Logo for the heavy metal band, Metallica. I had nothing to do with the logo. I just like the music.

Fresh from my studies of illustration and painting at Art Center, I hit the bricks in search of gainful employment. But the economy at the time was having one of its recurrent recessions. Artists, I was quick to learn, are the ballast first thrown overboard from the ship of commerce when the seas get choppy. (Sorry, my dad was a sailor.) After months of taking intermittent slave-waged freelance gigs, I got an interview with a small design firm that would lead to my first real job.

“Can you spec type?” my future boss asked.

“Sure,” I said. Then immediately, in those pre-Google days, I went to my local library to look up what is “spec type”. I plunged into the world of typography and, on the spot, transmogrified from a wannabe illustrator into a graphic designer.

Printed—that is, graphic—letters and words are visual symbols for the language we speak. I found it helpful when choosing a typeface for a particular assignment to “listen” for the music each font made. Different fonts “sound” differently. Some are loud, some soft, some sophisticated like classical music, some jazzy, and so on. There are endless varieties. We all acknowledge this when we TYPE IN ALL CAPS to “shout” out our point.

Here’s a nice article from WIRED magazine that illustrates (ahem!) the idea of visual music: The Beauty and Total Illegibility of Extreme Heavy Metal Logos