# The Art of Typography: Communicate Effectively Through the Power of Type - review & insight | Gareth B. Davies Source: https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/the-art-of-typography-communicate-effectively-through-the-power-of-type/ [← All courses](https://garethbdavies.com/course-insights/) Graphic Design · Solid intro · Rated 6 /10 # The Art of Typography: Communicate Effectively Through the Power of Type By Gareth B. Davies · Updated July 2026 Faye Brown · Faye Brown Designs Beginner · 128 min A warm, well-structured beginner primer on typography that trades technical depth for enthusiasm and craft-project charm. [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fthe-art-of-typography-communicate-effectively-through-the-power-of-type%2F367812909) New to Skillshare? Your first month is free, enough to take this course at no cost. ## A friendly on-ramp, not a technical deep dive Faye Brown's course does what a beginner typography class should do: it makes students notice type. The opening unit sends students out into their own weekend armed with nothing but a question, "why was this font used," and that simple prompt does more to build a typographic eye than any lecture could. The 10 words, 10 typefaces exercise that follows reinforces the same idea in miniature, forcing quick, instinctive pairings of words like "sporty" or "danger" with fonts that carry those connotations. It is a genuinely good teaching device, cheap to run and immediately revealing. The anatomy lesson is the course's technical backbone, covering serifs, weight, italics versus oblique, x-height, leading, kerning, and ligatures in a single dense video. It is thorough for a beginner audience and comes with a downloadable reference sheet, which is a practical touch given how much terminology gets thrown out in eighteen minutes. The tradeoff is pacing: definitions arrive back to back with little room to practice each one before the next appears, so retention depends heavily on rewatching. ## Branding and making your own type The branding unit is where the course is most engaging. Walking through Coca-Cola's Spencerian script, Virgin's confident forward-leaning wordmark, Milton Glaser's I Heart New York, the Edward Johnson-designed London Underground typeface, and the negative-space arrow hidden in the FedEx logo gives students a concrete vocabulary for talking about type as brand communication rather than decoration. These are well-chosen, well-known examples that make the abstract idea of "typeface personality" tangible. The typeface-creation unit is more of a survey than a skill-building lesson. It points students toward tools like iFontMaker and myscriptfont.com for turning handwriting into usable fonts, and toward potato prints and mixed media for texture, but it does not teach the mechanics of font construction. Students hoping to learn actual type design, spacing tables, kerning pairs, glyph engineering, will need a different, more advanced course. The Illustrator and Photoshop tutorials that follow are similarly beginner-level: useful for someone who has never traced a hand-drawn letter into a vector path or masked a photograph inside a circle, but too basic for anyone with prior software experience. ## Where it lands The final project, illustrating a favorite quote or lyric, ties the units together sensibly, and the course's structure into a foundation phase followed by a build phase gives it a clear arc. The heavy reliance on Skillshare community sharing and peer feedback is a strength for motivated students but a weakness for anyone taking the course in isolation, since several exercises are designed around classroom interaction rather than solo completion. At 128 minutes across fifteen lessons, this is a light course that covers breadth over depth. It succeeds as an enthusiastic, well-organized introduction that will change how a beginner looks at fonts in daily life, and it will feel thin to anyone who already knows what kerning means. The standout The brand logotype teardown, which unpacks the hidden FedEx arrow, the London Underground typeface's calligraphic structure, and Coca-Cola's Spencerian script to show how letterforms carry brand meaning most viewers never consciously register. ## What you will learn - · How to read and use core typography terms like x-height, kerning, tracking, leading, serif vs sans serif, and ligatures - · How to analyze real-world typefaces for the emotional and cultural messages they send - · How famous logotypes (Coca-Cola, Virgin, I Heart NY, FedEx, London Underground) use type to encode brand values - · How to convert hand-drawn lettering into editable vector type in Illustrator - · How to build a simple custom typeface digitally or from handwriting using apps like iFontMaker or myscriptfont.com - · How to lay out a typographic quote illustration in Photoshop using masking, drop shadows, and blended photography Best for: Total beginners, hobbyist illustrators, and non-designers who give presentations and want a friendly, jargon-light introduction to why type choices matter. Skip it if: Anyone with existing type design or graphic design training, since the software tutorials stay at a surface level and the typeface-creation methods skip real font engineering. Helpful Examples Engaging Teacher Clarity of Instruction Actionable Steps [Get a Free Month on Skillshare](https://skillshare.eqcm.net/c/3155494/298081/4650?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.skillshare.com%2Fclasses%2Fthe-art-of-typography-communicate-effectively-through-the-power-of-type%2F367812909)