras and I found this important when a student told me the Renaissance was 1850, I thought, we have no context here of what was going on in the world. So in addition to the gray markers here that are indicating the introduction or use of a particular letter form in handwriting, the other colors you'll see, this provides some religious context, this provides inventions and discoveries in blue. We have architecture and teal, current cultural events and famous battles and politics. I also wanna add music and fine art to the mix here. I want this to be in an interface where you can control what you're seeing and choose these various levels. I also want to make some connections that they can see imperial caps were influenced by the early Greek alphabet from 1,000 years before. To see connections is possibly how Unsealed developed in the black letter, to see the lineage of the different typefaces. To understand the significance of this, we can look at something just like Trajan and blow up this one little area and say it comes from imperial caps and you all know the sort of history of the Trajan column but to see how Johnston and Eric Gill were involved in their publications and study. Father Katich in his origin of the Seraph and Tom Kemp in his formal brush writing book. Carol Twombly's typeface. There are videos that Tom posted about painting these letter forms and even a video just released on Vox last month discussing Trajan and its use in movie posters. Poster debut here for Hector Babenko's at play in the fields of the Lord. After that, it was on the bodyguard and sensible woman. Then it was on three 1993 box office hits. By 1994, it was everywhere. So the interactivity, the user experience side of this, I still have to continually develop but my conclusions are that this interactive timeline would give a sense of the connotative and denotative both. It would provide some context. The hands-on exercises would foster the sense of appreciation through personal experience and this does provide a deep contextual knowledge and appreciation of type history. So along the while we're doing many projects and exercises to use type in a contemporary fashion and also get into what is experimental and more explorations not just doing traditional typography. And this again comes from the world of music. It didn't really help us studying music to learn how to write a madrigal. We just felt like when are we ever going to be in a situation where we have to come up with a madrigal. I love them but we embraced a different approach with music composition. So I'm hoping this is the experimental side here. I really don't have answers. I have things I want to try and that's what I'm showing to these things that I think are worth trying that will provide some context for the students and we shall see. So thank you, Shaz hands.