Needless to say my lecturers soon took me clean off my delusional high horse. Yes, I was already producing some pretty slick images, which delighted my image-making lecturer. But that was one small part of the course. I soon had several lecturers land me squarely back down to Earth. In particular my typography lecturers.

I loved doing tutorials that enabled me to do cool new PS effects, I did not however dedicate any real amount of time to doing typography and layout tutorials, beyond hunting for fonts and experimenting with superfluous type treatments.

Sure I had books of other designer’s typographic work which I parroted, but like self-taught designer David Carson says, you have to understand the rules before you can break them; I didn’t understand them, I just mimicked people who did.

Few self-taught designers are as interested in truly pushing themselves into the less immediately rewarding areas of proper layout and typographic study as people like David Carson, he is the exception not the rule. A cursory glance at the litany of horrendous examples of incompetent typography littering our visual landscape is testament to this. Typography and layout represent the glue that holds design together, not photoshop.