From For the Hearts

Typography is a methodical system to organize quantities of text. Typography can be as little as one character, or it may be heaps of text. Books, magazines, or newspapers. Typography happens when a thought is put in writing, regardless of the writer’s knowledge about typographic conventions, and regardless of any desire to adhere to or break with these conventions.

The root of typography is the script. It consists of lowercase and uppercase letters, numerals and an assortment of marks. These shapes are written on an imaginary baseline, from left to right, word after word, sentence after sentence, line after line, and page after page. This is already a handful of conventions established and developed since ancient times, without which the thought put in writing could not reach the reader undistorted, limited only by the limitations of language itself.

As a coin has two sides to it, so has typography. The reader is not supposed to be aware of the typography, just as magicians are not supposed to make you aware of how the trick is performed. The goal is to suspend disbelief, support the content, and wherever possible, enhance the message with subtle visual metaphor on a level that truly works at the subconscious level. The best typography is when you are not aware of it consciously, in other words a thankless job.

Beyond the aim of making typography an optimal carrier of information lays a way to tell a story beyond that of the text itself. Useful? Certainly, but appropriate? Not always the case. Any body of text has a style, consciously applied or not, that will convey an emotion. The typographer should be able to set the text in its appropriate typographic style, so that the typography aids the reading of the text. The typographer should also be able to set the text in a style that accentuates the text, and likewise should be able to set in a style that works against the text. All from the condition that the typographer masters the language of visual communication.

In 1928 Jan Tschichold wrote his book The New Typography in which he says “The essence of the New Typography is clarity. This puts it into deliberate opposition to the old typography whose aim was ‘beauty’ and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today. This utmost clarity is necessary today because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression.” “The New Typography is distinguished from the old by the fact that its first objective is to develop its visible form out of the functions of the text. It is essential to give pure and direct expression to the contents of whatever is printed: just as in the works of technology and nature, ‘form’ must be created out of function. Only then can we achieve a typography which expresses the spirit of modern man. The function of printed text is communication, emphasis (word value), and the logical sequence of the contents.”

In this sense he was not far from the views of fellow contemporary typographer Stanley Morison who two years after, in his book First Principles Of Typography wrote “Typography may be defined as the craft of rightly disposing printing material in accordance with specific purpose; of so arranging the letters, distributing the space and controlling the type as to aid to the maximum the reader’s comprehension of the text. Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end, for enjoyment of patterns is rarely the reader’s chief aim. Therefore, any disposition of printing material which, whatever the intention, has the effect of coming between author and reader is wrong. It follows that in the printing of books meant to be read there is little room for ‘bright’ typography.” In her 1932 essay The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should Be Invisible, Beatrice Warde succinctly coins the simile that a transparent goblet is preferable to any other because “everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.”

These views relate to the basic typography – the blocks of text and their relation to the page and it’s margins. Where Tschichold and Morison did not agree was in Tschichold’s modern functionalistic approach to typography. Much a product of the Bauhaus school of thought Tschichold advocated the use of asymmetry, visual contrasts and the use of sans serif type. Tschichold writes “Not least, the liveliness of asymmetry is also an expression of our own movement and that of modern life; it is a symbol of the changing forms of life in general when asymmetrical movement in typography takes the place of symmetrical repose.”

After wwii Tschichold reversed his former position on typography and revisited medieval books to uncover the lost secrets of proportions. In his 1991 collection of essays The Form of the Book he writes “When typography hit bottom near the end of the nineteenth century, all manner of styles were copied naively in their obvious outward appearance, like initials and vignettes. Yet no one thought about page proportions. Painters attempted to free the shoddy typography from atrophied rules, and in doing so, they objected to everything that might infringe upon the newly declared artistic freedom.” He continues “After much toilsome work I finally succeeded, in 1953, in reconstructing the Golden Canon of book page construction as it was used during late Gothic times by the finest of scribes.”

Gone are his youthful theories on asymmetry and functionalism. As he himself unveiled the secrets of typography he became in-line with the dogmas of Stanley Morison’s typography. For Jan Tschichold in 1966, the greatest enemy of typographers was still ‘self-expression.’ In his Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering he writes “It’s far better to keep one’s hand off and not be lead astray by the false notion that lettering calls for ‘self expression.’ This error is largely responsible for the ugly lettering which surrounds us. Even some acknowledged masters among recent lettering artists have succumbed to this error to a regrettable extent. The essence of good lettering is precisely the opposite of what, until recently, has been widely preached: it is not self-expression, but compete self-negation in the service of correctly understood task.”

These approaches to typography pertains to the domain of style or ‘graphic design’ rather than being universal truths. Despite the definitive nature of Morison, Tschichold and others view on typography, the ‘truth’ is a relative concept changing from one context to another. For mass communication like books and newspapers Morison gets it right when he concludes “Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader.” Still the society is constantly evolving, new ideas replace old, and the collective consciousness moves to new ground. The Bauhaus School was such a reaction on the Victorian and Biedermeier aesthetics prominent of the time. The fact that many of the Bauhaus experiments on type and typography were later abandoned, empirically supports Morison’s conservatism. Still the success of sans serif type and asymmetry shows that not all is set in stone. Some new ideas do integrate with society and even become very successful indeed.

The rules of typography are tied to their context; the wider the target group the more conservative conventions apply, and a narrow target group might imply the use of exclusive or even idiosyncratic solutions, that for the uninitiated would stand in the way of the text but for the initiated would aid understanding and thus be ‘good typography’. As Peter Bilak states in his 1996 presentation for typ 4.0 “Right and wrong do not exist in graphic design. There is only effective and non-effective communication.” He expands “According to the communicative model process of Shannon and Weaver from 1949 (the first classical communication model based on Western traditions), an information source encodes a message, which is transmitted to receiver (Fig 1). The receiver decodes the message and has a chance to react to it. The assumptions in this model are that the channel is free of interference, the sender expresses clearly his message and the receiver decodes it with intended interpretation. According to this diagram, classic typography is used to work with the first two modes, while typography today takes a role of the noise channel as well. This noise does not mean to eliminate the receiver from decoding the messages; graphic designers just use the noise as a challenge for the readers, instead of spoon-feeding them. In communication, noise is anything that interferes with comprehension by its intended recipient.”

This flow model visualizes the operators of communication, and it immediately explains the rationality of using conservative typography to reduce the ‘noise’. To further understand the rationality of typography we can look at the tree levels of communication problems that Shannon and Weaver defined “Level A: How accurately can the symbols of communication be transmitted? (The technical problem). Level B: How precisely do the transmitted symbols convey the desired meaning? (The semantic problem). Level C: How effectively does the received meaning affect conduct in the desired way? (The effectiveness problem).” Typography has a clear influence on ‘The technical problem’. Along with printing quality and reading conditions, the typography is clearly a technical factor. Legibility and readability are part of this technical problem, and they are largely governed by typography.

Level B – ‘The semantic problem’ is also influenced by the typography used. Should one opt for transparency and neutrality or instead use tools of visual language to underline and accentuate the meaning of the text? This has no distinct answer and depends on the context and on the visual literacy of the reader. We can never be sure how the visual elements are interpreted. The designer can have an idea about it but can never be sure until all the readers have been asked regarding. Different interpretations could stem from differences in age, cultural- and social situations or simply be idiosyncratic. ‘Level C’ – ‘The effectiveness problem’ is more vaguely influenced by typography. One could suppose that certain typography would aid the ‘liking’ and thus the effectiveness of the communication. This would be the reason for employing other typographic approaches than the strictly conservative one. This is often aided by segmentation analysis, but can mostly never be more than a generic guideline, and often cancels it own effect when it falls prey for the clichés of these segments, and becomes bland and forgettable.

Beatrice Warde coined her much quoted goblet simile, but remember that there are a great many goblets of different shapes, each calculated to reveal the specific vine it was made for. As one would never pour Barolo in a Champagne glass, or cognac in a white wine glass, the ideal of transparency may prevail, but it translates into executions befitted to the context it is used in.

Time and society contains great oppositions, and they are in constant transformation. For every thesis comes its antithesis, ideas come to vogue only to be replaced by new ideas. These ideas are products of the time and surroundings in which they where born, but in-between these pillars of reasoning there lays a greater truth – that of applied thought – something that can never be replaced by any system or set of rules.