Roman inscriptions, public lettering cut by hand in stone, have held a fascination for anyone subsequently involved with letters because they represent part of a classical past that seems so assure and authoritative. The Romans, of course, used inscriptions in exactly the way any society uses written propaganda — for purpose of political and social power.
Indeed, as you wander around the Forum in Rome it is the familiarity of the shapes of inscriptional capital letters that is so striking. They may look formal and classical, but unlike other ancient artefacts, they don’t look out of date — because they look just like forms that we still use today.
Scribes and printers in the Renaissance were faced with 2 competing pressures when designing their letters — should they be ruled by geometry or by the eye? There was a general belief, throughout the artistic and scientific worlds, in divine proportion — a fundamental set of geometric relationships that could be found in nature, in mathematics, and even in man.
Creating letters from shapes that are entirely regular, and building them on a genuinely geometrical frame, causes optical problems. A circle appears smaller than a square when both are the same height, and a horizontal line appears thicker than an identical vertical one.
The typeface that most fully reflects the aims of modernist lettering, Futura, is actually a careful balancing act between truly geometrical and optically corrected forms.
Spareness, simplicity, and standardization define much that we consider modern, or modernist, in typography. And so the sans serif, which in the early 19th century was considered antique and exotic, became associated in the 20th century with the new scientific, technological age; a shift in perception that demonstrates how letterforms, although in many way arbitrary, can nonetheless be associated with cultural values.
The printer has not differentiated the text by using different sizes, so the intrinsic resources are limited: capitals are used for headwords and italics for sources. It is only a clever use of indentation and alignment, which are extrinsic arrangements of the type, rather than the intrinsic use of variant letterforms, that tells the reader that a paragraph is a quotation rather than a definition.
All of the types we have considered so far were essentially made and then set into words by hand. Punch cutting, type founding, and hand composition were laborious and skilled work, so it is not surprising that in the 19th century much effort went into mechanizing and deskilling manual processes in the type-making and printing industries in order to reduce costs and increase productivity.
For certain character combinations even kerning does not help, as they will always combine awkwardly.
The table demonstrates 2 of the advantage of visual language over spoken language — simultaneity and accessibility of information. At one glance we can see the overall structure of the Forecast.
Lists with long entires need unambiguous formatting, such as the bullets and hanging indent. By cueing the start of items within a list we can confirm the boundary of these semantic units, and we can also indicate the status of the items within a hierarchy.
Branching tree structures that are presented as lists can also be indicated by numbering paragraphs with decimal notation: 1, 1.1, 1.2, 1.2.1, and so on. Acts of Parliament and other legal documents use this presentation.
An exhibition catalogue where each work is illustrated, identified, and described separately allows a reader to work sequentially through the exhibits or seek out an image that is of particular interest and read the text that accompanies it; either way the reader is firmly directed by the regularity of the grid-like layout. A tabloid newspaper page offers the reader a mosaic of images, headlines, text, and advertisements, all pretty much unrelated; while there is a scale of prominence, it really doesn’t matter which item the reader alights on first.
A map consisting of an aerial photograph, or of conventional representational cartography does not provoke a particular reading direction — towns and cities are dotted around the map with the connections between them indicated, but not prioritized over other geographic elements.
The London Underground diagram, on the other hand, can be categorized as “non-linear, directed.”
Not all our spoken utterances are of equal value. Similarly, the flow of text in a document will very rarely consist of elements of exactly equal value. We’ve already seen that in speech we use what linguists call cataphoric (looking ahead) statements to cue our listeners to the status of what we are about to say.
Put simply, their essential thesis was that we perceive the whole as different from the sum of its parts: we perceive relationships between elements as well as the features of individual elements. In thinking about hierarchy, the most relevant gestalt principles are the similarity principle and the proximity principle. The first tells us simply that we group things that resemble each other, and share similar characteristics and properties. If all headings are set in bold type, and all body text in roman, this will reinforce the difference between them, so that we are less likely to confuse a single line in roman type for a heading. The proximity principle tells us that while we see individual elements, we perceptually group objects on the basis of their nearness to one another. Elements that are close together are perceptually grouped together.
Using an XML file as a source for typesetting or web page creation is the most rigorous workflow option, but the principle of defining structure and significance within the document, rather than appearance, holds good for the organization of typography however the text is created and designed.
We can think of a paragraph as a string of boxes (words) with glue (spaces) between them. The glue is stretchable and shrinkable by amounts that we can determine.
Language functions efficiently within a language community whose members share a common understanding of the world and the way it can be described in words. While some writing is intended to stay within a tightly defined group (a scientific journal article), some is intended to have the wildest possible audience. Organizations need to use language in a way that indicates their identity so that they can construct relationships with their audiences. Choices about vocabulary and grammar need to be answered before a writer can communicate information effectively.
Grids offer a way of introducing modularity, and allow a page to use size, for example, both as a schematic indicator of hierarchy, and a naturalistic indication of scale.
Web pages can offer rich media content, but they are less good at visually relating material for the reader. The printed page organizes the topic: a tint panel runs across the top of the page, grouping the stories under it. A large central image visualizes the “freeze” metaphor of the main headline. Data are presented in statistical charts.
Too often, ebooks present a window of decontextualized text to the reader, denying them the insight that handling a physical book gives about the scope and overall structure of the work. Too often, linear reading and searching are the only reading strategies that are thoroughly supported. If text composition, typography, and book design are about providing the reader with the means to overcome the linearity of language and enable them to select, turn back, look forward, annotate, and even skip, then the technologies of ebook readers and software still fall a long way short of the printed book.
Symbols are perceived by readers as more “abstract” than words and (along with photographs) are read more slowly than equivalent words.
Isotype charts displayed information using repeated symbols instead of the lines or bars of traditional graphs, with the aim of looking less technical and more easily understandable.
Words make division. Pictures make connection.
Given that traditional time-series and bar charts can plot data with extreme accuracy, what are the advantage of Isotype charts? In addition to immediacy and concreteness, Isotype symbols can be counted, and this helps the reader to make judgments about relative proportions.
Type is saying things to us all the time. Typefaces express a mood, an atmosphere. They give words a certain coloring.
Typography is also the mechanized presentation of language. In this way it is subservient to the structures of the messages it presents.
The similarity between advertising and information design is that they both include a “call to action”; the difference is that the action from an advertisement usually involves a suspension of rational thinking and an acceptance of the advertiser’s claims.
We move our eyes during reading partly because only the tiny central area of the retina can discern fine detail — and at normal reading distance only 6 or 7 letters fall inside this area. A word longer than this will mean that some of its letters fall into the less-acute area of the retina.
Legibility was the quality of letters being decipherable and recognizable, while readability was the quality which allowed the text to be read for many minutes at a time without strain or difficulty.
The letters used for signs were traditionally not enlarged typefaces but specially drawn alphabets, designed to be painted or made at large sizes and read at a distance, and also to have some design affinity with the architectural environment in which they were seen.
Designers need to question whether the client brief is complete, whether the copy is final or liable to change, whether the readership has been defined or understood (or asked its opinion) thoroughly enough to confirm how that genre should be adopted, adapted, or ultimately rejected.
History helps us — if we question it.
We might elevate these 3 approaches to cultural positions by describing the first as that of a “new traditionalist” (for whom continuity and association with historical styles are important), the second as that of a pragmatist (it just works!), and the third as that of a postmodernist (because its neatly points out a discrepancy between the garb of language and its content).
- Readers come first, second, and third. Designing is not done for peer approval or prizes.
- Readers are neither “target audiences” nor cliches: they bring their own purposes and questions to every encounter with text.
- “Reading” is not one-dimensional: there are many reading acts.
- Content matters: design nothing that is not worth reading.
- Stand by meaning.
- Embrace the big picture.
- Attend to details.
- Looking good is better than looking different.
- Looking good is worthless without making sense.