Now this is what I call Summer Camp

What can I say, I'm a design junkie. Amazing typography can make me salivate. True, you have yet to see any drool-worthy typography here, but that's because it just doesn't match the whole white-trash persona. On the other hand, I don't suppose many (if any) of the posts here support it either. Oh well, it is what it is. And now I'm going to go wash my hands to clean them after typing that wretched phrase.

Imagine my surprise and delight to find that there's a summer camp up in Canada just for typography! Would you believe it's called Type Camp? Well, what else would it be called?! Mind you, with such an unassuming name it costs a pretty penny (especially with the US dollar as weak as a kitten these days) but holy kerning, it would be the summer camp experience of a lifetime. Well, for a certain type of folk I guess…no pun intended. Okay, pun intended, but only just a little.

I wish they had camps like this back when I was a kid. Back then the choices were the summer camp out in the woods with the horse back riding and the archery and ticks with their lyme disease, or you could spend your summer mornings at the local high school in front of an Apple II learning how to program in BASIC and such. Guess where I spent two summers between the ages of 10 and 12? Exactly. I wouldn't come to fully appreciate the art that is typography until I was in college and waist deep in it. Believe me when I say that it's easily one of the most overlooked and under appreciated forms of design in the world.

Well if I happened to have nearly $1,300 lying around and the flexability to take a week off in the late summer I would really consider going. Having to fling out the projects like I do these days, my typography skills are no doubt pretty rusty. And because it's so easy to just let the computer's defaults for leading (line spacing) and kerning (letter spacing) be good enough (even though they never are) because you're up against deadline after deadline and it takes time to go in and kern every character to look just right next the each other, how can one not get a little rusty? They also offer (or have in the past) a camp on information design…another one that I should start saving up for.

Hopefully after reading this you'll start to look at type as more than just letters on a page, and start to notice the spacial relationships they have with one another, and maybe even think twice before typing that next document in Times New Roman. May I suggest something in a nice humanist sans serif?