Inge Druckery Teaching to See Documentary Review

Inge Druckery’s style of teaching impacted the lives of all students she encountered, helping them to go beyond seeing things for what they are, and instead to see them for what they are doing.  She seems to be a very influential person, and her students’ work is a reflection of her unique way of teaching. Some of the interesting things I took from the documentary were Inge’s technique of using reducing glass to view the stroke relationships and to obtain optical accuracy, as well as her take on letter spacing. I did not realize until I watched the documentary that letter spacing is very important to how a typeface can look.

I really enjoyed hearing Inge’s 3 tips for designing your own typeface. It is common knowledge that letters all need to share a common structure, but it isn’t necessarily something you think about when looking at different typefaces. Also, it was helpful that she pointed out that the letterforms must be efficiently different from one another, because if they all look too similar, it would be impossible to read words made up of the typeface. Her last tip about designing your own typeface was to have proper optical letter spacing. This is essential, as it ensures legibility of your typeface. After hearing these tips, I can picture myself designing my own typeface.

I wish I had the opportunity to do projects like the ones that Inge gave her students, as the ones shown in the film were all very unique and well-designed.