The Crystal Goblet

Beatrice Warde1932

Imagine that you have before you a flagon ofwine. You may choose your own favourite vintagefor this imaginary demonstration, so that it be adeep shimmering crimson in colour. You havetwo goblets before you. One is of solid gold,wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The otheris of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and astransparent. Pour and drink; and according toyour choice of goblet, I shall know whether or notyou are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have nofeelings about wine one way or the other, you willwant the sensation of drinking the stuff out of avessel that may have cost thousands of pounds;but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe,the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose thecrystal, because everything about it is calculatedto reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thingwhich it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrantmetaphor, for you will find that almost all thevirtues of the perfect wineglass have a parallel intypography. There is the long, thin stem thatobviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Becauseno cloud must come between your eyes and thefiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins onbook pages similarly meant to obviate thenecessity of fingering the type page? Again: Theglass is colourless, or at the most only faintlytinged in the bowl, because the connoisseurjudges wine partly by its colour and is impatientof anything that alters it. There are a thousandmannerisms in typography that are as impudentand arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red orgreen glass. When a goblet has a base that lookstoo small for security, it does not matter howcleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest itshould tip over. There are ways of setting lines oftype which may work well enough and yet keepthe reader subconsciously worried by the fear of“doubling” lines, reading three words as one, andso forth.

Now the man who first chose glass instead ofclay or metal to hold his wine was a “modernist”in the sense in which I am going to use that term.That is, the first thing he asked of this particularobject was not “How should it look?” but “Whatmust it do?”, and to that extent all goodtypography is modernist.

Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it hasbeen used in the central ritual of religion in oneplace and time and attacked by a virago with ahatchet in another. There is only one thing in theworld that is capable of stirring and alteringpeople’s minds to the same extent, and that is thecoherent expression of thought. That is thehuman’s chief miracle, unique to us. There is no“explanation” whatever of the fact that I canmake arbitrary sounds that will lead a totalstranger to think my own thought. It is sheermagic that I should be able to hold a one-sidedconversation by means of black marks on paperwith an unknown person halfway across theworld. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printingare all quite literally forms of thoughttransference, and it is this ability and eagernessto transfer and receive the contents of the mindthat is almost alone responsible for humancivilization.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my onemain idea, i.e., that the most important thingabout printing is that it conveys thought, ideas,images from one mind to other minds. Thisstatement is what you might call the “front door”of the science of typography. Within lie hundredsof rooms, but unless you start by assuming thatprinting is meant to convey specific and coherentideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wronghouse altogether.

Before asking what this statement leads to, let ussee what it does not necessarily lead to. If booksare printed in order to be read, we mustdistinguish readability from what the opticianwould call legibility. A page set in 14 point BoldSans is, according to the laboratory tests, more“legible” than one set in it point Baskerville. Apublic speaker is more “audible” in that sensewhen he bellows. But a good speaking voice isone which is inaudible as a voice. It is thetransparent goblet again! I need not warn youthat if you begin listening to the inflections andspeaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, youare falling asleep. When you listen to a song in alanguage you do not understand, part of yourmind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quiteseparate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoythemselves unimpeded by your reasoningfaculties. The fine arts do that, but that is not thepurpose of printing. Type well used is invisible astype, just as the perfect talking voice is theunnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words,ideas.

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Key text

The Crystal Goblet

2 We may say, therefore, that printing may bedelightful for many reasons, but that it isimportant, first and foremost, as a means ofdoing something. That is why it is mischievous tocall any printed piece a work of art, especially fineart: because that would imply that its firstpurpose was to exist as an expression of beautyfor its own sake and for the delectation of thesenses. Calligraphy can almost be considered afine art nowadays, because its primary economicand educational purpose has been taken away;but printing in English will not qualify as an artuntil the present English language no longerconveys ideas to future generations and untilprinting itself hands its usefulness to some yetunimagined successor.

There is no end to the maze of practices intypography, and this idea of printing as aconveyor is, at least in the minds of all the greattypographers with whom I have had the privilegeof talking, the one clue that can guide youthrough the maze. Without this essential humilityof mind, I have seen ardent designers go morehopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakesout of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could havethought possible. And with this clue, thispurposiveness in the back of your mind, it ispossible to do the most unheard of things andfind that they justify you triumphantly. It is not awaste of time to go to the simple fundamentalsand reason from them. In the flurry of yourindividual problems, I think you will not mindspending half an hour on one broad and simpleset of ideas involving abstract principles.

I once was talking to a man who designed a verypleasing advertising type that undoubtedly all ofyou have used. I said something about whatartists think about a certain problem, and hereplied with a beautiful gesture: “Ah, madam, weartists do not think – we feel!” That same day Iquoted that remark to another designer of myacquaintance, and he, being less poeticallyinclined, murmured: “I’m not feeling very welltoday, I think!” He was right, he did think; he wasthe thinking sort, and that is why he is not sogood a painter, and to my mind ten times betteras a typographer and type designer than the manwho instinctively avoided anything as coherent asa reason.

I always suspect the typographic enthusiast whotakes a printed page from a book and frames it tohang on the wall, for I believe that in order togratify a sensory delight he has mutilatedsomething infinitely more important. I rememberthat T. M. Cleland, the famous Americantypographer, once showed me a very beautifullayout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorationsin colour. He did not have the actual text to workwith in drawing up his specimen pages, so hehad set the lines in Latin. This was not only forthe reason that you will all think of, if you haveseen the old type foundries’ famous QuousqueTandem copy (i.e., that Latin has few descendersand thus gives a remarkably even line). No, hetold me that originally he had set up the dullest“wording” that he could find (I daresay it wasfrom Mansard), and yet he discovered that theman to whom he submitted it would start readingand making comments on the text. I made someremark on the mentality of boards of directors,but Mr. Cleland said, “No, you’re wrong; if thereader had not been practically forced to read-ifhe had not seen those words suddenly imbuedwith glamour and significance-then the layoutwould have been a failure. Setting it in Italian orLatin is only an easy way of saying, ‘This is notthe text as it will appear.”

Let me start my specific conclusions with booktypography, because that contains all thefundamentals, and then go on to a few pointsabout advertising. The book typographer has thejob of erecting a window between the readerinside the room and that landscape which is theauthor’s words. He may put up a stained-glasswindow of marvellous beauty, but a failure as awindow; that is, he may use some rich, superb,typelike text gothic that is something to be lookedat, not through. Or he may work in what I calltransparent or invisible typography. I have a bookat home, of which I have no visual recollectionwhatever as far as its typography goes; when Ithink of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers andtheir comrades swaggering up and down thestreets of Paris. The third type of window is onein which the glass is broken into relatively smallleaded panes; and this corresponds to what iscalled “fine printing” today, in that you are atleast conscious that there is a window there, andthat someone has enjoyed building it. That is notobjectionable because of a very important factwhich has to do with the psychology of thesubconscious mind. This is that the mental eyefocuses through type and not upon it. The typewhich, through any arbitrary warping of design orexcess of “colour,” gets in the way of the mentalpicture to be conveyed, is a bad type.

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The Crystal Goblet

3 Our subconsciousness is always afraid ofblunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing,and too wide unleaded lines can trick us into), ofboredom, and of officiousness. The runningheadline that keeps shouting at us, the line thatlooks like one long word, the capitals jammedtogether without hair spaces – these meansubconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.

And if what I have said is true of book printing,even of the most exquisite limited editions, it isfifty times more obvious in advertising, where theone and only justification for the purchase ofspace is that you are conveying a message-thatyou are implanting a desire straight into the mindof the reader. It is tragically easy to throw awayhalf the reader interest of an advertisement bysetting the simple and compelling argument in aface that is uncomfortably alien to the classicreasonableness of the book face. Get attention asyou will by your headline and make any prettytype pictures you like if you are sure that the copyis useless as a means of selling goods; but if youare happy enough to have really good copy towork with, I beg you to remember that thousandsof people pay hard-earned money for the privilegeof reading quietly set book pages, and that onlyyour wildest ingenuity can stop people fromreading a really interesting text.

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lackof which many of the fine arts are even nowfloundering in self-conscious and maudlinexperiments. There is nothing simple or dull inachieving the transparent page. Vulgarostentation is twice as easy as discipline. Whenyou realize that ugly typography never effacesitself, you will be able to capture beauty as thewise men capture happiness by aiming atsomething else. The “stunt typographer” learnsthe fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Notfor them are long breaths held over serif andkern; they will not appreciate your splitting of hairspaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) willappreciate half your skill. But you may spendendless years of happy experiment in devisingthat crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold thevintage of the human mind.

This essay was first given as an address to the Society of

Typographic Designers, formerly the British Typographers Guild,

London, 1932. It was later published in Beatrice Warde: The

Crystal Goblet-Sixteen Essays on Typography.

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The Rules ofTypographyAccording toCrackpots Experts

The first thing one learns about typography andtype design is that there are many rules andmaxims. The second is that these rules are madeto be broken. And the third is that “breaking therules” has always been just another one of therules. Although rules are meant to be broken,scrupulously followed, misunderstood.reassessed, retrofitted and subverted, the bestrule of thumb is that rules should never beignored. The typefaces discussed in this articleare recent examples of rule-breaking/making inprogress. I have taken some old rules to task andadded some new ones of my own that I hope willbe considered critically.

Imagine that you have before you a flagon ofwine. You may choose your own favouritevintage for this imaginary demonstration, sothat it be a deep shimmering crimson incolour. You have two goblets before you. Oneis of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisitepatterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass,thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour anddrink; and according to your choice of goblet,I shall know whether or not you are aconnoisseur of wine. For if you have nofeelings about wine one way or the other, youwill want the sensation of drinking the stuffout of a vessel that may have cost thousandsof pounds; but if you are a member of thatvanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages,you will choose the crystal, becauseeverything about it is calculated to revealrather than to hide the beautiful thing which itwas meant to contain... Now the man whofirst chose glass instead of clay or metal tohold his wine was a “modernist” in the sensein which I am going to use the term. That is,the first thing he asked of this particularobject was not “How should it look?” but“What must it do?” and to that extent allgood typography is modernist.

Beatrice Warde, from an address to the BritishTypographers’ Guild at the St. Bride Institute,London, 1932. Published in Monotype Recorder,Vol. 44, No. 1 (Autumn 1970).

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Beatrice Warde’s address is favoured by membersof a vanishing tribe – typography connoisseurswho “reveal” beautiful things to the rest of us(modernists). Such connoisseurs are opposed totypographic sensationalists who have no feelingsabout the material they contain with theirextravagance (postmodernist hacks). In short, thetypographers with “taste” must rise above thecrass fashion-mongers of the day.Connoisseurship will always have its place in acapitalist, class-conscious society and there isnothing like modernism for the creation of highand low consumer markets. The modernisttypophile-connoisseur should rejoice in thetypefaces shown here because they reaffirm hisor her status as being above fleeting concerns.After all, if there was no innovation to evolvethrough refinement to tradition, then wherewould the connoisseur be?

Beatrice Warde did not imagine her crystal gobletwould contain Pepsi-Cola, but some vessel has todo it. Of course, she was talking in terms ofideals, but what is the ideal typeface to say: “Uh-Huh, Uh-Huh, You got the right one baby”? Thereis no reason why all typefaces should bedesigned to last forever, and in any case, howwould we know if they did?

The art of lettering has all but disappeared today,surviving at best through sign painters andlogotype specialists. Lettering is beingincorporated into type design and the distinctionbetween the two is no longer clear. Today, specialor custom letterforms designed in earlier times bya letterer are developed into whole typefaces.Calligraphy will also be added to the mix as morecalligraphic tools are incorporated into type-design software. Marshall McLuhan said that allnew technologies incorporate the previous ones,and this certainly seems to be the case with type.The technological integration of calligraphy,lettering, and type has expanded the conceptualand aesthetic possibilities of letterforms. The rigidcategories applied to type design in the past donot make much sense in the digital era. Previousdistinctions such as serif and sans serif arechallenged by the new “semi serif” and “pseudoserif. “The designation of type as text or display isalso too simplistic. Whereas type used to existonly in books (text faces) or occasionally on abuilding or sign (display), today’s typographer ismost frequently working with in-betweenamounts of type – more than a word or two butmuch less than one hundred pages. Thecategories of text and display should not be takentoo literally in a multimedia and interactiveenvironment where type is also read ontelevision, computers, clothing, even tattoos.

Jeffery Keedy1993

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The Rules of Typography According to Crackpots Experts

Good taste and perfect typography aresuprapersonal. Today, good taste is oftenerroneously rejected as old-fashioned becausethe ordinary man, seeking approval of his so-called personality, prefers to follow thedictates of his own peculiar style rather thansubmit to any objective criterion of taste.

Jan Tschichold, 1948, published in AusgewählteAufsatze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches undder Typographie (1975).

“Criteria of taste” are anything but objective.Theories of typography are mostly a matter ofproclaiming one’s own “tastes” as universaltruths. The typographic tradition is one ofconstant change due to technological, functional,and cultural advancement (I use the word“advancement” as I am unfashionably optimisticabout the future).

In typographic circles it is common to refer totraditional values as though they werepermanently fixed and definitely not open tointerpretation. This is the source of the misguidedfear of new developments in type design. The fearis that new technology, with its democratizationof design, is the beginning of the end oftraditional typographic standards. In fact, just theopposite is true, for though typographicstandards are being challenged by moredesigners and applications than ever before, thischallenge can only reaffirm what works andmodify what is outdated.

The desktop computer and related software haveempowered designers and nonspecialists todesign and use their own typefaces. And withmore type designers and consumers, there willobviously be more amateurish and ill-conceivedletterforms. But there will also be an abundanceof new ideas that will add to the richness of thetradition.Too much has been made of theproliferation of “bad” typefaces, as if a few poorlydrawn letterforms could bring Western civilizationto its knees. Major creative breakthroughs oftencome from outside a discipline, because the“experts” all approach the discipline with asimilar obedient point of view. The mostimportant contribution of computer technology,like the printing press before it, lies in itsdemocratization of information. This is why thedigital era will be the most innovative in thehistory of type design.

The more uninteresting the letter, the moreuseful it is to the typographer.

Piet Zwart, A History of Lettering, CreativeExperiment and Letter Identity (1986).

Back in Pier Zwart’s day most typographers reliedon “fancy type” to be expressive. I don’t thinkZwart was against expression in type design asmuch as he was for expression (an architectonicone) in composition. Zwart’s statementepitomizes the typographic fundamentalists’credo. The irony is that the essentially radical andliberal manifestos of the early modernists are withus today as fundamentally conservative dogma.

I suspect that what is most appealing about thisrhetoric is the way the typographer’s egosupersedes that of the type designer. By usinguninteresting “neutral” typefaces (created byanonymous or dead designers), typographers areassured that they alone will be credited for theircreations. I have often heard designers say theywould never use so-and-so’s typefaces becausethat would make their work look like so-and-so’s,though they are apparently unafraid of lookinglike Eric Gill or Giovanni Battista Bodoni.Wolfgang Weingart told me after a lecture atCalArts in which he included my typeface KeedySans as an example of “what we do not do atBasel” that he likes the typeface, but believes itshould be used only by me. Missing from thisstatement is an explanation of how Weingart canuse a typeface such as Akzidenz Grotesk soinnovatively and expertly.

New typefaces designed by living designersshould not be perceived as incompatible with thetypographer’s ego. Rudy VanderLans’s use ofKeedy Sans for Emigre and B. W. Honeycutt’s useof Hard Times and Skelter in Details magazine arebetter treatments of my typefaces than I couldconceive. Much of the pleasure in designing atypeface is seeing what people do with it. If youare lucky, the uses of your typeface will transcendyour expectations; if you are not so fortunate,your type will sink into oblivion. Typefaces have alife of their own and only time will determine theirfate.

2

The Rules of Typography According to Crackpots Experts

In the new computer age, the proliferation oftypefaces and type manipulations representsa new level of visual pollution threatening ourculture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all weneed are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.

Massimo Vignelli, from a poster announcing theexhibition “The Masters Series: MassimoVignelli,” (February/March 1991).

In an age of hundreds of television channels,thousands of magazines, books, and newspapers,and inconceivable amounts of information viatelecommunications, could just a few basictypefaces keep the information net moving?Given the value placed on expressing one’sindividual point of view, there would have to beonly a handful of people on the planet for this towork.

Everything should be permitted, as long ascontext is rigorously and critically scrutinized.Diversity and excellence are not mutuallyexclusive; if everything is allowed it does notnecessarily follow that everything is of equalvalue. Variety is much more than just the “spiceof life.” At a time when cultural diversity andempowering other voices are critical issues insociety, the last thing designers should be doingis retrenching into a mythical canon of “goodtaste.”

There is no such thing as a bad typeface...just bad typography.

Jeffery Keedy

Typographers are always quick to criticize, but itis rare to hear them admit that it is a typefacethat makes their typography look good. Goodtypographers can make good use of almostanything. The typeface is a point of departure, nota destination. In using new typefaces theessential ingredient is imagination, becauseunlike with old faces, the possibilities have notbeen exhausted.

Typographers need to lighten up, to recognizethat change is good (and inevitable), to jump intothe multicultural, poststructural, postmodern,electronic flow. Rejection or ignorance of the richand varied history and traditions of typographyare inexcusable; however, adherence totraditional concepts without regard tocontemporary context is intellectually lazy and athreat to typography today.

You cannot do new typography with oldtypefaces. This statement riles typographers,probably because they equate “new” with“good,” which I do not. My statement is simply astatement of fact, not a value judgement. Therecent proliferation of new typefaces should haveanyone interested in advancing the tradition oftypography in a state of ecstasy. It is alwayspossible to do good typography with oldtypefaces. But why are so many typographersinsistent on trying to do the impossible – newtypography with old faces?

Inherent in the new typefaces are possibilities forthe (imaginative) typographer that wereunavailable ten years ago. So besides merelytitillating typophiles with fresh new faces, it is myintention to encourage typographers and typedesigners to look optimistically forward. You mayfind some of the typefaces formally andfunctionally repugnant, but you must admit thattype design is becoming very interesting again.

Originally published in Eye, No. 11, November 1993.

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3

Clarety: Drinkingfrom the CrystalGoblet

Beatrice Warde wrote that type is like awineglass. The point of the simile had nothing todo with either craftsmanship or the potential forlead poisoning from handling Bembo orWaterford. Warde valued a plain crystal gobletover an ornate chalice because the latter vesselobscures the observation of the wine, which, sheassumes, is the point of drinking. It is hergreatest failing as a type critic that she nevermentioned (or, apparently, even considered) thejelly jar.

Drinking wine from a jelly jar reveals the colour ofthe wine and saves both money and landfillspace. The shape of the jar may not be optimalfor swirling the wine to show off its legs, but thepoint of oenological gams is lost on me. If a winehas a feature that I cannot distinguish by smell,taste, or feel, why should I care? Suchobservation is useful in connoisseurship, but Ihave little interest in that. Knowing that I’ve paidthree times the retail price for a better wine thanthe one that the folks at the next table paid threetimes the retail price for is, for some reason Ican’t explain, not central to my being.

If we are to assume that Warde was not merely ashallow snob obsessed with reassuring herselfthat she consumed the best available drugs,perhaps it is not the glass that she should havecriticized, but the wine. I do not refer to criticizingthe wine in the sense of comparing its colour tovarious gemstones, examining its body, notingthe bouquet, sloshing it around in one’s mouth,then spitting out both the wine and a pompouslist of adjectives. I mean we should reconsiderwine and wine drinking.

What is the relationship of colour toconsumption? Is the look of the wine an arbitraryaesthetic addition to the drinking experience?How, then, are the ruby tones and visualindication of substance superior to a tankardencrusted with actual rubies-a vessel of moresubstance than any wine?

Such questions should not be dismissed asdenigrating wine, as mere antioenologism. Thewine is the medium that connects the winemaker and the drinker -it is not more importantthan either. Did Warde equate the typographerwith the truck driver who delivers the wine to thecafé? No, I think maybe the busboy who sets thetable or the restaurant manager who chose whichglasses to provide... but I digress. Let’s get backto the main point.

Perhaps the point of knowing whether a wine haslegs is not a dry functional problem but a sweetbit of fantasy. (I have, by now, come to assumethat a woman as thoughtful and accomplished asBeatrice Warde would not have ignored the jellyjar. Unless we are willing to consider thepossibility of a morbid fear of getting jar-lidthread marks on her lips, we must believe thatthe legs issue was foremost on her mind, eventhough her biographers have not revealed anyrecord of discussion of the subject.) There may besome considerable satisfaction in imagining thesecret pattern of the rivulets formed as oneswallows.

Knowing that viscous flows of Chateau Laffitegrace one’s tongue while flaccid sheets of DegoRed take a lingual fall at the next table couldprovide a sense of separation from the evil ofbanality that surrounds us all. I read an interviewwith a man who had several rings in piercings ofhis penis. He said it gave him a real satisfaction tostand in a crowded elevator knowing that he hadsomething under his suit that nobody else evenimagined. An old girlfriend of mine said she likedsitting in a meeting with a group of Japanesebusinessmen knowing that her garter belt, lack ofunderpants, and shaved pubic hair set her apartfrom everyone else in the boardroom. Perhaps aprivate knowledge of vinous currents providesthat same sense of personal distinction.

The corporate records at Monotype are woefullyincomplete. Among other things, they offer noinsights into Beatrice Warde’s preferences inunderwear or hairstyles, and no particularlycogent information on the role of wine choice intype design.

A dozen years ago I drank alternating gulps ofFresca and rum with someone I met in QuintanaRoo (or was it Yucatan?). In retrospect, it was abit like reading Bookman with swash variations,but since we were drinking right out of thebottles, I’m not sure whether Beatrice Wardewould find this story relevant to her essay.

Originally published in Graphic Design and Reading, Ed. Gunnar

Swanson, Allworth Press, 2000.

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Gunnar Swanson2000

Looking into Space

What I really want on the Macintosh is avirtual reality interface – armholes in eitherside of the box so you can reach in and movelogos around; a real paintbrush so that youcan feel the texture of the surface underneath.Neville Brody 1

Although Neville Brody cannot get inside the box,the viewer of his work can. The irony of his abovestatement is that it was spoken by a graphicdesigner whose work captures the very ideal thathe claims is out of reach. In stretching theboundaries of legibility and composing a layered,textured surface, for two decades graphicdesigners have been creating two-dimensionalspace with a three-dimensional effect.

Today, typefaces and their configurations containmeaning that is distinct from the words theycreate. Certainly, calligraphy, decorative type, anditalic or bold letterforms have long served toexpress tone or heighten the impact of words.But the proliferation of computer technology intomost areas of social experience, and especially inthe field of communication design, has caused afundamental shift in the way we decipherinformation. We are consumers of a complexlexicon of type and image-a viewing audiencemore accustomed to looking into space.

But computers alone do not have an effect on theway we read. All technologies incorporate a set ofpractices which in turn, presuppose a culturaldisposition. Within the field of graphic design,there has been a shift from modern forms tocomputer-generated, deconstructionist ones.Underlying this trend toward digitization is achanging conception of the way we envision theworld which generates new kinds of culturalmeaning.

Modernism as a school of thought is supportedby a model of vision that presupposes a linearpath between a viewer’s eye and an object ofperception. In this conception, there is no“space” between the eye and an image becausethe act of seeing is not understood to incorporatehuman experience. Rather, the gazing “eye ofdistant and infinite vision” is disembodied fromthe self and shielded from the outside.2

This way of seeing is described by RobertRomanyshyn in Technology as Symptom andDream. In his discussion of Renaissance paintingRomanyshyn explains that the way artists beganto represent the world in the fifteenth centurycaused a cultural form of vision that turned “theself into a spectator, the world into a spectacleand the body into a specimen.” In his view, thedepiction of the world on the canvas formed ouractual perception of it.

We became isolated selves, detached from ourown bodies and from the “outside” world, whichwe were left to observe from a distance.Romanyshyn’s metaphor of a closed “window”describes a barrier between us and the worldwhich can only be penetrated by the eye,implying that the visual component of our beingis the only bridge between “inside” and“outside.” As a result, our disjointed world (thelegacy of the partition of the canvas) is infinitelyremoved from us. And the eye, as a gazing,distant point in space, distills our soulfulsensuality. He writes,

The vanishing point, the point where theworld as texture, quality, and difference hasshrunk to a geometric dot, has no sound, notaste, no smell, no colour, no feel, no quality.It has only measure.4

Romanyshyn claims that linear perspective visionwas an artistic view of the world that became acultural one, as the “innate geometry of our eyes”began to perceive everything in the world on thesame horizontal plane.5

This model of vision corresponds to themethodology of modern graphic design, whichrejects an interplay between viewer and imageand affirms that our internal makeup does notalter the impressions we receive. The moderndesigner’s objective is to control the viewer’sdetached visual component so that information istransmitted seamlessly. In this process, meaningis finite and the text is closed.

In declaring that their practices were “neutral”and “objective,” modernists in the 1940s begandesigning in accordance with these underlyingconceptions. It was simply accepted that thehuman eye – divorced from the subjectiveapparatus of the emotional body – would alwaysdecipher a message in the same way. Inattempting to control the eye, modern designdismissed the creativity of viewing.

The notions of monocularity and the separation ofthe eye from the body were also addressed byMarshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy.While Romanyshyn claims that the invention oflinear perspective painting served to isolate thevisual component of our senses and divorce theself from the world, McLuhan, on the other hand,argued that the introduction of the phoneticalphabet and the printing press caused a breakbetween the eye and the ear, disrupting thesensory complex and impairing the social spirit.

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Stephanie Zelman2000

Looking into Space

McLuhan explained that whereas an interplay ofall the senses in traditional oral societiespromoted a heterogeneous space of humaninteraction and interdependence, the invention ofthe printing press caused an adverse culturaltransformation. He showed that printed matterwas instrumental in causing the visualcomponent to become abstracted from the othersenses, inducing an internalized, static, andcompartmentalized lived experience whichultimately led to a society of detached individuals.

McLuhan argued that humanity inherited a “fixedpoint of view” due to the abstraction of the visualfactor. But unlike Romanyshyn, who believes thecomputer “will give flesh to this eye which inabandoning the body has dreamed of a vision ofthe world unmoved by the appeal of the world,”McLuhan looked positively on technologicalinnovation.6 McLuhan affirmed that the electronicsignal brings about a “stream of consciousness”and an “open field of perception” creating thepossibility for a richer viewing activity.7 He alsoclaimed that our emerging electronic age couldbring back the “mythic, collective dimension ofhuman experience” that was experienced in oralculture.8 For McLuhan, new informationtechnologies cause a shift in our sense ratios,resulting in a reunification with one’s self andwith others:

The “simultaneous field” of electricinformation structures today reconstitutes theconditions and need for dialogue andparticipation, rather than specialism andprivate initiative in all levels of socialexperience.9

McLuhan’s writings are prophetic given that thecomputer’s multimedia and interactivecapabilities, along with its capability to layer andlink moving type and images, encouragecontinuous and simultaneous experience. And hisunderstanding of our relationship with newinformation technologies supports the conceptionof a new kind of visual experience that occurswhen typography enters the “polymorphousdigital realm.”10 He observed that the electronicage “is not mechanical but organic, and has littlesympathy [for] the values achieved throughtypography, ‘this mechanical way of writing’...”11

The canonical, fixed, authoritative text thatproduced a passive visual experience goes handin hand with the linear visual system of moderndesign. Conversely, in a digital milieu, typebecomes unfixed and so does meaning. AsJacques Derrida observed, “one cannot tamperwith the form of the book without disturbingeverything else in Western thought.”12

The decline of modernist ideas of legibility wasinevitable the moment graphic designers dippedtheir creative fingertips into the binary pool.When the Macintosh computer was introduced tothe field in the 1980s, designers began to layerand dissolve type and imagery – a practice thatshattered the conception of a detached, objectivereader. Designers began to endorse the sort ofcommunication that would “promote multiplerather than fixed readings” and “provoke thereader into becoming an active participant in theconstruction of the message.”13

Viewing began to be understood as a process ofhuman involvement, which entails an “act ofconsciousness.”14 Ron Burnett articulates thispoint in Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and theImaginary, where he explains that images are notjust representations that enter our field of vision,but are experienced by us in a personal way. Inexamining our response to them, Burnettintroduces the concept of “projection,” which hedescribes as a “meeting point of desire, meaningand interpretation.”15 This union is, metaphoricallyspeaking, a “space” between the viewer and theviewed, where the eye, along with the rest of thebody and the human state of consciousness,encounters an image and creatively interprets it.Rather than presume that we are detached fromthat which is “outside” ourselves, “projection” isa way of describing how we subjectively andimaginatively engage with our world.

According to Burnett, even though we injectmeaning into images – and are in that senseresponsible for what we see-we do not have anobserving power over the world. We may befabricating our own viewing process when weproject, but our fragile subjectivity hinges onphysical, emotional, and psychological states. AsBurnett explains, projections are “like filters,which retain all of the traces of communication,but are always in transition between the demandsmade by the image and the needs of theviewer.”16

Although his discussion is primarily aboutimages, Burnett’s theory of vision can be appliedto the way we experience graphic design. In fact,Johanna Drucker has made a similar argument inThe Visible World: Experimental Typography andModern Art:

[T]he materiality of the signifier, whether it beword or image, is linked to its capacity toeither evoke or designate sensation as ittransformed into perception, and that it in nocase has a guaranteed truth value, only therelative accuracy within the experience of anindividual subject.17

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Burnett’s notion of “projection” is helpful inidentifying some of the features of typographicdesign in a digital environment, where designershave blurred the distinction between type andimage. When typography is treated as imagery-that , when it is pushed to the limits of legibility –the result is an enhanced visual involvement onthe part of the viewer. As designers transform themechanics of representation, more demands aremade on the viewer to interpret messages.Designers now expect that something like“projection” will occur while reading. Forexample, in The End of Print, David Carson’s artdirection of magazines such as Ray Gun andBeach Culture is defended on the basis that theiraudience does not need visual direction. Whereasmost magazines “want their readers to knowwhat to expect, to know where to look and howto read through a page,” these publicationsestablish “a different relationship with thereader.”18

As the digital medium encourages designers totreat typography as imagery, readers are simplyinvited to interpret messages on their own terms.In fact, designers suggest that the more often anew typeface is used, the more familiar itbecomes. Simply put by one type designer,“readability is a conditioned state.”19 Apparently,since words are no longer expected to containtruth-value, the fact that they are somewhatillegible at first does not seem to present toomuch of a problem. As stated by type designer,Jeffery Keedy,

If someone interprets my work in a way thatis totally new to me, I say fine. That way yourwork has a life of its own. You create asituation for people to do with it what theywill, and you don’t create an enclosed orencapsulated moment.20

The less legible a typeface becomes, either on itsown or in juxtaposition with other graphicelements, the more it takes on an inherent image.When this occurs, words are no longer simplyread, but understood within the context of anentire visual construction. This is the visuallanguage of deconstruction.

Deconstruction, as we learned from JacquesDerrida in Grammatology, is the technique ofbreaking down a “whole” in order to reflectcritically on its parts. When using this method,the designer affirms that different interpretationswill be discovered within the fabric that holds amessage together. Unlike the linearity ofmodernism which implies a separation betweenthe viewer and the viewed, and a “withdrawal ofthe self from the world,”21 typographicdeconstruction compels a viewer to take part inthe interpretation of a message. This strategy ofvisual disorganization was embraced andlegitimized by design schools such a theCranbrook Academy of Art:

The Cranbrook theorist’s aim, derived fromFrench philosophy and literary theory, is todeconstruct, or break apart and expose, themanipulative visual language and differentlevels of meaning embodied in design.22

This visual language conditions readers toapproach text differently – to look into a twodimensional space (page or screen) in order todecipher meaning. Put somewhat differently,Richard Lanham argues in The Electronic World:Democracy, Technology and the Arts, that wenow look “at” art rather than “through” it.23

Similarly, readers look “at” text because typedesigners go through pains to ensure that theirfonts are not overlooked in the reading process.Consider Brody’s description of his typeface,State.

I wanted to take the role of typography awayfrom a purely subservient, practical roletowards one that is potentially moreexpressive and visually dynamic. There are nospecial characters and presently no lowercaseis planned. The font is designed to have noletter spacing, and ideally it should be setwith no line space. I decided not to include acomplete set of punctuation marks andaccents, encouraging people to create theirown if needed.24

Typographic deconstruction parallels Burnett’stheory of “projection,” which incorporates theview that words and images are not the sourcesof meaning. Like Burnett, contemporarydesigners argue that a seeing audience is notmade up of receptors of images (and words), butcapable of engaging in an interpretive “space.”As well, they view typography similarly to theway Burnett regards imagery-that it “shouldaddress our capacity for intuitive insight andsimultaneous perception, and stimulate oursenses as well as engaging our intellect.”25 Thelayering, texturing, and overall fluidity oftypography and imagery that ensues from newmedia technologies now affects the way we take“in” information. The self is absorbed into the actof viewing; the eye is embodied and the windowis open.

The blurring of type and image is clearly amanifestation of our cultural tendency torenegotiate boundaries that were long thought tobe sacrosanct. Critical discourse in graphicdesign over the last two decades has highlightedsome of modernism’s conceptual dichotomiessuch as “high” vs. “low,” “distinguished” vs.“vulgar,” and “beautiful” vs. “ugly.” In fact,oppositional binary systems underlie many ofmodernity’s claims to knowledge.

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Looking into Space

One explanation is that in the seventeenthcentury, when science became the new religionand objectivity the new god, Western civilizationset out to create an ordered understanding of theworld. A cultural value was secured to the notionof “absolute truth” and a new imperative wasplaced on the human race to uncover it. Thebelief in the existence of an objective truth bringswith it a system of binary oppositions; for wherethere is truth, there is falsehood.

Apart from this core distinction, many othersupposedly “natural” oppositions such as “mind”vs. “body,” “reality” vs. “representation,” and“objective” vs. “subjective” form modernity’sideological grid. This system was modernity’sway of understanding the world and our place init. And modern design’s model of linear visionthat distinguished between “inside” and“outside” was no exception. By mid-century, thebelief in an objective reality was so ingrained inthe way Western society produced meaning, thenotion of a universal method of communicationwent undisputed. The fixation on logic, rationality,and closure in Western culture corresponded toan unselfconscious and linear typographic stylethat does not obstruct the transmission ofmeaning. There would be no hidden meanings,no nuances, no uncertainty. Post modern thinkerJean Baudrillard described a disenchanted worldwhere everything must be produced, legible, real,visible, measurable, indexed, and recorded.26

Deconstruction in design highlights yet anotherone of those familiar Western binary oppositionsthat went unchallenged by the ModernMovement – the writing/speech dichotomy. Asexplained by Drucker, structural linguists privilegespeech over writing because of its perceivedtime-based immediacy and purity.27 Unlike thetruthful spontaneity of expression, writing wasviewed as an inferior copy of speech, fartherremoved from interior consciousness andtherefore seen to contain no linguistic value. It isclear by now that modernism implicitly adheredto this distinction in its drive to keep viewerslooking “through” text. In a context wherespeech is privileged, graphic design only makesmatters worse. Twice removed from the meaningof the word, the stylized letterform strays evenfarther from the initial thought.

The writing/speech dichotomy was understood byDerrida as encapsulating the Western drive forclosure. He argued against the distinctionbetween “live” speech and “dead” letters whichstructural linguists had constructed in an effort tolink truth with the voice closest to the self.Derrida showed that truth is an illusion inWestern thought, since both writing and speechhave no final meaning. The idea that it is not thewritten words, per se, but the disorganization ofgraphic elements that can extend meaning, is apowerful manifestation of Derrida’s theory.

From a modern point of view, the designmethodology of deconstruction seemedmeaningless and purposeless because readabilitywas secondary to engaging the reader andeliciting an emotional response. After all,modernists thought, what is the point ofcommunication design if the message ismisunderstood? Yet it no longer seems so absurdnow that we recognize that there are ways tocommunicate, without making “everything speak,everything babble, everything climax.”20 Type andimagery is manipulated in order to engage theviewer and beckon interpretation, ultimatelyblurring the distinction between “designer” and“viewer” as well.

In our digital landscape, we do not “design andinvent our world in accordance with a particularvision”29 but reinvent our world and ourselveseach time we encounter a visual message.Reading requires that we use our intellect, butdeconstructed typography further encourages a“shifting movement from awareness toknowledge, to desire and its negation.”30 The eyeroams, looking into the printed page or glowingscreen, where meaning is revealed through anevaluation of the entire space. Deconstructionhas not simply addressed the look of design but away of looking at design.

When the theory of deconstruction penetratedthe field of graphic design in the 1980s, it did notsimply undermine the modern aesthetic, itchipped away at the underpinnings of Modernity.Ingrained binary oppositions such as “inside” vs.“outside,” “subjective” vs. “objective,” and even“humanity” vs. “technology” were renegotiatedas designers tried to get inside the box. Sincethen, designers have brazenly blurred the line oflegibility, underscoring the open text andconfirming that the only knowable truth is thattruth itself is an illusion.31

The notion of an interpretive text that appeared inthe eighties and nineties was a distressingprospect for designers who came of age at a timewhen design was a means of ordering the world.Renowned designers who had long been workingwithin Modernity’s cultural constructions werenot impressed by computer-generated solutions.Perhaps, like Romanyshyn, they wonderedwhether “technology has eclipsed the life ofimagination more than it has been itsrealization.”32 For those designers who grew up inthe modern tradition, the loss of a structured,understandable world was surely difficult towithstand. But to quote McLuhan, for all theirlamentations, the revolution had already takenplace.33

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1Diane Burns, ed., “Neville Brody,” Designers onMac (Tokyo Graphic-sha Publishing Co., Ltd.,1992) 172Robert Romanyshyn, Technology as Symptomand Dream (New York: Routledge Press, 1989) 973Ibid. 334Ibid. 895lbid. 32 (phrase attributed to Samuel Y. Edgerton)6lbid. 997Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968) 2788Ibid. 2699Ibid. 14110Rick Poynor, Type and Deconstruction in theDigital Era,” Typography Now: The New Wave(Cincinnati, OH: North Light, 1992)11Marshall McLuhan, 13512Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, Trans. BarbaraJohnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1981) 313Poynor, 914Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision: Images, Mediaand the Imaginary (Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press, 1995) 13615Ibid.16Ibid. 136-13717Johanna Drucker, The Visible World: ExperimentalTypography and Modern Art 19091923, (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1994) 6518Lewis Blackwell and David Carson, eds., The Endof Print: The Graphic Design of David Carson (SanFrancisco: Chronicle Books, 1995)19Neville Brody, www.type. cp.uk/snet/fuse/statesamp.html accessed 199620Jeffery Keedy, Emigre #15 (1990) 1721Romanyshyn, 4222Poynor, 14

23Richard Lanham, The Electronic World:Democracy, Technology and the Arts (Chicagoand London: The University of Chicago Press,1993) 4524Neville Brody, www. type.cp.uk/snet/fuse/statesamp.html accessed 199625Poynor, 1626Jean Baudrillard, Seduction (New York: St.Martins Press, 1990) 34-3527Drucker, 3728Baudrillard, 2029Romanyshyn, 4130Burrnett, 13531Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation,Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor, MI:University of Michigan Press, 1994)32Romanyshyn, 633Marshall McLuhan, “Playboy Interview: A CandidConversation with the High Priest of Popcult andMetaphysician of Media” Essential McLuhan, EricMcLuhan and Frank Zingrone, eds. (Concord, ON:Anansi, 1995) 266

Originally published in Graphic Design and Reading, Ed. Gunnar

Swanson, Allworth Press, 2000.

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Fellow Readers:Notes onMultiplied Language

Free-for-all meaning

“It is the world of words that creates the world ofthings.” Jacques Lacan’s motto – extreme,absolute, unreal – sums up as clearly as can anysingle formulation the tendency ofpoststructuralist theorizing. Over the last twentyyears the quite rarified ideas of a few thinkers inParis have become common currency inintellectual discussion. And now, late in the day,and after they have been seriously questioned attheir source, these ideas have turned up in therude world of design. A full discussion wouldneed to consider the ways in which this theoryhas been applied to typography and graphicdesign, with illustrations drawn both from designwork and from theoretical writing. But, for thepurposes of the present brief argument, this tight,self-enclosed circuit of ideas might be adequatelydescribed in a summary such as the following.We know the world only through the medium oflanguage. Meaning is arbitrary: without “natural”foundation. Meaning is unstable and has to bemade by the reader. Each reader will readdifferently. To impose a single text on readers isauthoritarian and oppressive. Designers shouldmake texts visually ambiguous and difficult tofathom, as a way to respect the rights of readers.

This mishmash of the obvious and the absurdgoes under different names: poststructuralism,deconstruction, deconstructivism, and – moregenerally and much more vaguely –postmodernism. One could have a theologicaldiscussion of these terms; but not here. Thisessay is a loose and informal tour around some ofthe issues raised by deconstruction in typographyand graphic design. I will wander off the path attimes, believing that the academic discussion oftypography, and of design in general, is too oftenhermetic and unreal: in unholy partnership withthe proud anti-intellectualism of many practicingdesigners.

Let us go back to the main theoretical source atthe root of these ideas about reading. This is thebook known as Cours de linuistique générale byFerdinand de Saussure: “Course in generallinguistics.” Saussure was a professor oflinguistics at the University of Geneva. He died in1913, and this book was first published in 1916.Its text is a reconstruction of lectures, based onnotes taken by students and edited by some ofhis colleagues. This helps to explain whyprofessional linguists-not to mention amateurswithout any special competence in linguisticshave found it an enigmatic and difficult text,though commentaries and improved editionshave cleared up some mysteries.

Saussure dismisses the simple-minded notionthat words correspond to real objects; that, forexample the word “tree” corresponds to the realthing that we know as a tree. Instead heintroduces a more complex notion of what hecalls the sign (la signe). “A linguistic sign is not alink between a thing and a name, but between aconcept and a sound pattern.”

And Saussure goes on: “The sound pattern is notactually a sound; for a sound is somethingphysical. A sound pattern is the hearer’spsychological impression of a sound, as given tohim by the evidence of his senses.” Coming tothe end of this discussion he proposes tosubstitute concept (“concept” in this translation)and image acoustique (“sound pattern”) by theterms signifié and signifiant, which, in the Englishtranslation followed here, are “signification” and“signal.” This pair in combination constitutes thesign.

Saussure then describes the two fundamentalcharacteristics of a sign: that the link betweensignal and signification is arbitrary; and that thesignal is linear in character (it occurs over time).The first of these characteristics is at the root ofthe debate over typography and the reader.

As one reads Saussure’s remarks on arbitrariness,it is hard, I think, to disagree. He says thatdifferent languages have different words for thesame concept: the animal which the French knowas un boeuf, the Germans know as ein Ochs. Andthis is enough to prove the arbitrariness of thelinguistic sign.

Two paragraphs after this, Saussure drops in aspeculation about semiology, the science which,he predicts, will extend the principles oflinguistics to the understanding of every aspect ofhuman life. This is why Saussure has assumed somuch importance outside his part in linguistics. Afew cryptic remarks in this text becamefoundation stones for the semiology that wasdeveloped half a century later. semiology becamepart of the larger project of structuralism, workedout most notably in the anthropology of ClaudeLevi-Strauss. Then later gradually – semiologyand structuralism turned into poststructuralisrn.The development of Roland Barthes’s writing –from the scientific pretensions of the early workto his frankly poetic later prose – exhibits thistransition most clearly. Poststructuralismrenounces the notion of the heart, centre, oressence; but if it had such a thing (and perhapsits centre lies in its wearying championing of theperiphery?) then this concept of the arbitrarinessof the sign lies there. Another two paragraphsfurther on, Saussure says the following:

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Fellow Readers: Notes on Multiplied Language

The word arbitrary also calls for comment. Itmust not be taken to imply that a signaldepends on the free choice of the speaker.(We shall see later that the individual has nopower to alter a sign in any respect once ithas become established in a linguisticcommunity.) The term implies simply that thesignal is unmotivated: that is to say, arbitraryin relation to its signification, with which ithas no natural connection in reality.

It seems that the deconstructionists never readthis. Or if they did read it, they never made theirdisagreement clear. Language, Saussure remindsus, is created by a community, and we use itwithin the constraints of this larger, communalunderstanding. In this fundamental sense, signsare not arbitrary, and we would do better to usethe term “unmotivated” to describe the quality offortuitousness in our pairing of signal tosignification. So deconstruction contradictsSaussure, without acknowledging thiscontradiction. Certainly in its degraded forms, asin the recent typography debate, this theory verysimple-mindedly asserts that there is no suchthing as community, or society as MargaretThatcher notoriously formulated it, at around thesame time.

Saussure regards language as a collective, socialendeavour. But typographers and other designerswho share that view should nevertheless have adeep disagreement with Saussure. The languagethat he considered was almost exclusively spokenlanguage. Saussure’s idea of language is a verytheoretical and intellectual one. It is less materialeven than human breath. He remarks that “asound is something physical” Can one sense atone of disdain here? Then he turns away fromsuch crude materialism to concentrate onconcepts and sound patterns. The diagram in theCours de linguistique générale of how sounds areproduced by the organs of speech is about asmaterial as Saussure gets.

In the Cours de linguistique générale there is noteven much sense of human beings talking with orto one another. It is true that Saussure’s famousdistinction between la langue (the system oflanguage) and la parole (individual acts of speech)makes provision for this, in this second term. Butthen his emphasis falls so largely on the speaker.And if you look for the form of language thatmost interests typographers – the language thatuses letters, characters, images, of ink on paper,of scans across TV screens, of grids and bitmaps,of incisions in stone – there is a large gap. Early inthe lectures, Saussure has some pages onwriting, but only to put it in its place: “A languageand its written form constitute two separatesystems of signs. The sole reason for theexistence of the latter is to represent the former.The object of study in linguistics is not acombination of the written word and the spokenword. The spoken word alone constitutes thatobject.” This may have been a revolutionaryattitude to adopt then: linguistics had beenshaped as a study of language in its writtenforms. But its legacy has not been helpful to anydiscussion of the material world of the makingand exchange of artifacts: the world to whichtypography belongs. The wish of semiologists, tostudy and explain the social world, suffers fromthis crippling weakness: it has no materialfoundations. So, after his brief discussion ofwriting, Saussure confines himself to spokenlanguage. Indeed he uses the word “language”(la langue) to mean just “spoken language.”

Some attempts have been made to correct theblindness of linguistics to writing. From withinlinguistics itself, one could cite the work of JosefVachek, and maybe others. From a vantage pointoutside linguistics, the English anthropologistJack Goody has produced a stream of books andessays on writing, understood in its full historicaland material sense. The Domestication of TheSavage Mind may be his most accessible anddirectly relevant book for typography. Goody herepoints forcefully to the distinctive properties ofwritten language as a system apart from and inmutual reciprocity with spoken language. Hiswork also has the distinction of examining waysin which writing may be configured other than ascontinuous text: in tables, lists, formulae, andother related forms for which we hardly have anagreed descriptive terminology. These systems ofconfiguration may be used almost unthinkingly,every working day, by typographers, editors,typesetters, and typists. And yet discussionsabout reading, legibility, print, and the future ofthe book seem to know only continuous text (apage of a novel, most typically) as their object ofreference. The real world of typography is farmore diverse and awkward. If reflection on whatis there before us is not enough to persuadesemiologists about the reality and difference ofwritten language, then a reading of Jack Goodyshould be persuasive. Afterwards it will beimpossible to parrot Saussure on “language.”

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Shared copy

The recognition and analysis of written languageis an essential correction to the Saussuriantheory, but it needs to be developed further.There is writing and there is printing: twodifferent phenomena. Writing exists in one copy;printing makes multiple copies of the same thing.Yes, you can duplicate writing: you canphotocopy it or photograph and make a printingplate from it. The more exact difference isbetween writing and typographic composition oftext. But some such differentiation must bemade: between the written and thetypographic/printed; or, more widely (to includefilm, TV, video, tape- and disc-stored information)between the single and the multiple.

Semiology, based on an abstract notion oflanguage that does not recognize theindependent life of writing, is no help here.Theorists who do discuss “writing,” but just assome unified, undifferentiated sphere of visiblelanguage, may have a tool of analysis. However, itis a blunt one, which cannot deal with multipliedlanguage.”) Although here one should rememberthat this discussion is being conducted in English,and in this language a rather clear distinction ismade between “writing” and “printing.” But, forexample, German has Schrift as a common termbetween writing (by hand) and printing (with amachine). Whereas in English, one speaks of“writing” and of “type” (i.e., words with quitedifferent roots), in German, one speaks just ofSchrift, or perhaps of Handschrift andDruckschift. As if to confirm the distinction thatEnglish makes, one can judge typographicinnocence in an English-speaker by the extent towhich they muddle “writing” and “printing?”Thus: “I like the writing [i.e., type] on that recordcover.” Or: “please print your name and address”(i.e., write in capital letters).

Theorists of spoken and written language cannotdivorce their subject from its place and time.Thus Jack Goody’s main field of interest has beenin Africa and the Near East, and in ancientsocieties. When Goody touches on European ormodern societies, he is alert to the differencesintroduced by printing; but for the most part hecan properly concentrate on written –handwritten – language.

From within the world of typography, GerritNoordzij has been a productive and powerfultheorist of writing, which he usually takes toinclude typographic composition of text:“typography is writing with prefabricated letters.”This definition is offered as .in alternative way ofthinking, within the context of a discussion ofgraphic design and typography as processes ofspecification and worldly intervention betweentexts, commissioners, printers, and producers.Noordzij’s wish to subsume typography withinwriting is the purest piece of dogma: an essentialitem of mental equipment for a master scribe,lettercutter, and engraver, whose main focus ison the minutest details of letters and theirproduction. But here, in this essay, our focus ison the world that Gerrit Noordzij sees when heputs down his magnifying glass and picks up histelephone: the social world of producers andreaders. In this domain, typography and writingare essentially different activities.

Typography deals with language duplicated, inmultiple copies, on a material substrate. Here wecan add in screen displays, and any other meansof multiplying text. And to “text,” we can add“images” too: the same point applies. The exactrepetition of information is the defining feature ofmultiplied text, and it is what is missing fromwriting. The historical elaboration of thisperception has been made most thoroughly byWilliam M. Ivins in his Prints and VisualCommunication and by Elizabeth Eisenstein in herThe Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Ifprinting was not, as Eisenstein sometimes seemsto suggest, the lever of change in the history offifteenth.- and sixteenth-century Europe, it wascertainly a fundamental factor in the changes thattook place then. Printing could for the first timeprovide the steady and reliable means for thespreading and sharing of knowledge. Science andtechnology could be developed, ideas could bedisseminated and then questioned. With a stableand common text for discussion, a critical culturecould grow. Argument had a firm basis on whichto proceed.

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The emphasis of historians of print culture, suchas Eisenstein, has tended to be on books, partlyperhaps for the mundane reason that these arethe printed documents that survive mostabundantly. It is certainly harder for a historian toinvestigate newspapers or street posters: harderto locate surviving copies, and to consider theireffects. Indeed this branch of history has becomeknown as “the history of the book.” A book is,most characteristically, read by one person at atime, and often that person will be alone. One cancounter this perception by recalling the practice-now declining – of reading aloud, in churches, inschools and other institutions, and in the home.Texts are also read alone in public: on buses, inparks, in libraries. So reading often has a visibleand apparent social dimension. But its truer andperhaps more real social dimension lies in thereading that happens when one person picks up aprinted sheet and turns its marks into meaning.The page – it could be a screen too – is then thecommon ground on which people can meet. Theymay be widely dispersed in space and time,unknown and unavailable to each other. Or theymay know each other and come together later todiscuss their reading of the text. Then the socialdimension of the text may become a group ofpeople around a table, pointing to the text,quoting from it, arguing, considering.

A text is produced by writers, editors, andprinters. With luck, if they keep their heads down,designers might find a role somewhere here, too.The text is composed, proofed, corrected,perhaps read and corrected further. Then it ismultiplied and distributed. Finally it is read alonebut in common, for shared meanings. When onestarts to think along these lines, the semiology oftexts and images doesn’t seem to help much.Yes,”signification” can be identified as part of alarger process. And within this small part, what ofthe “arbitrary link” between signification andsignal? Saussure’s too-little noticed suggestionthat “unmotivated” is a better term than“arbitrary” helps because “arbitrary” is not whattypography is about at all.

The juxtaposition that one finds happening intypography is easy to grasp. It is the link betweena keyboard and a monitor; between manuscriptcopy and a laser-printed proof, betweeninformation on a disc and on sheets of text onfilm; and finally, and differently, between thepage and the reader. The links between thesepairs are, we try to ensure, anything but arbitrary.Correcting proofs, with its attempt to turn“arbitrary” into “intended,” can stand as theclearest instance of this defining characteristic oftypography.

The argument made here is that deconstructionand poststructuralist theory can’t account for thematerial world. The only material it knows is air,and its foundations are built not even on air, buton the entirely abstract and intellectual. Certainly,when it takes on typography, the huge mistakethat poststructuralist theory makes is not to seethe material nature of typographic language. Herescreen display, because it is indeed so fluidmaterially so probably should be consideredseparately. But certainly in printing, languagebecomes real and materially present: ink onpaper. Here lies the responsibility of the designerof printed matter: to bring into existence textsthat will never be changed, only-if one is lucky-revised and reprinted. The idea that design shouldact out the indeterminacy of reading is a folly. Aprinted sheet is not at all indeterminate, and allthat the real reader is left with is a designer’smuddle or vanity, frozen at the point at which thedigital description was turned into material. Farfrom giving freedom of interpretation to thereader, deconstructionist design imposes thedesigner’s reading of the text onto the rest of us.”

This argument against poststructuralism intypography is not directly about style, nor is itabout tradition and breaks with tradition. It is asocial argument. Saussure’s formulation, alreadyquoted, that “the individual has no power to altera sign in any respect once it has becomeestablished in a linguistic community” makes thepoint firmly. Too firmly, because it seems to leaveout the creative aspect of language, of syntaxespecially, and of the ways in which every one ofus mints these signs freshly, with new meanings,every day.

The theme of language as the possession of acommunity was developed by Benedict Andersonin the course of his book Imagined Communities.This book is one the handful of general works onhistory and politics that should be dear totypographers because it takes notice of printing;in fact printing is at the heart of Anderson’sthesis. In one chapter Anderson weaves togetherthe rise of capitalism, the spread of printing, thehistory of languages, and the “origins of nationalconsciousness.” Arbitrariness is acknowledged.He writes about alphabetic languages, as againstideographic: “The very arbitrariness of anysystem of signs for sounds facilitated theassembling process.” But, unlike thepoststructuralists, he does not stop there.“Nothing served to ‘assemble’ related vernacularsmore than capitalism, which, within the limitsimposed by grammars and syntaxes, createdmechanically-reproduced print-languages,capable of dissemination through the market.”But this is not a reductive account of merecapitalist exploitation. Anderson continues:

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These print-languages laid the base fornational consciousness... they created unifiedfields of exchange and communication belowLatin and above the spoken vernaculars.Speakers of the huge variety of Frenches,Englishes, or Spanishes, who might find itdifficult or even impossible to understand oneanother in conversation, became capable ofcomprehending one another via print andpaper. In the process, they gradually becameaware of the hundreds of thousands, evenmillions, of people in their particularlanguage-field, and at the same time that onlythose hundreds of thousands, or millions, sobelonged. These fellow readers, to whom theywere connected through print, formed, in theirsecular, particular, visible invisibility, theembryo of the nationally-imaginedCommunity.

This “imagined community” may be difficult forsome people to grasp, particularly if they livewithin the community of one of the dominantlanguages of the world. But even in the Englishspeaking metropolis where these words are beingwritten, it can be understood and felt. Greek,Italian, and Irish newspapers are sold at cornershops in this neighborhood, serving their readershere as conductors or lifelines out into the largersphere of their linguistic-cultural community. Thismay describe the case for some, probably olderreaders. For others from those communities, andfor us too-the mother-tongue English speakers-the local weekly newspaper is the place wherewe come together, where we read theneighborhood. The activity of reading, asBenedict Anderson puts it, may take place in thelair of the skull,” but it has this social extension.We always read in common, with fellow readers.

Places and nets

Some qualifications need to be made to thisargument. I have been stressing the “in-common” element of reading, against the ideathat this is a wilful, arbitrary process, without anintersubjective dimension. But as an extreme of“in-common” reading, one thinks of conditions intotalitarian societies. In China at the time of theCultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s “little redbook” became – despite its praise ofcontradiction and dialectics – the emblem of asociety in which an attempt was made atcoercion even into feeling in unison. The bookwas a badge, as well as a manual of “correctthinking.” Like the trim, beautifully made jacketsinto whose breast pockets it slotted, the “little redbook” was a model of fitting, unobtrusive designand production; but this uniform becameoppressive. The project of complete, totalitarianstandardization is inhuman, impossible, and willalways eventually collapse. After a while, peoplerebel.

To the list of the nondeterminable tendencies inreading, we can add that texts age and travel, ortheir contexts change both in time and place.Each generation, as well as each person, will finddifferent meanings in a text. Much that is fresh inwriting and thinking comes through recovery ofold texts, and through reading them against thegrain of current orthodoxy in an attempt todiscover the original habits of thought andlanguage in which the work was written.

Thus among the freshest of recent tendencies inmusic has been the uncovering of “early music,”by the attempt to understand and re-attain itsoriginal conditions of production. But, against anyidea of static and finally knowable pieces, it isclear that there can only be performances of theirtime and place. Take the example of J. S. Bach’sMatthew Passion: “authentic performances” inthe 1990s differ markedly from those in 1970s.The most moving and convincing readings arethose that-perhaps just through theirconcentration on “the work itself” – speak moredirectly to us. This was certainly the case in therecent “performed” version of the work. Thisproduction discarded the conventions of theconcert performance (white ties, tails, divadresses, upright posture) – often then uneasilysituated in a church – and joined the work insteadto the sphere of the everyday reality of theaudience (jeans and sweaters, gestures andperambulation). Somehow this helped set freethe emotional power in the Passion story,especially for the nonbeliever, for whom the workmay otherwise remain a long-distance and largelyaesthetic experience. The audience, groupedaround the action in stacked scaffolded seating,entered the event more intimately than is usual.The acting-out was quite limited: a touch on theshoulder, a gesture of the head, and not muchmore. But just in this very constraint it gained ineffect. One could point to some historicallegitimation for this performance (the work wasfelt to be surprisingly theatrical and operatic by itsfirst audiences in Leipzig in the 1730s), but thiswas at most a starting point rather than acomplete program to emulate or recreate.

The “reading” that is given before an audiencegathered under one roof-or even that is broadcaston television-is, of course, a different matter tothe reading that is the concern of this essay.Although, by comparison and contrast, it mayilluminate. The director of the performance, incollaboration with others, presents aninterpretation, a reading. We the audience receiveit and interpret that interpretation, and ourattention interacts with and may affect thisinterpretation. Afterwards, with others who havebeen there, we consider, discuss, develop,modify, revise our interpretations. These havebeen different experiences, maybe quite wildlydifferent, if members of an audience bring verydifferent assumptions and beliefs to the event(say, people of different religious beliefs at the

Fellow Readers: Notes on Multiplied Language

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Fellow Readers: Notes on Multiplied Language

Matthew Passion). This may be why theatre canbe so vivid an experience in small communities,where audience members have shared pasts anda sense of who each other is. And it may be whytheatre in a large city-however technicallyassured-can be such a desolate experience.Whatever the composition of the audience, thereis a common event by which to measure. And thesense of community that may be engendered atsuch a performance is, of course, what makes thedifference between public performance andprivate reading. But joint reflection oversomething that has been shared can happen withboth these experiences of watching and ofreading. Both have public and private dimensions,if in different measures.

“The truth lies somewhere in between” may be atruism, but one that is also true in this case, or inthese infinite particular cases of people readingtexts. One only has to think of any reader turningthe pages, misunderstanding, turning back to seewhat was said before, sneaking a look at the lastchapter, being distracted by a phone call or thedemands of a child, perhaps falling asleep anddreaming around the text, and then returning tothis business of turning marks into meaning. Theprocess is individual and unpredictable. As if weneeded a designer to make this so! And yet thetext is there as an irresistible and multiple fact: acommon ground. For any writer, theintersubjective dimension of reading comesvividly to life when one hears from a friend thatthey have been reading something you wrote.Then you may reach for your copy of the text andread it again, but this time in the voice of thatother reader, turning the words over, wonderingwhat she or he made of them.

Computer-based means of transmitting texts areno doubt introducing fundamental changes to themodel that is here taken as characteristic ofreading. Text and images organized as nodes on anetwork, as in hypertext, or intercut and layeredwith other information and other kinds of media(animated images, sound) – this provides adifferent experience from that of reading aprinted page. And here the deconstructionistrhetoric about the active reader may have moretruth in its descriptions. At least here there reallyis fluidity and the possibility of change, as therehardly is in printed deconstruction.

Debates over the coming of the “electronicbook,” at the expense of the printed one, havealways seemed a little futile. Futurist visionariestend to underestimate the dimensions of bodilycomfort and cost. Reading cheap small books inbed can still be a great pleasure. The dead duckof “legibility” is hardly the issue here. Much morecritical apart, of course, from content – is pagesize, weight, openability and flappiness, lighting,temperature of the room, and how many pillowsyou have. Sitting in an upright chair at a screenbrings a more serious air to the processes ofreading, and there would be some sense ofcontradiction in reading a thriller that way. Toread an intimate letter sent over the wires to yourterminal may also feel a little odd, The presentupsurge in this mode of communication mustbring large changes. One already noticeableeffect is that an informal, unedited style whichgoes with private communication is spreadinginto multiplied communication. Electronic mail isfine, but not if this becomes the model for allcommunication. The formality that multiplicationand publication demands of text carries a socialfunction. And the social necessity of “in-common” reading, which was won for us byprinting, remains-even if it is now carried by otherways of transmitting text. If this is lost, then wereally will all be reduced to “individuals and theirfamilies.”

Extract from the text originally published as: Fellow Readers:

Notes on Multiplied Language (London: Hyphen Press, 1994),

reproduced in Looking Closer 2, Allworth Press, 1997.

Annotations and footnotes have been excluded from the version

here.

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Am I Type?

Introduction

I bring into the light of day the precious stores ofknowledge and wisdom long hidden in the graveof ignorance. I am the leaden army that conquersthe world: I am type!

This was the declaration of the 1933 broadsidedesigned and written by the renowned typefacedesigner Frederic Goudy. It is an arresting oratorylike homage by Goudy to the predominance oftype in the printing and design hierarchy of hisday. Reading it now, however, it brings up manyquestions and contradictions, that Goudy couldnever have envisaged, arising from theevolutionary twists and turns that typography hasundergone in the last twenty years, in particularits emergence and application within screenbased environments such as film, television,desktop computers and mobile communications.

This paper will focus on the nature of theevolutionary change that typography isundergoing in screen based contexts and willbegin to examine some of the problematic issuesfor designing typography that have arisen as aresult of this emergent transition from paper toscreen. In this presentation, I will attempt to:

• Define screen media and contexts fortypography

• Make an analytical comparison of printtypography to screen based typography.

Today’s presentation aims to clarify and definethe current context within which my research issituated, by establishing and defining the natureof what ‘screen’ means in relation to typographyand by beginning to examine existing typographicdesign principles for practice.

Definition of screen media and context fortypography

New media theorist Lev Manovich describescontemporary western society as ‘a society of thescreen’ where much of our daily lives are involvedwith screens in one way or another, whether itsworking, reading a newspaper, watching moviesor communicating with friends and relatives.’Screens have rapidly become our primary meansof accessing information. Manovich claims thatas new generations of both computer users andcomputer designers grow up in a media richenvironment dominated by television rather thanby printed texts, they are preferencing thelanguage of the screen over the language of print.This is the backdrop against which typography inscreen based media will be examined.

Definition of screen

Design critic and author, Jessica Helfanddescribes the screen itself as possessing a‘complex and variable presence in our daily lives:as a window, linking public space and privatespace; as an interface, providing closure andexposure; as a mirror, reinforcing the self andenabling reciprocity across electronically linkedphone lines’ 2 This description highlights theinherent problem of defining ‘screen’ as either asingle entity or as having a single purpose.‘Screens’ appear to extend their range frompainting to cinema screen, from computerdesktop to equipment control panels, and frommobile phones to public information displays.

Just as the medium itself is difficult to classifyand understand, so too are the multifariouschallenges for typographic design within thisemergent form.

Lev Manovich’s genealogy of the screen providesa useful analysis for the purposes of situatingscreen typography in this research.

He describes the first stage of this development,as the ‘classic screen’, a flat, rectangular surfaceintended for frontal viewing, that exists in ournormal body space and acts as a window toanother space. This other space (inside thescreen) has a different scale to our normal spaceand its proportions (landscape and portrait) haveremained the same for centuries from painting tocomputer screen.

The second distinctive development, Manovichcalls the ‘dynamic screen’, which emergedapproximately one hundred years ago and retainsall of the qualities of the classic screen except theimage it displays changes over time. It bringswith it a certain ‘viewing regime’ that strives forcomplete illusion, asking the viewer to suspendtheir disbelief and identify wholly with the imageon screen. The viewer must concentratecompletely on what they see in the window andthe image completely fills the screen. Manovichnotes that the dynamic screen is aggressive in itspresentation because it functions ‘to filter, screenout, take over, render non existent what is outsideof the frame`. Typography on the dynamic screenin the form of cinema and television will form partthis research context.

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Am I Type? Type on Screen: anuneasy relationship from thebeginning

Hilary Kenna

RNUAL Summer SymposiumJuly 2005

Am I Type?

The third, and most contemporary, stage inManovich’s genealogy is the ‘real time screen’. Itencompasses some of the qualities of the classicand dynamic screen, but is fundamentallydifferent for a number of reasons. Firstly, it showsmultiple, overlapping and co existing images atonce and the viewer (now termed user) no longerhas to concentrate on one image but on many atthe same time and different parts of the image (orwindows) can correspond to different momentsin time. Secondly, the images can change overtime in real time as users decide and control whatinformation they want to access and how theywant to view it. Both of these qualities arefundamental principles of the GUI (Graphical UserInterface), which has become a main property ofthe real time screen.

The GUI completely disrupts the viewing regimeassociated with the classic and dynamic screen.On the real time screen, the participation ofviewers or users can range from selecting andediting, to reading and viewing, to creating andpublishing. The multifarious and customisablenature of viewer/user activity in relation to thereal time screen creates an immense density ofdiffering design challenges for typographydepending on the type of usage context inquestion.

Perhaps, it is for this reason, according to newmedia scholar Jay David Bolter, that the ultimategoal of GUI design seems to be the improvementof the technology to the point of invisibility, sothat it puts the viewer or user in touch with realitywithout the interference of an interface. Bolterdescribes the quest to create an invisibleinterface as the search for ‘transparency’, whichhe deems an endless pursuit because it isredefined with each new technology.

Types of screens

This research primarily concerns itself with thedynamic and real time screens and the manyguises and hybrids that they manifest. I havebegun the preliminary development of a typologyof the screen, which aims to focus on threestrands of screen development plotted acrosstime. They are; technology types of screens andtypes of display technologies for renderingtypography; usage contexts including thosespecifically related to typography; and finally,seminal practical work ground breaking examplesof screen work that demonstrate aspects of theabove two strands. This typology remains verymuch a work in progress and I have as yet toaddress the third aspect.

Looking at the first strand, it is clear that thetension between technological advancement andqualitative display can often be a trade offresulting in contradictory development. Forexample, as screen technology strives to matchthe scalability and portability of paper, the qualityof resolution and image display often seems totake a retrograde step. There are stark similaritiesbetween the typography on an 1980’s VDAmonitor and to mobile phones of the late 1990’s.The search for improved and higher resolutionrendering technologies means equipment mayalso be more expensive and take longer to reachmainstream use. Plasma television screens versusCRT television screens are one such example.Additionally, different strategies to best rendertypography on screen have evolved in parallelwith computer display technologies, includingPost script and anti aliasing, TrueType, OpenTypeand most recently Microsoft’s ClearType which isspecially developed for improving the legibility oftypography on LCD screens.

The relentless march of technologicaladvancement also means that standard formatsare constantly being revised and remain in a stateof flux. In this respect, it may seem futile toattempt to devise a typology of screen displayand rendering technology, except for the fact thatthe examination helps to identify consistentscreen characteristics that seem independent ofresolution or device.

Screen based contexts for typography

I have identified screen based typography in threebroad contexts, cinema, television and computerand telecommunications. It is worth looking ateach one in detail.

Cinema

Typically characteristic of cinema is the largescale of the screen and the audience, and for themost part, the purpose of the representation onscreen is entertainment, usually in the form of anarrative film. In this context, typography has arich tradition, dating back to the earliest silentfilms where title cards communicated keydialogue or events in the narrative through to thegolden age of film titles design in the 1960’s(spearheaded by Saul Bass, Pablo Ferra andMaurice Binder) and its resurgence in the 1990’s(with Kyle Cooper’s landmark mini narrative titlesequence to Seven). Film studios and director’scontinue to capitalise on the visual impact of thetitle sequence to sell the content of the film,convey information and establish the film’sidentity and mood. Typography in this screencontext might be described as largely imagebased and interpretative and the audience activityhere follows the viewing regime of the dynamicscreen.

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Am I Type?

Television

In many ways, traditional television viewingechoes the regime of cinema, albeit on a smallerscale the primary purpose remains socialentertainment, although educational, informationbased programmes and advertisements form asignificantly large part of television’s transmissionoutput. Typography on television incorporatesopening sequences, channel idents, listings,news, information and advertising graphics.Latterly, with the advent of interactive television,typography also plays a significant role in thetelevisions interface representation. The viewersits some distance away from the screen andoperates the television with a remote control.

Computer

The third and most complex context for screentypography relates to the computer platform andits integration with telecommunications. Broadlyspeaking, a single desktop computer withInternet accessibility probably typifies the natureof representation and usage for typography inthis area which may also incorporate a diverserange of mobile PDA’s. Typography in this contextoperates in the realm of Manovich’s real timescreen, where the viewing regime is inextricablybound up with the GUI and the type itself may bedynamic, static and changeable, either by thepublisher or the user. Typography on thecomputer screen has many functions and mayappear in many forms, as an integral part of theinterface, as web page content, as a dynamicsequence, or as an editable document. Thenature of its representation may be image basedor information based, it may be interpretative andexpressive or factual and objective.

The viewer or user may be the audience or authorof a computer text, actively watching and readingit, or writing and publishing it. The integration oftelecommunications with the computer make itpossible for a single user at a single screen tocommunicate and connect with a multitude ofother single users at single screens. This createsa multifarious and distributed community ofauthors and audiences, which in many ways arenot unlike the audiences for cinema andtelevision. The most significant difference is thatauthor and audience may engage in directdialogue exchanging points of view as well ascontent.

By uncovering some of the underlying propertiesof the types of screens that typography mayinhabit, it makes it easier to see how theseproperties may be projected on to, and reflectedin, the design of typography on screen. This willform the basis of the next section of this essay.

Analytical comparison of printed versusscreen typography

Typography has been rooted in the tradition ofthe print medium for over half a millennium and itis only in the last twenty years or so that textualform has become prevalent on screen. Thechallenge for typography lies in trying to reinventitself in the image based medium of the screenthat seems at odds with its print origins. Thisuneasy relationship between typography andscreen might be further examined by a criticalcomparison of the nature and properties of printtypography to its screen based counterpart.

I have chosen to focus this comparison under thefour key headings; format, media, readingexperience and typographic representation.

Format

If we accept that screen and paper aredistinctively single mediums (despite the varietyof different types of screen and paper available),the question of format, and subsequently of scaleand proportion, is a crucial design considerationfor typography in either context. Similarities ofscale are apparent, as we might compare thescale of the cinema screen to a billboard, or themobile phone display to a business card, or eventhe desktop monitor to a standard magazinepublication. (Note we are not comparing contextsof use here). There are possibly infinite variationsof the scale and proportion of paper formats, andtypes of paper, that a designer has the control tospecify. In comparison, the number of screenformats available is very limited, and is whollydetermined by technological manufacturers.Designers of screen based texts have to carefullyexamine and work within the constraints of aparticular screen format.

In the print medium, a single page of content isdisplayed on a single piece of paper, andadditional pages may be added as contentincreases in scale. In screen based media, allcontent is displayed within a single screen. Thishas necessitated the design of a variety of displayand access interfaces that try to facilitate differingamounts of content.

The key difference between screen and printformats is highlighted in the interface formthrough which we access and understand theseformats. In the print medium, there has been littlechange to the page/book interface, from tableau,to scroll, to codex, in over five hundred years.Despite differences in scale or type of paper, theinterface for print is pretty much standardised. Itis also taught to us early and is very easilylearned. We understand how to design and howto read typography in almost all printed formats.

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Am I Type?

In contrast, as outlined earlier in reference toManovich’s screen genealogy, the interface formof the screen has changed dramatically over thecourse of its development. We have moved fromwatching the single moving image of thedynamic screen to multiple and varied activitieswith the real time screen. Each type of screen(mobile, computer or television) and displaytechnology may have an unique interface, and thequality and properties of typography may varygreatly in each. MIT scholar David Small refers tothis as a ‘complexity barrier’ that must besurmounted if typography on screen is ever torival its printed counterpart.’

Media

A comparison of media use in print and screencontexts seems straightforward. Print uses textand image. Screen encompasses text, image,sound and motion.

Given typography’s printed tradition, the designand integration of typographic and image basedforms has been thoroughly explored anddocumented in its five hundred year plus history.In comparison, the design of typography in amultimedia environment that includes sound,motion and interactivity is still evolving. The corecontrast here perhaps, is that each media type(text, image, sound, animation) has its own set ofunique properties and principles governing itsdesign application. The design of typography in atwo dimensional print environment has been welltraversed and a broad knowledge base ofscholarship established. However, this does nothold true for the design of typography in three¬dimensional and four dimensional (time based orreal time) environments, or for type that isauditory or interactively responsive. In her essay‘Electronic Typography: The New VisualLanguage’, Jessica Helfand considers that toadequately develop this new typography, ‘wemight do well to rethink visual languagealtogether, to consider new and alternativeperspectives’.

A detailed critical examination of the practicaldesign principles for typography thatencompasses the diverse media characteristic tothe screen will be the main focus of my futureresearch.

Reading experience

I have chosen the term ‘reading experience’ torefer to issues relating to the audience interactionwith a text, in both print and screen formats.Traditionally readability has referred to how easilya text can be read, while legibility relates towhether or not a text can be read. A wide rangeof scientific, psychological and typographicresearch has been published on factors affectingthe legibility of typography (Tinker 1963, Dillon1992, Dyson 2002). There is less formal materialavailable on the study of readability. The scope ofreadability in this comparison describes theoverall sense of the experience of reading aparticular text.

Printed material can be read anywhere the readerchooses, on a bus, at a desk, in bed, at thebeach. While reading print, the reader’s eyesmove over the surface of the page, scanning theinformation, relying on the contrast and rhythmcreated in the typographic composition to guidethem through the text. The surface of the page isstill and the typography is static and fixed,presented exactly as the designer had intended,on carefully chosen stock and in a particular typedesign setting. The reader may hold the printedpiece in their hands and control how much timethey wish to spend reading a particular page. Thescale and nature of the physical paper format willalso tell them at a glance how much text itcontains. The text is already written and its orderdecided (executed by the author), the story iswaiting to be read. The pace of reading andcontemplation of the text is at the reader’sdiscretion. As the reader becomes immersed inthe ‘reading space’ inside their head’, the bookinterfaces gradually disappears.

Let’s compare this to the experience of readingon screen. The reader’s eye may move or it maybe transfixed, scanning over and staring at thelight patterns of text reflecting outward from themonitor’s screen. The text may be static ordynamic, fixed or changing depending on thenature of representation, whether it is linear andtime based, or non linear and real¬ time based orperhaps even a combination of both. The visualpresentation on the surface of the screen willmostly likely be moving, either by animatedpresentation, or reader interactivity via the GUIsuch as selecting, opening, closing, scrolling etc.The reader is more likely to sit in front of thescreen and the physical interaction with the textwill be usually via a mouse, keyboard or stylus.The reader is dependent on the customisedinterface of a particular screen text to determineits scale and order. The reading experience onscreen may combine watching, reading andexploration through the interface. In this context,it seems unlikely that the reading interface willmetaphorically disappear as it does in print.

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Am I Type?

Recounting Bolter’s and Manovich’s earlierclaims, in a context where the interface is not‘transparent’, and the ‘viewing regime’ isdisrupted by the GUI, it is less likely that a trulyimmersive reading experience comparable toprint will emerge. Victor Nell, who has conductedone of the few empirical studies on readability,states the extreme case of immersive reading as‘ludic reading’, (from ludo in Latin, meaning toplay) or reading for pleasure. According to BillHill, head of Microsoft’s Advanced ReadingTechnology, if the problem of ludic reading couldbe solved on screen, to make it as comfortableand natural as it is print, then the same basicprinciples would apply to any other reading taskon screen.

Typographic representation

Typeface

Typography in printed form can be reproduced tothe highest resolution and every detail andnuance of a typeface will be rendered accurately.Consider the average ‘book quality’ image¬setteruses 2,500 x 2,500 dots per square inch, or over6 million bits of information. The averagecomputer screen offers less than 100 dotssquared (usually 72dpi or 96dpi), which adds upto about 5,000 bits of information. This is lessthan 111000’ of the resolution of the commonbook, and considerably less than a even acommon 600dpi office laser printer. 6 Trying torender the detail of a serif typeface, especially ata small point size on screen is virtuallyimpossible. It is hardly surprising that typefaceson screen seem like poor approximations of theirprinted counterparts and that legibility remains akey concern.

To date, most research into screen typographyhas focused specifically on developing betterways to render type within the low resolutiondisplay environment of the screen. These includetechnologies such as Postscript, TrueType,OpenType and ClearType, or the design on screenspecific typefaces, such as Verdana and Georgia(by Matthew Carter) or the wide range of pixelaliased fonts. In 2006, Microsoft is planning toship six specially commissioned typefacesdesigned for maximum screen legibility with itsnew version of the Windows operating system.

Screen legibility has been well researched byDillon and more recently Dyson, the findings ofwhich are too numerous and detailed to cite here.In summary, the appropriate choice and size oftypeface (sans serif with large x height), thenumber of words in a line, spacing betweenwords and lines of text, the colour of text againstits background etc, remain as much aconsideration for screen typography as they dofor print. The parameters affecting these issuesare of course different in each medium. Otheraspects specific to screen include renderingissues such as antialiasing, the impact ofdynamic elements and the ability to navigate atext interface. Dyson notes that the term legibilitymight be extended to include issues of‘usability’.’

Composition

It is worth comparing the differences intypographic composition between print and onscreen. As mentioned earlier, a designer canspecify any format they wish in which tocompose their design. Once chosen, the edges ofthe page become a definitive boundary governingthe placement of typographic elements. The 21)flat surface of the page focuses relationships ofsize and placement on the x and y axis.

On screen, the designer will usually work with anumber of fixed sizes or resolutions that relate tospecific screen types, such as computer(800x600dpi, 1024x768dpi) television (PAL768x576dpi or DVPAL 720x576dpi) or mobile(l20xl30dpi up to 640x480dpi etc.). For the mostpart the proportions and aspect ratio on screen is4:3 landscape orientation. This is the frame withinwhich typography can be composed on screen.Considering how to compose multiple pages oftext in the single frame of the screen is the keydifference to composing type in print. Designerson screen have to consider dynamic strategies forcomposition such as animation, layering, scrollingand scaling. The time based nature of thesestrategies also means that the composition frameappears to be the viewing window that capturesdifferent moments of the composition. Thescreen edges are not the boundaries, as thecomposition begins and continues outside of theframe, passing through in a form guided byanimation or viewer interaction.

The screen also possesses an intangible qualitybecause of the virtual space inside it. It meansthat composing type in this virtual space can beconsidered on the x, y and z axes. Time mightalso be considered the fourth axis. Thecomplexities of managing typographic elementsacross these four relationships is a challengingcontrast to the two dimensional composition ofprint.

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Am I Type?

Hierarchy and Structure

Following naturally from composition is adiscussion of typographic hierarchy. Traditionallydesigners have used the nuance of typographicexpression via different weights and size, coupledwith logical, and linear ordering to denote theinformational hierarchy within a printed piece. Incontrast, there is a limit to what the pixel canrender on screen and the nuance of typographicexpression, especially hairlines and serifs, areinevitably compromised. The advent of‘hypertext’, which Bolter calls ‘the typography ofthe electronic medium’, has also challenged thetraditional linear ordering of text, making itpossible to create layers of additional meaningaccessible through programmable associativelinks within the text. Hyper linking betweendifferent texts facilitates multiple entry and exitpoints to and from a text, resulting in a seeminglynon linear structure. It can often be difficult forusers to understand and follow the hierarchy (ifindeed one exists) of a digital text. This variableform coupled with the dynamic and auralproperties of multimedia combine to create aconfusing palette for the designer to choosefrom. Jessica Helfand aptly sums up thischallenge questioning the value of typographicchoices such as bold and italics, ‘when wordscan dance across the screen, dissolve, ordisappear altogether?’’

Outside of designing the form of text on screen,designers should acknowledge that the culture ofscreen is different to the culture of print. In herbook, Thinking with Type, Ellen Lupton, stressesthat the impatience of the digital reader arisesfrom the cultural habits of the screen where usersexpect to feel ‘productive’ not contemplative,‘they expect to be in search mode, not processingmode’. Typography in this context seems to bemore about alleviating the experience ofprolonged reading on screen rather thanencouraging it, as designers are expected toserve up byte sized chunks of tantalisingtypography to whet the appetite of browsingreaders.

With this in mind, designing typographichierarchy on screen is not as seeminglystraightforward as it is in print.

Delivery

Print designers can generally feel secure that thefinished manufacture of their design will manifestitself exactly in the same form they specified.They have detailed control over each stage of thedesign and production process, with theexception of final printing, but even then aconscientious designer will press check the firstproofs of a job to ensure its accuracy. It is difficultto compare this process to the design andproduction of screen typography because of themultifarious nature of both screen hardware anddesign contexts.

For example, a web designer has to consider arange of technical constraints; what screenfriendly typeface to use and what developmentenvironment (html/asp and css, or flash and fontembedding) to produce the design. After thesedecisions are made, it is likely that a designer willrely on a programmer to build some, or all of theirdesign on screen. Assuming this reaches asatisfactory conclusion, the designer still has nocontrol over who will access the website, how itwill be accessed or if the audience will accessand view the design in the way it was originallyconceived. Because the final delivery mechanismis variable and the viewer may also intervene init’s the final transmission, designers must bewilling to compromise absolute control over thefinal design outcome and to perhaps to considerdesign as specifying the optimum set of aestheticvariables to work in this framework.

If we think back over the issues discussed in thispaper, and then consider Goudy’s broadside ‘I amType’, one can’t help thinking that the qualities oftype on screen seem far removed from Goudy’spersonified description of a leaden army ofprinted type. One wonders, if Goudy wereconsidering today’s army of typographic bits onscreens that are pervading the world, and writinga similar piece whether he wouldn’t entitle it Am1 Type?

© Hilary Kenna.RNUAL Summer SymposiumJuly 2005

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Am I Type?

References

1Manovich L., (2001), The Language of NewMedia, MIT Press, p.72.2Helfand, J., (2001), Screen: Essays o GraphicDesign, New Media and Visual Culture, PrincetonArchitectural Press, p.xiii.3Manovich, L., (2001), The Language of NewMedia, MIT Press, p.96.4Small D., (1999), Rethinking the Book, MIT PhdThesis.5Worthington, Michael, (Autumn 1999), Entrancedby motion, seduced by stillness, V9, 33.6Sassoon, R., (2002), Computers and Typography2, ‘Computer screens are not like paper:typography on the web’ by An Davidow, Intellect.7Dyson, M., (2002), Legibility on screen: what dowe think versus what do we know?, Proceedingsof the 1st international conference on Typographyand Visual Communication, Thessaloniki, Greece,26 30 June 2002, Thessaloniki: University ofMacedonia Press, 2004, 249 256.8Helfand L, (2001), Screen: Essays on GraphicDesign, New Media and Visual Culture, PrincetonArchitectural Press, p.107.9Lupton, E., (2004), Thinking with Type A criticalguide for designers, writers, editors and students,Princeton Architectural Press, p.74.

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