Typography is valuable, but having a keyboard with a full set of working keys… priceless.

Are you Prince’s daughter?

Atisha,
There is a world renowned school of typography in Reading. That might be a good place to start. Please do type in actual English words, though instead of using teenager text-message shorthand?

ChrisL

In all seriousness an essay linking the decline of typography in the UK and the rise of text messaging and emoticons may be a perfect response to the question. ;-)

smile
Just had a discussion with my girlfriend about this topic.
It came up because of the word modern in regards to fonts.
what is a modern font? I think people just wanted
everything faster and faster, so there was no time to draw
nice dropcap letters, there was no time to do something to
perfection...which evolved to a point where you
couldn't reduce letterforms anymore and it seems,
now we start saving on letters, simplify a whole
language...but where is this going? do we simplify a
language to a point where we're not using words any
longer and just grunt at each other?

smile

by the way: as a none native english speaker txt language is a pain
in the ass.

LOL..let's not beat her over the head with it. Maybe she was in a rush to post before class? That said, your essay should have carefully refined point, rather than hitting such a big subject as "Does Typography matter?" which will probably take you 6 months to write.

Atisha,
i think you allready googled on "bad exaples of typography" because there is plenty, but some people mistake typography with bad spelling.

but a fun place to start is here
http://www.flickr.com/groups/typographical_mistakes/

Tracking.

When deciding if something matters, it's good to figure out who it may or may not matter to.