I have a question

Subject: Typography

In my luddist (I 'made it up' and googled it and it kind-of exists) overview of typography, one of my biggest fears is to commit 'type crimes'. These are things that you simply must not do when working with type. I remember a couple of them from my one, militant, typography class in art school, widows and orphans, that [type] of thing. How that woman got through trying to teach a bunch of juvenile, wanna-be animators creative elements of solid type, I'd never know. Probably an alcoholic. But back to the point. I discovered a couple of other type crimes today and they make sense. The problem is they are oh so completely easy to do. Especially when the bread and butter application suite of the digital design industry has buttons for them! Here's what you're not supposed to do, now here are the buttons with which to do them. This goes a long way to explain why I can't find the button to do 'small caps' in Illustrator, besides the fact that I am intermediate at best with that app.

-Warning: Overt generalizations ahead-

So Illustrator, then is the choice for hard-core, control freak, type-fans with stricter backgrounds and Photoshop may well be for pixel-pushers that like to warp and bend things and alter color and perception but don't give a flying eff at a rolling donut about x-height or ascendants.

What then, if you want to be bad-ass at both? Well I think you just try. When you do things like that, you think like a designer thinks all the time, possibly. Or you just think you do. At any rate none of this is really making all that much sense and looks so elementary on the screen. I wonder what I actually learned in art/design/3d/modelling/animation/color theory/pay-for-a-thin-piece-of-paper school.

I learned that most of the time, you must teach yourself. Then what? Then you do.