I can say that I am mildly obsessed with fonts. I own an encyclopedia of fonts and I labor over every stylistic decision I need to make for my online tee shirt and gift shop. Even years ago, I used to spend hours upon hours designing my old record label’s website. To this day, I pay close attention to the layouts and fonts used in magazines, websites and on product boxes – yes, I am a little strange.
One evening, while writing an article for Families.com, my girl climbed up on my lap and wanted to see what I was doing. Initially she just watched me type away on my Mac Book, but then she demanded a little more involvement and entertainment. Believe it or not, watching someone pound keys, pumping out terrific family fun ideas for the Families.com community is not interesting enough for a three year old. Who knew?
To start, I made some of my text bigger, size 48, and then changed the font repeatedly, from Blackmoor LET to Jazz LET to Mona Lisa Solid (my current favorite). She was fascinated to see the shape of the letters change while the letters and the words themselves remained constant. I figured that if she liked this crude mock-up of the alphabet, she would love Microsoft PowerPoint with its neat Word Art function. I promptly saved what I was working on and launched Microsoft PowerPoint.
I started by simply typing her name, which was enough to prompt an excited, “Hey, that’s my name!” I then showed her how to change the colors, borders and shape of her name. She loved it! She was shouting, “Make it brown…make it purple!” and advising on which fonts looked the coolest. I affixed some shadows on the letters and made the words appear to be in 3-D, bowed, etc. We squished the middle of her name and then stretched and moved it all across the screen. It was a really neat moment we shared together, learning a bit more about how the same letter can be written in many different ways.
This turned out to be perfect timing for a lesson on fonts, since my daughter has lately become quite entranced with identifying and writing out letters in her tablets. As a result, she recently started naming the letters she saw in books, and saying things like “that’s a funny letter ‘g’ Mommy!”
Maybe she will grow to be as quirky as me when it comes to such alphabetical matters.
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