Back in college, I had this fantastic typography professor who also taught the History of Graphic Design to all junior Vis Comm majors. To help us keep our historical typographers straight he created a typography rap and performed a verse of it at the end of each history class for the first part of the semester. Memorizing it came in pretty handy on the midterm. A conversation at work recently reminded me of it and I managed to find a hand written copy of in my old notebook. I'm sorry to say that I don't have the mp3 version one of my classmates helped him record our senior year, but here's the written script. Any designer will get a kick out of it!Typography Rap
In 1455 and this ain’t no hype
Gutenberg was gettin’ jiggy with movable type
He was printing in Germany in a city called Mainz,
And his first printed Bible had 42 lines
Two Germans went to Rome ‘cuz the food was better
And printed their books in the Subiaco letter
Jenson was a Frenchman, but in Venice he was cool
His type was called Venetian and will always rule
Aldus and Griffo worked in Venice for awhile
And the type they designed we call Old Style
Aldus was wild, he was phat he was free
With Hypnerotomachia Poliphili
The Frenchman cut punches of which he was fond
And cast the family we call Garamond
Baskerville was a man with a mission
He began the typographic transition
Bodoni was no phony, he was keepin’ it real
He made modern the ideas of John Baskerville
Serifs, who needs ‘em, we all got plans
Strip ‘em all away and we’ll call the type sans
A mnemonic device for your memory,
So you can download typography
14 comments:
What rhymes with comic sans?
This is my second comment to go with the first,
Cuz that "one comments" line is simply the worst.
comic sans would never make the grade into the typography rap so it's a moot point.
The comic sans point is moot.
Let's all give that a woot, woot!
nice :)
I'm impressed. Most art directors would have written "mute point."
I think you need to find the MP3 of that song!
Who's leaving comments as anonymous? I was anonymous first.
-Bill
I guess that makes me "second".
But how do I know if the second anonymous is just the first anonymous disguising her or his anonymity behind the shroud of multiple anonymous postings? And could there be a third anonymous? Or a fourth? Tell me. I need to know.
That's pretty fun. I wish my professor would have created a rap like that.
I think the highlight of my class was naming the font used in different movie titles for extra credit points.
I was also a student of Botnick! Do you know where I can get a hold of this mp3? I'm trying to play it for my boss and I was totally let down to see that Ken's site is gone.
Hey! i found the mp3 on my old harddrive. i downloaded somewhere some time ago. if you want a copy. let me know.
Yes! Yes I do! Please email creativecooler@gmail.com with it. I'd greatly appreciate it :) Thanks!
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