says Dan Solo:
… typographers are all interested in the history of printing type.
There comes a point at which, if you become a typographer, you’ll become a scholar. The two go hand in hand. It can’t be otherwise. I doubt that there are any really good typographers who are not scholars by nature. They may not be knowledgeable about anything else, but they all know a great deal about why things are designed the way they are.
And continuing
… if you know how good work looks like, you’ll do good work. But you get young people out of school (and I hate to say it this way, because I sound like such an old curmudgeon), and they have never done design or typography any other way than by computer. Their entire thinking is structured by what the computer will do so easily. It’s bad in typography because many of them believe that if the computer spaced it, it must be right. A typographer can’t live with that.
From a great interview Steven Heller conducted in 1998 for his book Design Dialogues, reproduced on Imprint in May 2012 shortly after Solo’s death.