What's the solution?

I couldn't agree more with Jeremy Smith. His article on the demise of the typographer took me back to my days as a junior artist in a Toronto advertising design studio in the late 60s, and reminded me just how much everything has changed - and not always for the better. Now I am working as a design director in a small publishing company on the western edge of Europe. Young, and not-so-young designers have been known to roll their eyes and cast pitying looks in my direction when I lament the lack of typographic training in today's colleges. After all, digital type can be squashed, stretched and otherwise tortured until it fits a given space, so why worry about things like proportion and readability? And is there a designer anywhere who can still do a freehand rendering of Times Roman or Helvetica for a layout? Typography is no longer the realm of the more senior designer, and it shows. There was a lot to be said for galley proofs, the ink still slightly wet as one meticulously did a cut and paste late on a Friday afternoon. In those days you had to know what you were doing because deadlines were tight and there was little tolerance for beginners who carelessly wiped their sleeve across the freshly output proof! Unquestionably, digital design and typesetting has taken a lot of drudgery out of our business, and has opened up all sorts of new, exciting design possibilities. But I wouldn't have missed the opportunities I had in my art college and junior artist days to render a full colour ad in soft pastels, and later in magic markers; to spend hours carefully hand-lettering entire paragraphs in recognisable fonts; to laboriously cut drop out masks for photographs, and so on. While I don't have to do all that anymore, I have found that the work habits learned through those tedious tasks still stand me in good stead - namely patience, attention to detail, maintaining a clean working environment etc. But typography taught me something more - an appreciation for subtle nuances in design and a sense of the printed word as an art form in itself. Unfortunately, that also means that I tend to wince when I open up a book or a magazine and see widows and orphans and little rivers of white space trickling down the page. The pity of it is that with care, even digital typesetting can be done well, but sadly, designers are now more likely to answer to the company accountant who only sees beauty in the 'bottom 'line' - not by the eagle eye of a creative director who has no qualms about tearing up a shoddy pice of work, even if it means staying up all night to do it again. Ironic, isn't it - we have been freed from the time-consuming drudgery of scalpels and rubber cement, but we have less time to spend on producing high quality typography?!
Thanks, Jeremy. You are absolutely on the mark!