My new friend Ellen Lupton

Perhaps to atone for spotty reading over the last few weeks, I got up at 4 this morning, and read read read until I had to leave for work. After I got home I went right back to it, and finished up Thinking With Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors and Students, by Ellen Lupton.

I have to say, I really enjoyed this book. It's packed with visual examples, funny, and fundamental. Ellen touches on many areas that I have studied before and internalized to a certain degree, but it's worth reading the way she explains these same ideas and peppers them with things that I certainly did not know. I appreciate her style of conveying basic information without making it feel dumbed-down. Like a friend who can tell you things you kind of knew (but needed to hear again) in private without embarrassing you.

I just finished up the Grids section of the book. Ellen's thorough and flexible explanations provided a great counter-balance to Josef Muller-Brockmann and Jan Tschichold. Like when I was a college freshman and swept up by every charismatic person I met, I got kind of sucked in by Josef's and Jan's religious fervor surrounding grids and wanted to follow them around campus. I think I have a clearer view now of the diversity of grids and how it's okay to both use them and let them go--or at least a starting notion of how that can be done.