Typography is what language looks like.
Some books on typography focus on the classical page; others are vast and encyclopedic, overflowing with facts and details. Some rely heavily on illustrations of their authors’ own work, providing narrow views of a diverse practice, while others are chatty and dumbed down, presented in a condescending tone.
I sought a book that is serene and intelligible, a volume where design and text gently collaborate to enhance understanding. I sought a work that is small and compact, economical yet well constructed — a handbook designed for the hands. I sought a book that reflects the diversity of typographic life, past and present, exposing my students to history, theory, and ideas. Finally, I sought a book that would be relevant across the media of visual design, from the printed page to the glowing screen.
This book is about thinking with typography — in the end, the emphasis falls on with. Typography is a tool for doing things with: shaping content, giving language a physical body, enabling the social flow of messages.
Whereas Caslon’s letters were widely used during his own time, Baskerville’s work was denounced by many of his contemporaries as amateur and extremist.
In search of a beauty both rational and sublime, Bodoni and Didot had created a monster: an abstract and dehumanized approach to the design of letters.
Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements. Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for intellect in city dwellers, will grow thicker with each succeeding year.
Some designers viewed the distortion of the alphabet as gross and immoral, tied to a destructive and inhumane industrial system. Johnston revived the search for an essential, standard alphabet and warned against the “dangers” of exaggeration. He looked back to the Renaissance and Middle Ages for pure, uncorrupted letterforms.
Renner designed Futura in numerous weights, viewing his type family as a painterly tool for constructing a page in shades of gray.
A word set in all caps within running text can look big and bulky, and a long passage set entirely in capitals can look utterly insane.
Combining typefaces is like making a salad. Start with a small number of elements representing different colors, tastes, and textures. Strive for contrast rather than harmony, looking for emphatic differences rather than mushy transitions. Give each ingredient a role to play: sweet tomatoes, crunchy cucumbers, and the pungent shock of an occasional anchovy.
If nothing else, this laborious exercise would teach you the value of a well-designed typeface. A broadly usable typeface includes numerous weights, styles, and special characters as well as a strong underlying design. Fonts are expensive because they are carefully crafted products.
Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of the design’s most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading.
Design is as much an act of spacing as an act of marking. The typographer’s art concerns not only the positive grain of letterforms, but the negative gaps between and around them.
Although we take the breaks between the words for granted, spoken language is perceived as a continuous flow, with no audible gaps. Spacing has become crucial, however, to alphabetic writing, which translates the sounds of speech into multiple characters. Spaces were introduced after the invention of the Greek alphabet to make words into intelligible as distinct units.
Whereas talking flows in a single direction, writing occupies space as well as time. Tapping that spatial dimension — and thus liberating readers fro the bonds of linearity — is among typography’s most urgent tasks.
The database, one of the defining information structures of our time, is a nonlinear form. Providing readers and writers with a simultaneous menu of options, a database is a system of elements that can be arranged in countless sequences.
Database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning of the world.
Users of websites have different expectation than users of print. They expect to feel “productive,” not contemplative. They expect to be in search mode, not processing mode. Users also expected to be disappointed, distracted, and delayed by false leads. The cultural habits of the screen are driving changes in design for print, while at the same time affirming print’s role as a place where extended reading can still occur.
In our much-fabled era of information overload, a person can still process only one message at a time. This brute fact of cognition is the secret behind magic tricks: sleights of hand occur while the attention of the audience is drawn elsewhere.
Alphanumeric text has risen from its own ashes, a digital phoenix taking flight on monitors, across networks, and in the realms of virtual space.
Roman letters are designed to sit side by side, not on top of one another. Stacks of lowercase letters are especially awkward because the ascenders and descenders make the vertical spacing appear uneven, and the varied width of the characters makes the stacks looks precarious.
Paragraphs do not occur in nature. Whereas sentences are grammatical units intrinsic to the spoken language, paragraphs are a literary convention designed to divide masses of content into appetizing portions.
Typographic grids are all about control. They establish a system for arranging content within the space of a page, screen, or the built environment. Designed in response to the internal pressures of content (text, image, data) and the outer edge or frame (page, screen, window), an effective grid is not a rigid formula but a flexible and resilient structure, a skeleton that moves in concert with the muscular mass of information.
Typography is, by and large, an art of framing, a form designed to melt away as it yields itself to content. Designers focus much of their energy on margins, edges, and empty spaces, elements that oscillate between present and absent, visible and invisible. With print’s ascent, margins became the user interface of the book, providing space for page numbers, running heads, commentary, notes, and ornaments.
Whereas Futurism and Dada had aggressively attacked convention, Tschichold advocated design as a means of discipline and order, and he began to theorize the grid as a modular system based on standard measures.
Rejecting the artistic cliches of self expression and raw intuition, they aspired to what Ruder called “a cool and fascinating beauty.”
This approach, which quickly became known as “Swiss design,” found adherents (and detractors) around the world. Many American designers dismissed Swiss rationalism as irrelevant to a society driven by pop culture and hungry for rapidly transforming styles. Programmatic thinking is now being revived, however, as designers today confront large-scale information projects. The need is greater than ever for flexible “programs” designed to accommodate dynamic bodies of content.
Play serves learning through experimentation without risk. Learning occurs though quick, imprecise actions, conducted within understood rules of a game, and free from threat or consummation. Play does not use up so much as build.
Think more, design less. Say more, write less.