The Significance of Visual Form
Tuesday, April 24th, 1990
Geoffrey F. K. Sauer
30,884 words
207 Fisher Hall
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
(219) 283-1949
Copyright © 1990 by Geoffrey F.K. Sauer
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
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Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to
Permissions, The GS Press, 4401 The Cedars, Mobile, Alabama 36608
ISBN 9-99-999999-9 (the last word in typography)
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 99-99999
To my mother and father.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS............................................................................................. iv.
PREFACE ........................................................................................................................ v.
INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 7.
Problems with the current approach to typographic theory ........................... 8.
Making use of literary criticism .......................................................................... 13.
Nietzsche .................................................................................................................. 13.
My own beliefs....................................................................................................... 14.
HISTORY OF ORTHOGRAPHY ............................................................................ 16.
Why study it? ........................................................................................................ 16.
How to use this knowledge .................................................................................. 29.
VARIETIES OF CONTEMPORARY TYPOGRAPHIC CRITICISM ............. 31.
Antiquarian Typographic Criticism.................................................................. 33.
Antihistorical Typographic Criticism................................................................ 36.
Monumental Typography.................................................................................... 39.
Critical Typographic Thought ........................................................................... 45.
CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................. 55.
GLOSSARY .................................................................................................................. 59.
BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 66.
INDEX ............................................................................................................................ 69.
The Significance of Visual Form
PREFACE
It should be pointed out here that the term typographic can refer to two very-dissimilar sorts of
analysis. When Elizabeth Eisenstein, Marshall McLuhan, or Walter Ong use the term, they are
referring to those characteristics which are peculiar to print-oriented literacy as opposed to those of
other media: film, television, etc. (written versus oral/aural or visual communication). This
thesis, focusing exclusively on print, will use a more specific (and to my mind richer) definition of
the term: the study of written communication addressing not only the issues involved in print as a
‘literacy,’ but also analyzing the effects of physical orthography on narrative—the shape of letterforms, their placement on the page, and the disposition created by a text’s physical presence
within the realm of readers’ expectations.
Herbert Marshall McLuhan’s 1962 Gutenberg Galaxy provided insight into the mechanisms
which have historically determined print’s role in society. But in doing this he used the word
‘typographic’ to refer to anything which deals with mass-production of manuscript—in short, the
printing press as an abstract entity. His work almost completely avoids discussion of the aesthetic
merits or innovations of the look of specific printed texts, to center instead on the sociopolitics of
mass media. Elizabeth Eisenstein in her comprehensive Printing Press as an Agent of Change
(1967) continues this use, as does Eugene Provenzo in his 1986 Beyond the Gutenberg Galaxy.
But their inability/unwillingness to deal with the visual form of a significantly visual medium
is substantial, and Foucauldian analysis can make much of this omission. I suggest that in order
to do this, my thesis must define itself from within a tradition of printers’ writings, rather than
from those of historians, sociologists, or literary critics. I will argue (vehemently) that the writings
about typography must incorporate the advances of feminist thought, semiotic analysis,
poststructural and deconstructive criticism, and feel that within a few years can certainly make
contributions to their discussions.
Elizabeth Eisenstein’s writings are really for the most part outside of the realm of printing
discourse—more historians’ texts than printers’—as is apparent in her tone and conclusions. 1 She
argues in the preface to her most substantial work that the significance of printing on Europeans
has been so vast that it has seldom been addressed adequately, but that this magnitude makes it a
very necessary area of research.2 But she remains a historian examining what she considers to be a
primarily historical phenomenon, or rather phenomena, since she rightly argues that printing as a
discipline is so vast that ‘publishers’ cannot accurately be incorporated within any single rubric or
stereotype. But if one were to suppose that typographers’ writings constitute a discourse of their
1 The
title of her two-volume, twelve-hundred page thesis, is The Printing Press as an Agent of Change.
This is important, because it demonstrates that her focus will be on the social and historical effects of
printing on western society, preferring explanations of historical causality to semiotic analysis.
Rather than publishing or printing research, it is a sociological or anthropological one.
2 Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. vol. 1. p. xi.
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own, in which the interests of physically composing words on the page play an important part in
the construction of popular understandings of literature and textuality, then research like Eisenstein’s, though helpful in its own right, can to be put to another use.
During the long period this work has been in research, I have incurred more than an
undergraduate’s share of scholarly debts. The recommended readings and bibliographic advice of
Jim and Ava Collins have been invaluable; their commentary on its various revisions have made
possible its final form. For the guidance he has given me since introducing me to the field of
literary criticism in the first place, the insights, anecdotes and overall support I should also like to
thank Joseph Buttigieg. And for their continued support and encouragement to place my ideas in
print, I thank my mother and father.
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The Significance of Visual Form
INTRODUCTION
The mode of presentation of a text is in many ways crucial to the sorts of messages it can
convey; literary theorists have investigated diverse categories of this ‘mode’ (a term which already
begs definition) for over two thousand years. For Aristotelian analysis the ‘form’ of a piece refers
primarily to its structure—stylistic elegance being achieved when the elements in a work resolve
themselves without extraneous clutter. Formalist, and more specifically New Critical literary
theorists extol what Monroe Beardsley calls textural form: the feel, the tone imbued by the author
as craftsman. Michel Foucault’s work analyzes discursive forms: the difference between varied
media and genres, and the ability of discursive regularities to circumscribe a work’s scope before it
is begun. This treatise will address a different sort of formal quality, one which has coexisted with
the three above, yet not addressed by literary critics due to peculiar historical circumstance. Yet in
the past five hundred years, this fourth mode has evolved as substantially as any other, and affected
readers in ways comparable to those above. The fourth formal essence is a work’s visual form, the
tone imbued by the actual look of a document.
The greatest single reason literary criticism has neglected typography—the study of physical
placement of words on the page—should be clear: the author has historically seldom had a direct
role in production of the work. The publications of the Mainz printers (Gutenberg, Fust and
Shoeffer) were of classical, Church, or community texts: one famous example being Gutenberg’s
42-line Bible of 1455, the first book printed in the West. Publishers initially paid no royalties,
and the emerging industry at first proceeded in this way all across Europe: the first book printed in
English was William Caxton’s 1477 Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers; in Italy the
Humanists began by publishing Latin classics, notably Jenson’s 1470 edition of Poliphilus. And
from the fifteenth century authorial presence has never been indispensable to the publication of a
work: for examples one may cite the posthumous First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (1623),
Pepys’ Diaries, Morris’s Chaucer, etc. But as a result, the publisher has been excluded from the
‘creative’ characterization of writing, assigned the mere role of ‘necessary evil’ or ‘practical
businessman’ instead of being integrally placed in the presentation of art to its audience. Until
recently the work of such typographic historians as Elizabeth Eisenstein have been considered very
marginal, and outside the scope of ‘literary criticism,’ but such work can certainly be helpful in a
historical sense, for instance when Eisenstein powerfully refutes common stereotypes of publishers:
she points out in her 1967 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change that a look at the rich assortment of characters in publishing demonstrates the craftsman/businessman dichotomy, though
traditional, to be nevertheless simplistic and inaccurate. And in turn an understanding of the
production and distribution of texts may indeed be important to analysis of artistic works themselves.
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The Significance of Visual Form
In the history of print some authors have directed the visual form of their own works. From
Ben Jonson’s supervision of his first printing, one can cite numerous examples: William Blake’s
and e. e. cumming’s poetry; the drama of G. B. Shaw; the prose of Lawrence Sterne, William
Morris, Mark Twain, John Barth, and countless others. Indeed it should be possible to examine
the relation of writer to his or her manuscript’s production farther back in history than 1455—
Geoffrey Chaucer’s humorous letter to his scribe, listed in anthologies under the title ‘To Adam,’
demonstrates this possibility. But the reason my thesis will argue type becomes a significant issue
today are that sophisticated visual controls possible with word processing and desktop publishing,
having expanded rapidly in the past ten years, are today a commonplace means of composition.
When the computer and laser printer were first combined to produce high-quality, near-typeset design, visual form was still far from the author’s control; but if every word processor provides typographic autonomy (i.e. sufficient quality for authors to publish themselves), then literary criticism
must address the issues that creative use of visual form begets.
PROBLEMS WITH THE CURRENT APPROACH TO TYPOGRAPHIC THEORY
One significant difficulty with a literary criticism which does not account for the significance of
visual form is the that typographic critical thought, arguably underestimated to this day, plays a
substantial part in popularly defining what exactly ‘the book’ is: what reading (and consequently
literature) is for, what audience is to read it, how it is to be regarded (as popular distraction, ‘true
center’ of culture, etc.). Typographic criticism has existed just as literary criticism has, though
both are relatively modern inventions as ‘disciplines.’ Nevertheless, publishing’s discourse has to
a tremendous degree determined the character or identity attributed to printed works.
Historically, publishers have seldom been scholars (with a few notable exceptions, such as
Aldus Manutius or Stanley Morison)—many instead followed Gutenberg’s model, that of
pragmatic tradesman-specialist. The upshot of this can be found in that the term ‘publisher’ today
evokes images of businessman, not craftsman or artist. Elizabeth Eisenstein, in her comprehensive
scholarly analysis of print as a historical agent, speaks of the sixteenth-century Humanists’
‘centering’ of the printer’s role in scholarship:
Insofar as [illustration or translation] decisions entailed consultation with professors and
physicians, print dealers, painters, translators, librarians and other learned men, it is not
surprising that printer’s workshops served as cultural centers in several towns…printers were
in the unusual position of being able to profit from passing on to others systems they
designed for themselves. They not only practiced self-help but preached it as well. 3
Typographic writings of the last five hundred years, largely as a result of the sixteenth-century coincidence of publisher and editor, have created for typographic specialists a very clear role of
authority—and the resulting conception of self demonstrated in printers’ writings through the
3 Eisenstein,
Elizabeth. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. vol. 1, pp. 87-88.
8.
The Significance of Visual Form
centuries has clearly been that of ‘expert.’ With the sovereignty or at least independence of
scholarship and intellect fostered by neoclassicists and achieved by the Romantics, printers turned
their expertise inward into editing and type-setting; master-printers became unchallenged didacts
in a discipline of their own. One consequence of the rift between printing and scholarship has been
that the lore of publishing, the history and documentation of publishers’ attitudes and opinions,
consists almost exclusively of aphorisms and sage advice about details without a coherent critical
whole—much in the manner of ‘self-help’ books, or ‘how-to’ manuals.
But no one has coordinated a criticism of this state of affairs because typography (in its definition as the artistic arrangement of text in print) has never in history been as accessible as it is becoming in the 1990s—the advent of ‘desktop publishing’ implicates amateurs of all descriptions
in what had been a sequestered craft. Without the institution of apprenticeship, in which youth
gains experience from the teachings of their accepted master, to the thousands of adult ‘initiates’
learning typography today the contradictory wisdoms of printing will very likely seem
unreasonable. Yet the creation of a new, ‘reasonable’ set of rules based on scientific principles to
the exclusion of tradition sounds little better—spurious at best, too like the angry dogma of
Bauhaus design resuscitated rather than rethought. The solution which will result from an influx of
a decidedly postindustrial and postmodern vitality, will very likely entail the inclusion of a
postmodern typographic theory yet to be coherently articulated. Indeed this is a feat under way at
present, as can be noted from fragments of typographically-aware criticism including the recentlyreleased 1989 Typography by Lacoue-Labarthe and Jacques Derrida.
There can be little equivocation that writings for the profession of type-founders and
compositors maintain a tradition of didacticism virtually-unbroken over the more than five
centuries of print. From its earliest days, the discourse of discussion of letterforms has adopted
imperatives and tones of advice to young newcomers. Albrecht Dürer worried (in print) about the
future of his profession as early as 1535, in his Of the Just Shaping of Letters. He speaks slightingly of amateurs and novitiates entering the world of lettering because of the renaissance of
manuscript copying from Mainz and Rome, and complains that these ‘young men…without any
artistic training whatever’ are not aware of the central secret of type design, which he goes on to
describe.4
The most definitive patriarch of printing, author of the seventeenth-century bible of typography
(a manual still found in prominent printers’ bookshelves as late as 1940)5 was the Englishman
Joseph Moxon. Moxon could hardly be said to be the founder of typographic discourse—his guide
for printers, The Mechanick Exercises, was published in 1683, fully two hundred years after the
4 Dürer,
Albrecht. Of the Just Shaping of Letters. R.T. Nichol, trans. New York: Dover Publications
Inc., 1965. p. 14.
5 Frederic Goudy refers to Moxon’s text as widespread in his 1940 Typologia.
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popularization of the press throughout Europe. But his writing is representative of dozens of the
preserved European printers’ writings, on the Continent (amazingly) as well as in Britain. The
tone is a distinctive one:
Our master-printers’ care in the choice of good and true shap’d letters is no difficult task: For
if it be a large bodied letter, as English, Great-Primer and upwards, it will shew it self; and if
it be small, as Pearl, Nonparel, &c. though it may be difficult to judge the exact symetry with
the naked eye, yet by the help of a magnifying-glass or two if occasion be, even those small
letters will appear as large as the biggest bodied letters shall to the naked eye: And then it
will be no difficult task to judge of the order and decorum even of the smallest bodied letters.
For indeed, to my wonder and astonishment, I have observ’d V. Dijcks Pearl Dutch letters in
glasses that have magnified them to great letters, and found the whole shape bear such
proportion to his great letters, both for the thickness, shape, fats and leans, as if with
compasses he could have measur’d and set off in that small compass every particular
member.6
Significantly, the prose is written in the first person, predominantly singular but with more
than occasional use of the plural: ‘Our master-printers…’ or ‘We can see…’. Moxon conveys his
attitudes and opinions along with a description of excellent technique he has observed, and this
constitutes the whole of a five-hundred page manual.
In The Printer’s Grammar from London of 1808, Charles Stower, a later London printer
pontificates in a similar manner, also conflating opinion with technical description:
The question still remains undecided with many masters, as to the most proper part of the
business that should first engage the attention of the learner without confusing his ideas;
various methods are adopted, each following the mode he thinks best. Sorting pie is generally
the first employment, and afterwards to set it up again, which unquestionably gives them a
strong insight into the nature of the business, makes them acquainted with all the different
sizes of type and the method of composing, and prepares their understanding for the
comprehension of whatever direction may be given them when the are put to the case. We
shall, however, follow the method generally adopted, which is that of first teaching him the
cases, a knowledge easily acquired by attention. 7
The air of didactic pedantry here is overpowering, a character distinctively reminiscent of the
pompous Dickensian Uncle-characters. But this printers’ discourse seems notoriously constant;
Moxon’s seventeenth-century Mechanick Exercises is much the same. And the scholars who
defined the role of twentieth-century book publishing often appear cast of the same mold. Eric Gill
wrote in 1934 the same sort of prattle about current techniques, mechanical problems, and his
disdain for workmen on the type floor, not very noticeably different from the earliest printers.
The first notable attempt to work out the norm for plain letters was made by Mr Edward
Johnston when he designed the sans-serif letter for the London Underground Railways. Some
6 Moxon,
Joseph. Mechanick Exercises on the whole Art of Printing, p. 24.
Clive Ashwin, ed. History of Graphic Design and Communication: a Source book. London:
Pembridge Press, 1983. p. 68.
7 in
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of these letters are not entirely satisfactory, especially when it is remembered that, for such a
purpose, an alphabet should be as near as possible ‘fool-proof,’ i.e. the forms of the should be
measurable, patient of dialectical exposition, as the philosophers would say—nothing should
be left to the imagination of the sign-writer or the enamel-plate maker. In this quality of ‘foolproofness’ the Monotype sans-serif face is perhaps an improvement. The letters are more
strictly normal—freer from forms depending upon appreciation and critical ability in the
workman who has to reproduce them. 8
The contemporary designer, by the time he or she achieves the status of professional, has
accumulated such a store of thesecontradictory wisdoms and without recognition that they are
juxtaposed that it will be difficult to demonstrate to them the feebleness (or at least inadequacy) of
these ‘commonsensical’ beliefs. This weakness of typographic criticism has never been widely
apparent, and only becomes so today as the established publishing ‘experts,’ such as Jan White or
Clifford Burke, attempt to explain publishing conventions to a mass audience of novitiates.
Part of the problem is one new to publishing, a creation of the twentieth century. In eighteenthcentury Europe, the printing press had been the instrument of mass media, the incarnation of
‘popular pandering’ as elitist literary circles termed novel-publishing. But in our own age, with
film, television and music more easily accused of promoting what Allan Bloom can call
‘hedonistic pleasure-seeking,’ typographic criticism finds itself a bastion of the Old Order. This
creates an uneasy alliance between desktop publishing (a movement which popularizes and massdistributes written communication) and the now more conservative, traditional, book publishing.
The ideology of this stance can easily be found in the manuals produced today to introduce
initiates to desktop publishing. The amalgamation of sage axioms in even the most erudite of
these texts can be traced back almost verbatim to typographic critics of self-contradictory visual
theory. The argument could be made that none of these maxims are assimilated in any substantive
way unless they are adopted into the holistic framework of designer’s ‘self.’
The most glaring anomalies of modern typographic criticism concern the role of tradition in
the formation of contemporary aesthetics. Jan White, in two passages from Graphic Design in the
Electronic Age, exemplifies the conflicted mandate facing publishing today. He argues in the
introduction to his manual of typography that ‘Desktop publishers today do not know the timeworn, established rules of a craft with a proud and dignified history.’ 9 Yet in the same paragraph
he also contends:
That’s why we must go back to the basics, because the wonders of technology are nothing
more than tools for use to use for the same old purpose of human communication. That will
remain constant, no matter what wonder-machine produces it. 10
8 from Eric
9 White,
Gill’s Essay on Typography, also in Ashwin p. 246.
Jan. Graphic Design in the Electronic Age: A Manual for Desktop and Tradtional Publishers.
p. 2.
10 Ibid.,
p. 2.
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His paradox is simply this: White wants to argue, in the Modernist fashion, that aesthetic design
should follow function—no matter how, why, when or where it is produced. But as a
representative of established typographic authority, he feels also compelled to belittle the new
‘amateur’ typographers, and can only do this by privileging a knowledge of history and tradition!
A second conflict arises from the question of how prominent the craftsmanship of a text’s
production should be: whether ‘transparent’ (subtly below the level of conscious awareness) or
‘opaque’ (flamboyant, calling attention to itself). Beatrice Warde demonstrates how difficult this
can be for Modernist typographers, who must reconcile the conflict in that they certainly view their
work as worthwhile and important, yet also somehow admit it to be only a conveyance of ideas
rather than a container. ‘Type should be invisible,’ she argues in a famous parable. But also:
If the ‘tone of voice’ of a typeface does not count, then nothing counts that distinguishes man
from the other animals…not only notation, but connotation is part of the proper study of
mankind.
Warde’s solution is to create an aesthetic which makes synonymous subtle typography and
quality work. She appoints typographers the guardians of quiet majesty, in the face of advertisers
and a mass public which produces only vulgar, showy type. But her solution is problematic at
best, in that it only incorporates poorly notions of typographic design as a creative or vital
process, of which the history of the craft can produce numerous examples.
Desktop publishers will be censured by these specialists time and again, accused of mixing
incompatible design styles and producing ugly work, of being merely eclectic imbeciles. But the
established printing authorities seem to demonstrate eclecticism and inconstancy within their own
indictments, in their supportive theory, and injure their own credibility and demonstrate the need
for a coherent, perhaps postmodern typographic criticism.
David Lodge, in his 1981 Working With Structuralism, speaks of literary criticism as a
pendulum which swings predictably from revolution to reaction every twenty years. After a decade
of Modernist experimentation in literature and design on the continent of Europe in the nineteentwenties, he demonstrates a literary reaction of simple, direct prose in writers such as Orwell,
Waugh and Hemingway in the thirties. 11 Graphic design today is of a very conservative turn in
serious literary publishing, in reaction to the expressiveness which resulted from the
popularization of phototype in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. But the revolutionary torrent of
typographic experimentation which seems likely to result in the nineties from the desks of
amateurs clearly appears a nightmare to those writing the majority of desktop publishing
‘manuals’ on the market today: the writers of which, in the tradition Lodge terms
‘antimodernism,’ evoke the solemn and dignified history of printing as an ideal of caution and
tradition against which a new generation of typographic experimentation may be defined.
11 Lodge,
David. Working With Structuralism. p. 8.
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MAKING USE OF LITERARY CRITICISM
I hope to juxtapose this ‘current’ understanding of type with readings from Western criticism,
in order to present other ways of explaining the significance of print. This strategy will as a
secondary effect introduce the possibility that literary criticism might be reconciled to typographic
criticism, and show deeply-ingrained (if tacit) relations between orthographic form and other sorts
of literary style.
N IETZSCHE
Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay ‘On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’
defines a sense of history as necessary for human activity; he goes on to discriminate between three
ways men have used history in the past, forms he terms the antiquarian, the monumental, and the
critical. The first is characterized by contemplation of lost historical forms, admiration of relics to
the exclusion of current or vital art—in typography the celebration of incunabula as pre-industrial
‘craftsmanship.’ Monumentalism, in a similarly erroneous move (according to Nietzsche),
sacrifices experimentation to Great Tradition. The third is capable, instead, of making the strange
and the past at one with the near or the present, and through the process of assimilation create new
and great works. 12 Nietzsche’s critical theory is useful both as a justification of desktoppublishing-related, postmodern eclecticism, and as an explanation in very useful ways of the
relationship between various schools of twentieth-century typographic design.
MY OWN BELIEFS
Nietzsche’s ideal, ‘critical’ typographer would be a writer, publisher, or designer very of the
sort termed ‘postmodern’ today. The Modernist movement of this century, most extravagantly in
the International School designs of the twenties, rejected history in a hope of purging the
inequalities and evils of the past; this is condemned as a bankrupt or exploded strategy by many
authors and artists of today, who prefer instead, among other things, the re-appropriation of
evocative images or symbols of tradition, combined into altogether new patterns and messages.
I should like to postulate that if postmodern ‘quotation’ and ‘parody’ can be used in textual
style, to evoke images or create an atmosphere, then certainly contemporary typography should be
encouraged to do the same; indeed, I should further argue that typographers since the fifteenth
century have engaged in this process often. It was the British and American formalist ‘New Style’
typography of Stanley Morison, Eric Gill, and Beatrice Warde which argued in fact that print
should not do this; but in a postmodern world with a new appropriative aesthetic, that conviction
(present, if tacit, in every contemporary publishing house) should be re-considered or rejected.
One could find a tremendous irony of history in that by the end of the 1890s printers like
William Morris felt they had to fight in order to restore the dignity of book typography from the
12 Nietzsche,
Friedrich. ‘The Use and Abuse of History’ in Thoughts Out of Season. Adrian Collins,
trans.Volume five of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. Oscar Levy, ed. p. 9.
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slovenly jumble of Victorian advertising and poster-work. Yet in the 1990s, posters and advertising, postmodern and technologically-adept design may have to fight to resuscitate book
typography from the stagnation which its defensiveness about ‘tradition’ and ‘preservation’ have
imposed.
I hope to explain why literary criticism must interest itself in this field—not because graphic
design won’t (though they won’t choose to, there is a tremendous vested interest behind current
hierarchical structures)—but because printed literature is defined (to some extent) by its typography; the typographer doesn’t have to answer to the public, because public consciousness of
the discipline is surprisingly low. It is the work itself (often conflated, as Roland Barthes points
out, with the author) which bears the burden or kudos of innovative, magnificent, or shoddy
composition. If the technology of composition places a command of visual form on the writer’s
desktop, a politics of established visual discourses should become incorporated into textual
criticism.
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HISTORY OF ORTHOGRAPHY
WHY STUDY IT?
Spenser and Milton wrote their epics The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost in an archaic,
pseudo-Medieval language deliberately, in order to create a desired tone. Visual periods of Western
history are as distinctive as archaic language, and marked by many elements which evoke at least
something in even the least visually-aware readers/viewers. The title page of Shakespeare’s First
Folio bears little resemblance to that of the Signet Classic’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. Signet
could have set its title page in a deliberate attempt to evoke that style, had they wished to ground
it historically in that way.
Typography can be (and is) evocative. And so in a literary age prone to allusion, a quick
summary of the written and printed word is appropriate. While Eliot’s or Joyce’s readers today
might not need an introduction which reviews his allusions (one assumes them to be
predominantly well-read and capable of drawing on their own knowledge of literature to grasp
subtle meanings, and Eliot was himself convinced that ‘Poets in our civilization, as it exists at
present, must be difficult.’ 13 ). But the introduction to a new mode of critical thinking, the
typographic mode, does require such a review.
Greece
The Greeks employed the alphabet largely to preserve a literary and philosophical tradition. By
1000 BC , they had adopted a writing system adopted from the Phonecians, and had begun to
transform it to create the model for our alphabet. The Phonecian system did not satisfy the
demands of Greek culture—it had been used by a pragmatic culture for business transactions and
record-keeping, not for poetry (it had no vowels, for example)—so the Greeks created five vowels
and renamed the consonants. By 403 BC the Greek alphabet was standardized. Athens had decreed
an official version of the writing system and it was slowly adopted by the other city-states. That
alphabet of two thousand years ago strongly resembles the one the Greeks use today, though the
ancients employed no punctuation, lowercase letters, or spaces between words.
The letterforms were very primitive by today’s standards, even in height of Pericles’s ‘Golden
Age’ in Athens. The character strokes were unadorned, straight lines—they resembled very much
today’s ‘print’ handwriting style: sans serifs, with a uniform line weight all around and smooth
bowls and arches.
Roman
The most important contribution of the Romans to our own alphabet was the visual refinement
of capital letters. Those incised on the Column of Trajan (raised in Rome, circa 114 AD) have
been called by Stanley Morison ‘the perfect expression of a letter.’ They are undeniably the basis
13 from Lodge,
David. Working with Structuralism. p. 70.
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for all our typefaces. Roman letters feature the first examples of thick and thin strokes, graceful
curves, and serifs. Serifs are ornamental cross-strokes at the ends of the main stems of a letterform.
The Roman serifs have been thought to result from the double-pointed pens used for sketching,
and the chisel’s need for starting and finishing points in letterform design (the serifs).
Indeed it seems likely that lettering styles in some way owe their form to the tools used to
make characters. Babylonian wedge-shaped cuniform letters were made by pressing wedges into
wet clay; the Egyptians chiseled their uncomplicated hieroglyphic characters into stone; the more
graceful hieratic script of later Egyptian civilization was drawn on papyrus with reed pens. The
rough Greek letters were drawn in wax with a stylus; this may explain why they didn’t ever use
serifs. The Roman society became one which prided itself on monumental achievements—their
letterforms were consequently designed to meet an aesthetic demand for dignified and impressive
letterforms. But for whatever reason, the Latin tradition of adding serifs to type is with us to this
day, and it is difficult to find a book set without them.
Early national hands
Although the sack of Rome in 456 AD is sometimes given as the official end of the Empire,
centralized power had begun to falter long before that time. During the period of this long decline
and the centuries following it, communication broke down between different parts of Europe.
Monks isolated from one another by geographic obstacles and sheer distance slowly began to
evolve different, ‘local’ letterforms. The regions in which individual styles were developed were
not nations, yet the various styles that appeared at the time are nonetheless referred to as national
hands.
These national hands developed their identity with passing generations of scribes, but were
also advanced by functional innovations. The Anglo-Irish script, called uncials, evolved as an
alternative set of letterforms than the Latin, and were popular because so much quicker to read and
write. These uncials were termed miniscules, and were incorporated into all subsequent
alphabets—the invention of lowercase letters.
Caroline miniscule
By 775, writing throughout Europe had become so haphazard that important secular and
religious works were in danger of being distorted by illegibility and poor copyists. The cultural
unity of the Roman Empire had given way to provincialism. Charlemagne’s rule of the Franks,
and, later, the Holy Roman Empire from 768 to 814, was as enthusiastic scholastically as
militarily (though the man was, in fact, himself illiterate). Determined to revive the cultural
glories of the classical era, he decreed in 789 that a monumentally ambitious project be undertaken: every existing manuscript, religious and secular, contemporary and ancient, was to be
copied. This project first required the development of a standard writing style; for that purpose, he
appointed Alcuin, a monk who had been born in York, England around 732. Alcuin used Celtic
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The Significance of Visual Form
and Anglo-Saxon semi-uncials as the basis for his new style, which has come to be known today
as the Caroline miniscule.
Gothic
The Gothic style evolved in northern Europe in the twelfth century, more or less avoiding
much of the influence of Caroline script. By 1400, it was used throughout areas that now correspond to present-day Germany, France, and England. Popularly called Old English, this style is
more accurately known as black letter, the term used in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Humanist
The Humanist face was established in southern Europe in the early fifteenth century (Niccolò
Niccoli’s chancery, an excellent example of the style, dates from 1405). It pairs capital letters
found in classical Roman manuscripts with the lowercase letters of the Caroline Miniscule. What
resulted was a much lighter face than the Gothic. And the speed with which Humanist letterforms
could be written gave the face a utility which seems somehow suited to the secular scholarship of
that age in Southern Europe.
Incunabula (15th-century)
In the early fifteenth century books were written out completely by hand, usually on parchment
or vellum (i.e. the prepared skins of sheep, goats or calves), but also increasingly on paper made
from linen rags. There was already a trade in books, whose manufacture was organized on massproduction lines in ‘scriptoria’ where a text was read aloud and copied down simultaneously by a
number of scribes.
The term incunabula typographica is derived from the Latin term for cradle, and refers to any
printing produced before 1500. The technological secret of printing was closely guarded, reserved
to printers working in and around Mainz, from between 1440 and 1460. In 1462, the city was
sacked and the printers scattered throughout Germany and Italy, bringing their knowledge of
printing techniques with them.
The first printers, Gutenberg, Fust and Schoeffer, based their conventions for typographic
layout upon manuscript models, so it is hardly surprising that the earliest type designs were based
upon the handwriting of the time. In Germany, where printing from movable type originated, the
local handwriting was a black letter. When Gutenberg printed his forty-two-line Bible in Mainz in
mid-1455, the first printed book in the Western world, he too used a black-letter script (that being
the style of text his books were to compete with). Gutenberg’s Bible also bore no title-page, no
page numbers, no innovations to distinguish it from the work of a master copyist. Faces like
Gutenberg’s spread rapidly, establishing themselves in the north in Scandanavia and Holland. By
1477, William Caxton had established his printing presses in London; his press and types had
17.
The Significance of Visual Form
been purchased in the Low Countries, and so English printing began with Gothic faces derived
from Gutenberg’s (subsequently today known as ‘Old English’).
Within four years after the attack on Mainz, two German printers established a press in a
Benedictine monastery at Subiaco, near Rome. Like Gutenberg before them, Sweynheim and
Pannartz created a printing style that resembled a national style, in this case the prevalent writing
style of Rome—the Humanist, which came to be labelled the ‘roman.’ The first roman to be
crafted by a master designer, Nicolaus Jenson, appeared in 1470. His typefaces were the pattern for
over half a century and were so widely copied that any roman typeface dating before 1500 is now
called a Venetian. Between 1470 and 1480, Jenson printed more than one hundred and fifty books
in several different types. The later styles are remarkably similar to romans designed today, five
hundred years later.
The most famous of the humanist printers was Aldus Manutius, a scholar, translator, editor
and author. Aldus and his type designer Francesco Griffo continued the tradition of the roman
typeface, but his major contributions to printing were italics and the pocket book. About the year
1500, Aldus composed a small pocket edition using italics, because he discovered they took less
space than vertically-postured text—this was their first use ever in print. In Italy, the face was
almost immediately named the Aldine. Elsewhere, because of its Venetian birthplace, the style
was called the italic, the name by which we know oblique letters today.
The Old Style
When Aldus and Griffo designed important typefaces of the sixteenth century, they affirmed the
supremacy of Italy as the source of typographic innovation. Their influence spread throughout
Europe, as the printing trade itself began to proliferate. But eventually the center of typographic
creativity shifted to the west, to France. These early types are known as Old Style. They can be
identified by the robust form of the serif, which is triangular in design; another distinguishing
feature is the diagonal emphasis given to the thicker parts of curved strokes. This is derived from
the manuscript models on which this family of types was based.
Claude Garamond, a Parisian, is given credit for creating the first true printing typeface not
designed to imitate handwriting. It was sharply drawn, graceful, of good contrast, and it soon
displaced most other typefaces then in use. The Garamond face shows obvious connections to
Aldus’ roman, but is classified as the first Old Style roman—a style easily identified by its small
and elegantly-shaped letters and the absence of contrast between major and minor strokes. In the
sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, printers did not have an extensive type library from which
to choose; Garamond, designed in 1541, became the dominant printing typeface for over two
hundred years; from the sixteenth well into the eighteenth century, the most notable type designers
in Europe were more important for their refinements on Garamond’s face than for innovation of
their own.
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The Significance of Visual Form
That English printers ultimately adopted roman as their standard type seems to be almost
accidental. It may be ascribed to the fact that English printers, who in the sixteenth century were
much hampered by political and religious censorship, admired and followed the lead of French
printers, who had settled for roman. The black letter of Caxton was quickly abandoned as
medieval; so when Shakespeare’s plays were first printed, they appeared in roman type.
Over the succeeding centuries, type assumed forms less and less influenced by handwriting.
The processes of refining the mechanics of printing—and its associated materials, such as paper,
ink and type—eventually resulted in the creation of a separate identity for printers’ type. Printing
thus came to be conceived quite differently of manuscript forms. Louis XIV even ordered the
creation of a commission charged with developing the design of a new type, the Romain du Roi,
to be composed of letters arrived at on ‘scientific’ principles. The commission, whose
deliberations were fully recorded, worked mathematically, drawing and redrawing each letters on a
48-by-48 grid. It is not reasonable to say, as did William Morris, that the Romain du Roi
replaced the calligrapher with the engineer as a typographical influence—but very clearly the
seventeenth-century interest in machinery and mechanization was reflected in typographic style.
Typographers continued to found Old Style faces; William Caslon issued his first typeface in
London in 1734, one of the last of the period; the face’s success was instantaneous, and Caslon
quickly supplanted Garamond in English type rooms. Used in the first printings of both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, the Caslon face suffered a decline in
popularity in the 1800s, but was revived full force in this century. Many printers still stand by an
old motto, ‘When in doubt, use Caslon.’
Neoclassical (late 18th-century)
In 1757, John Baskerville of Birmingham shocked the typographic world by producing a face
different from any that had preceded it. Baskerville is a typeface with increased contrast between
thick and thin strokes, a nearly vertical stress in the counters, and very sharp serifs—this style has
later been termed the Transitional roman, because it stands between Old Style and Neoclassical
extremes. Transitional faces differ from their Old Style forerunners in the relative straightness of
their serifs and strokes, and greater contrast between major and minor strokes.
In the 1780s two type designers, Firmin Didot of France and Giambattista Bodoni of Italy,
developed the Modern roman. Because Bodoni was the much more important printer, he is often
given most of the credit for the design. Bodoni designed an alphabet which abandoned the
influence of calligraphy, returning to the inscribed letters of early Rome for the crisp characteristics
of shading and serifs. The moderns are a study in contrasts: in letters like the A, Baskerville’s
influence is carried to the extreme; thin strokes are hairlines, whereas thick strokes are strong and
heavy. The circular feeling of the old romans had given way to a full vertical stress, especially in
letters such as the a and the o, whose counters are vertical instead of rounded.
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The Significance of Visual Form
The difference between Old Style and neoclassical typographic design has been typified as the
difference between the pen and the engraver’s tool; this seems particularly apt, because it evokes
the cultural and technological identity Bodoni and Didot hoped to encourage themselves, one of
eminent civilization and association with the esteemed ancient ‘Golden Ages’ of Greece and, more
particularly, Rome.
Industrial revolution
At the end of the eighteenth century, machines and steam power began to make drastic
differences in everyday life. Machine-made products increasingly replaced the handiwork of
artisans, supplanting a tradition that had been carried on since the Middle Ages. Objects came to
be mass-produced and mass-distributed efficiently, and the Industrial Revolution created a large
group of entrepreneurs who competed with one another to sell their products to a growing number
of consumers. These new, urban consumers were more literate than preceding generations, and
demanded a mass-produced reading matter, as well as goods. Among the many results of the competition fostered by industrial capitalism was the rise of advertising: with mass-production came
demand for printed publicity, which in turn changed the world of the typographer. After the introduction of the steam press, printers produced newspaper ads, circulars, posters, catalogs, time
tables, trade cards, labels, and stationery. Manufacturers demanded typefaces which shouted out the
names of their products. Instead of classical ‘decorum,’ the qualities of novelty and noticeability
became critical.
The movement toward more flamboyant designs resulted in several hundred creative type
forms. In 1805, Robert Thorne produced his Fat Face. In 1815, the English type founder Vincent
Figgins designed a face with square serifs, and because the heavy blocks reminded the English
public of Egyptian pyramids (Napoleon had recently completed a military campaign there), the
faces were popularly known as Egyptians. A year later in 1816, William Caslon IV produced the
first type without serifs. In America, the ornate and sometimes giddy faces of the Victorian era
formed a group known as novelty faces. Type was stretched, twisted, covered with ornamentation,
cut into pieces, and given three dimensions. The possibilities seemed endless.
But the predominant innovation of nineteenth-century type was the Egyptian, a race of families
generally bolder and blacker than those of previous centuries, a class notably defined by their serifs
(which for the first time carried as much weight as other parts of the letter). The simplicity and
evenness of the letterforms combined to make a particularly legible and popular design. Egyptians
were so well-liked, in fact, that they were adopted very quickly in almost all typewriters (a novelty
which first popularized in this period) and this has remained the dominant ‘look’ of the
typewriter. The major typewriter letterforms to this day remain Egyptian slab serifs: Courier,
Prestige, etc.
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The Significance of Visual Form
Arts and crafts
Throughout Queen Victoria’s reign there were some vehemently opposed to what has been
termed the ‘gaudiness’ of the age: its flagrant commercialism and exaggerated ornamentation.
Reactionary response to nineteenth-century design, however, wasn’t articulated clearly in type
until the 1890s. Graphic communication was one of the last areas of design to attract the attention
of the Arts and Crafts Movement, and by the close of the nineteenth century the ‘reform’ of
typography had little more than commenced. To modern eyes, even many of the best examples of
late nineteenth-century printing look turgid and over-ornamented. By the first decade of the twentieth century there was widespread evidence of a major rehabilitation of letterform and typography,
fed by two contrasted impulses: a revivalist fad in the English-speaking world, and a more radical
iconoclastic impulse found in Continental, especially German, typography.
William Morris’s ideals were not so much revolutionary as they were reactionary. His subject
matter was constantly the past: his poetic works include ‘The defense of Guenevere’ and
translations of the Aeneid and the Odyssey. Fighting the rising tide of the machine, Morris consistently looked to the past for his paradigms. Morris idealized the fifteenth-century craftsman, the
guild, and most importantly the practice of creating even ordinary, everyday objects by hand. He
despaired the decline of quality he ascribed to machine-made production. His thoughts on type and
printing were influenced by his neighbor on the Thames at Hammersmith, Emery Walker. In 1888
at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition in London, Walker gave a lecture on the history of printing, and
particularly book printing. He praised Caslon and the fine printing of the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. He defended Old Style romans and Venetians from the onslaught of the Transitional and Modern romans. With the aid of lantern slides of incunabula, Walker converted Morris.
From 1888 until his death in 1896, Morris sought to restore the long-lost standards of craftsmanship to typography and bookmaking.
Morris’s work marked the revival of the study of typography. Before the work of his Kelmscott
Press, no school taught typography or graphic design, and even typographers failed to devote
much attention to proper typographic patterns and techniques. After Morris, however, classes were
offered in graphic design. Type manufacturers supplied printers with the classic typefaces that had
long been forgotten. Most important, typographers began to feel that design involved more than
simply arranging letters on a page. In England and America, many printers quickly followed
Morris’s lead and set up shops dedicated more to art than to profit. These efforts, which continue
today, are known as the Private Press Movement.
The Kelmscott books, uniform in general style, attempted to show how books should be
designed—to some extent they succeeded, for their influence is striking on our beliefs about small
presses to this day. But they succeeded more in demonstrating that books could be magnificent,
rich and satisfying artefacts to look at and handle.
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The Significance of Visual Form
Modern
After World War I, artists throughout Europe grouped themselves into several competing
movements: Russian Constructivism, Italian Futurism, English Vorticism, French Dadaism, and
Dutch De Stijl—to name only the best known. But the best-known in the history of Western
typography was the German Bauhaus.
Criticism of ornament—the ‘international style’
Walter Gropius founded his Staatliches Bauhaus in 1919 after the First World War, in a
determined rejection of the nineteenth-century ‘Victorian’ aesthetic. Modern designers had many
things for which to hold the previous generation accountable: the petty imperialism which fueled
World War I, the massive glut of media and printed communication which polluted European
cities, and the turgid over-ornamentalism which characterized Victorian and Edwardian
typography; they zealously endorsed removal of ornament on the premise that ‘simplified’ design
could be familiar everywhere (the world became smaller every year), the adoption of ‘assemblyline’ principles in design (to assimilate industrialism into modern life), and the essentialization of
print (which they hoped would render the tremendous quantity of modern information
manageable).
The Germans called for a typeface unsere Zeit, one ‘of our own time.’ The movement was not
concerned fundamentally with art or design (‘art for art’s sake’ was specifically repudiated by the
Bauhaus) but instead with how people should live with make use of, rather than become slaves of,
the new technologies. Jan Tschichold, the premier Bauhaus typographer, came to the view that
lettering and typography, indeed the whole of graphic communication, needed a new look, one
specifically ‘not encrusted by the traditions and ornaments of the past.’ 14 His Die Neue Typographie (Berlin, 1928) was a powerful and persuasive expression of this belief. The Bauhaus emphasis
on sparseness, order, and function produced surprising results. Although one might expect the
movement’s stringent guidelines to give rise to sterile, uninteresting designs, Bauhaus typography is among the most striking ever created. The influences of geometrical symmetry and abstract art produced a look that is at first shocking, but after one examines the theoretical
background that underlies it, recognizably orthodox—the theory is startlingly reminiscent of
Morris, though the actual design differs so greatly.
Sans serifs
It was as a result of the Victorian search for ever-more-striking types that designers came to
realize that the silhouette of a letterform cannot be made infinitely bold. This is because, at a
certain point, the counters become so reduced that the letterform becomes illegible. It was as a
consequence of this that the Modern designers adopted types without any serifs at all—these
14 Tschichold
in Ashwin, p. 253.
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The Significance of Visual Form
‘essential forms,’ lacking completely any vestige of nineteenth-century ornament, came to be
characteristic of revolutionary design. Tschichold felt that sans represented letter design in its
fundamental form;
in Die Neue Typographie he wrote that its proper name should not be
‘grotesque’ but skelettschrift or ‘skeleton lettering’: the bare bones of the alphabet.
And another important innovation, this time of Herbert Bayer’s, was the geometric sans serif,
first successfully used in 1927 with Futura by Paul Renner. This is letterform design which
utilizes the fewest, simplest shapes to compose each letter; based on the ‘assembly-line theory’ of
printing it was though to enhance readability. These did much to raise the status of the sans from
a specialty face that was only occasionally used to, by 1970, a common text type.
New Style
England was significantly less shaken by the War than Germany, never having been occupied,
and the conservative bent of the ubiquitous English middle-class tended to disapprove of the
dynamic and spontaneous reform of the continent. In Britain the New Style typographers, a
generation which revered its teacher William Morris, advocated an exceedingly-conservative
design philosophy.
One individual who should be mentioned in connection with the typographic reaction is
Stanley Morison (1889-1967). Morison was responsible for supervising the redesigning of a
typeface for The Times of London, which appeared in 1930 as Times New Roman and has since
become perhaps the most widely used roman alphabet in the English-speaking world. In 1922
Morison was a founding member of the Fleuron Society, an association dedicated to the
improvement of typographic art. Its periodical The Fleuron (1923-30) provided a model of
excellence for many other similar periodicals.
Morison’s formidable knowledge of the history of manuscript and printing was put to good use
in his drawings for what has been described as the most ‘perfect’ roman available today. He argued
in his monologue First principles of typography that ‘the typographer’s purpose is to express,
not himself, but the author.’ 15 While this is a fine sentiment, it remains true that Morison’s style
of typography is distinctly manifest in all of his books.
Eric Gill (1882-1940), also of the New Style movement, became a significant influence on the
development of typography, especially in Britain. His range of activities embraced sculpture,
illustration and monumental lettering as well as calligraphy and typography, but Gill’s Essay on
Typography (1931) is typical of his views on life and art, emphasizing as it does the bond between
qualities of art and design and the health of society. The first typeface to result from the New Style
was Perpetua, very aptly named by its designer (who intended it to be used forever). He followed
Perpetua with Gill Sans, a sans serif which is one of the more imitated faces in history.
15 First
published in The Fleuron, volume 7, 1930.
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The Significance of Visual Form
But if Morison and Gill were the important type designers of the New Style, Beatrice Warde
was its major propagandist. Warde gave the American counterpart of the British New Style, the
Crystal Goblet School, its name. She believed that type should not decorate pages. Rather, it
should be like a crystal goblet, a clear receptacle that delivers but does not obscure its contents. In
a famous formulation, she insisted that type should be invisible. Type’s purpose was not to
illustrate design, but to convey words clearly.
The influence of this theory on book publishing is tremendous to this day, where the
revolutionary Bauhaus poster ‘art’ typography never caught on.
Swiss typography
After the War in the 1950s, typographers from Switzerland continued the work of the New
Style of the 1930s, though they designed with Continental sans serifs rather than romans. Demanding clean designs without embellishment, they formulated a typographic statement so influential that it has been echoed by typographers to this day.
Max Meidinger created the most popular typeface of our time, Helvetica, in 1954. A modern
sans, Helvetica is used throughout the world in books, advertising, signage, letterheads, and
television graphics. Adrian Frutiger created a similar style, Univers, in 1957. Swiss typography
resembles Helvetica; champions of the use of white space as a design element, the Swiss created
airy, clean pages that complemented their airy, clean typefaces. In the late 1950s, when most
American typographers were still using Bodoni, the Swiss offered a compelling alternative. Swiss
design was very particular in recommending exceedingly tight (close) letterspacing—the precision
of this look, like the precision of the famed Swiss watches, was attractive.
By 1980, Swiss typography in the United States was the mainstream. Characterized most noticeably by the minimalization of serif in body copy, the Swiss expressed the differences between
evocative and New Style as the difference between the syntactic and the semantic element of the
page: the ‘syntactic’ element placing importance on the way type is arranged; the ‘semantic’
(which the Swiss believed to be more critical) emphasizing the legibility of the words themselves.
Op art and psychedelic art
Throughout the 1960s, proponents of ‘syntax’ ruled American display typography. With an
advancement of communications technology came rapid changes in art and design. The artistic
movements of the decade were readily evoked by designers and typographers and mirrored in
posters, which had become a popular artistic form.
For example, optical art, in which lines or geometric patterns create the illusion of motion,
was a painting style that also influenced typographers and illustrators. But op art typography was
quickly replaced by the psychedelic designs of the late 1960s. By the 1970s, Swiss typography
had made its way across the Atlantic and was beginning to bring some serenity to American
advertising. That serenity, however, did not last long.
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The Significance of Visual Form
Phototypesetting
The conversion from hot metal to ‘cold type’ (photographic typesetting) took place mostly in
the late sixties and early seventies and disrupted the relative placidity publishing had achieved by
polarizing the field into the ‘computerized’ and ‘non-computerized.’ Although phototypesetting
technology and electrostatic offset printing technologies had been around for decades, only in the
seventies did they make inroads into the worlds of book and journal typography. And with the
new abilities of type not physically cast into lead blocks, came new typographic styles.
Until about the middle of this century, it was general practice to demonstrate very clear
‘movements’ in typographic history (as this thesis has been attempting above), movements which
could be characterized as ‘representative of their age.’ But the popularity of optical
phototypesetting—an entirely different technology—made necessary the re-drawing of all the faces
of history onto film. And in this redrawing, the most avant-garde of designers grew to appreciate
widely varied typographic styles. The International Typeface Corporation between 1970 and 1975
commissioned re-drawings of faces back to Gutenberg, each of which were redrawn for
contemporary use by modern designers, and we today live in an age which flaunts these ITC faces
as well as other companies’ with what has been termed ‘radical eclecticism.’
New wave typography
The tenets of New Wave typography, an offshoot of the abilities of phototype, stand directly
opposed to those of the New Style. Rather than stressing legibility or considering the page as a
vehicle for the ‘message,’ New Wave typographers (who came into prominence in the late 1970s)
emphasized playfulness and visual interest at the expense of verbal communication. Semantics had
given way to syntax. And although they appear to be wildly free, New Wave designs are actually
created within a strict set of visual symbols and patterns.
Slanted type patterns, the use of condensed, bold, and italic sans serifs, a grid background, the
strange use of bold sans serifs as initial caps, and the absence of illustration or photography are
hallmarks of the style; New Wave typography lives and dies by its type. Functioning at the
conceptual level, the message is conveyed not by type-as-word but by type-as-illustration. Lines of
type are often reproduced at incongruous diagonals, repeated in different sizes and colors, and
floated off the edge of the page into oblivion. Individual letters are scattered, apparently randomly,
about the page. In short, the type is relentlessly visible, a complete violation of Beatrice Warde’s
crystal goblet.
The New Wave also rejects Swiss typography, most violently in its letterspacing. Display
letters on New Wave pages are often separated by as much as an inch. The repudiation of the
Continental precision of tight letterspacing, kerning, is purposeful: the message is that these pages
are as much a rejection as they are a proclamation. New Wave has most often been used in ad-
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The Significance of Visual Form
vertising. Obviously, it would not work in editions of Shakespeare or Milton. But it liberates
with its ‘play.’
Digital typesetting
Introduced in 1985, Apple’s LaserWriter was revolutionary because its page-description
language, called PostScript, permitted typesetting using a microprocessor and laser, rather than
lenses and film. Created by Adobe Systems, the PostScript computer language allows computer
applications to lay out entire pages on the screen, eliminating the necessity for a paste-up stage.
More important, however, is the method used to generate type: typefaces reside in the printer’s
memory as mathematical formulae, which may then be scaled to any size, rotated, stretched, filled
with colors or halftone patterns, and placed on the page. Because offset printing, like xerography,
had been popularized already by phototype, no industry-wide technological update was required.
Most importantly of all, however, was the fact that such machines were affordable for businesses,
between three and seven thousand dollars. It would not be too extreme to credit this machine with
the inception of desktop publishing.
Because of PostScript’s implementation in professional typesetting equipment from Varityper,
Mergenthaler Linotype, Compugraphic and other vendors, users may proof their publications
WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) on their own LaserWriter, then have the designs
typeset in high resolution exactly as proofed.
The developments this technology has made possible are not, clearly, open to everyone. In a
December 1988 report by the U.S. Federal Government’s Office of Technology Assessment,
desktop publishing system were estimated to cost about $10,000 per system. 16 Nevertheless, the
machines are merely personal computers which might already be owned by businesses or
individuals, augmented by a laser printer which can serve fifty terminals at once. The proliferation
of desktop publishing software, including very significant marketing divisions into high-end and
low-cost ‘personal publishing’ installations have made the technology even more accessible.
It is not insignificant that publishing itself is adopting these new tools; the same 1988 report
states that DTP is used in prominent conglomerates:
Desktop publishing has made dramatic inroads in the newspaper and newsletter industries. An
estimated 80 percent of newspapers with a circulation of over 100,000 use Macintosh-based
desktop publishing, including the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, as do an estimated 75
percent of newspapers with a circulation over 50 percent. Knight Ridder and the Gannett
Corp. are using desktop publishing systems to create and distribute graphic designs
nationwide.’ 17
16 U.S.
Congress, Office of Technology Assessment. Informing the Nation: Federal Information
Dissemination in an Electronic Age, 1988. pp. 51.
17 Ibid, pp. 51-52.
26.
The Significance of Visual Form
In its infancy, desktop publishing has become a tremendous success. Indeed, there are now
several different levels of this new technology. Personal desktop publishing uses a microcomputer
to produce pages and simple illustrations. Claris’ MacDraw and Adobe’s Illustrator allow production of masterful illustrations. Programs specifically written to produce charts, graphs and tables
accommodate this process as well. Page-layout programs allow users to assemble complete pages
from word-processed text, computerized illustrations, and tables or forms as desired. Lastly, word
processors have adopted much more flexible and powerful typographic controls in the past two
years (to meet the competitive threat of DTP applications), and new releases of most major
software (WordPerfect, WordStar, and Mass-11 for MS-DOS; Microsoft Word, MacWrite, and
FullWrite Professional for the Mac) all provide substantially improved page layout features over
offerings available even a year ago.
HOW TO USE THIS KNOWLEDGE
The history of orthography can be summarized in many ways: as a continual refinement of
reproduction processes which manage ever-greater quantities of information, as a polarity of
functional versus playful, or in any of a hundred ideologically-equipped models. A great number
of the histories of type depict contemporary man at the summit of some great teleological,
evolutionary climb. These have some ground for their argument: contemporary graphic design
does have a freer access to the type designs of all history than ever before, and a cultural aesthetic
which supports eclectic design. Optical and digital typesetting make it possible to create faces
without years of training or particularly-inaccessible equipment. And there is a steady-and-growing
market for renovated renditions of classic families, in addition to numerous new faces. But modern
typographic book design is deeply conservative—the past twenty years of redesigns perhaps
having convinced it that the status quo is the summit of some sort of design evolution.
The difference between expertise and mastery
Mark Twain wrote tellingly of the exaltation he felt, as a young man, with his newly-acquired
expertise as a riverboat pilot. He describes his feelings towards it and his fellow man in Life on
the Mississippi:
The passenger who could not read it [the Mississippi River] was charmed with a peculiar sort
of faint dimple on its surface (on the rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether);
but to the pilot it was an italicized passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of
the largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it, for it meant a
wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the strongest vessel that ever
floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the water ever makes, and the most hideous
to the pilot’s eye. In truth, the passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all
manner of pretty pictures in it, painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the
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The Significance of Visual Form
trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of readingmatter.’ 18
This represents an understandable regard for expertise, a view comprehensible to Twain’s
nineteenth-century audiences and not entirely foreign today. He uses imagery of type and the book
on which to base his tropes of the river’s alternative identities, and so it seems not entirely
accidental that his narrator in the end takes a dim view of the unexperienced eye. Samuel Clemens
had spent his early years as a printer’s ‘devil’ in Missouri, under a stern master and seems to have
accepted some of the discourse’s predilections. Mere ‘natural’ appreciations of the river are for him
therefore shallow ones, his ‘truer’ only possible after a rigorous apprenticeship. Typographic
appreciation, visual cognizance, is similar—appreciation of the complexities of type enhance the
joy of reading, but because print is man-made art, rather than, as Clemens considered the River, a
work of God, appreciation in the twentieth century has become the recognition of a designer’s
skill.
But Twain’s reflections describe a point in his experience when the vitality, spontaneity, and
joy of the river’s mystery are lost, forever—because the river becomes ‘an open book’:
Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every trifling
feature that bordered the river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a
valuable acquisition. But I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I
lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry, had gone out of the majestic river!….All the value
any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward
compassing the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my
heart. What does the lovely flush of a beauty’s cheek mean to a doctor but a ‘break’ that
ripples above some deadly disease? Are not all her visible charms sown thick with what are
to him the signs and symbols of visible decay? Does he ever see her beauty at all, or doesn’t
he simply view her professionally, and comment upon her unwholesome condition all to
himself? And doesn’t he sometimes wonder whether he has gained or lost most by learning
his trade?
This disenchantment seems a result of his view of expertise as scientific: he equates piloting (and
by implication, printing) with the practice of medicine. Typography being a social science, rather,
or, even better—literary—in its use and accommodation of style, I must differ with Twain in that
one’s accomplishment doesn’t diminish appreciation, but rather enhances it. Is this perhaps
because mastery of so locomotive a medium is impossible?
18 Twain,
Mark [Clemens, Samuel L.]. Life on the Mississippi. pp. 47-49.
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VARIETIES OF CONTEMPORARY TYPOGRAPHIC CRITICISM
Typographic critical thought as fragmented—schizophrenic
To propose that printing possesses a dignified or upright tradition is a fairly common
‘constructive retelling’ of the genealogy of writing. A look at printers’ correspondences reveals
them to be very diverse: some manuals lecture about the virtue of patience, several complain about
the inadequacy of their colleagues’ work, others advise, and still others quietly offer uncommented
sound scholarly editions. But the tradition is complex and not entirely complimentary. Rather
than wise and stoic keepers of sacred knowledge, publishers often present only the appearance of
being know-it-all busybodies.
An item which permits the specific repudiation of vague convictions about print’s (one almost
feels compelled by literate discourse here to capitalize the p) ‘dignified’ history is that typography
had possessed since its infancy a deeply-rooted fragmentation, from 1462 when Mainz was sacked
by the Huns and the immature secret of printing was scattered across Europe. The craft became decentralized before ever having a firmly whole identity, and has never since entirely recovered.
This trauma of its early childhood seems to have scarred publishing as a discipline, deeply.
One example of the disunity which resulted can be found in the fact that for over three hundred
years there was no accepted measure for the size of lead types—letterforms, founded by smiths,
varied in size and style from shop to shop. In the 1760s Simon Fournier proposed a standard unit
of scale which he termed the point, and another Frenchman, Firmin Didot, developed and
implemented the system; but England, America and Eastern Europe never adopted it. To this day
US, UK and Irish printers use the Anglo-American point system (3% smaller than the Didot, and
incompatible), and Eastern Europe has adopted metric standards.
Another surviving example of splintering is the ambiguity of printers’ jargon, which to this
day can cause confusion for even seasoned masters: if a printer speaks of a folio, he or she might be
referring to a large book, a volume which was bound in a peculiar manner, to a kind of paper of a
particular size, or the actual numbering of pages in an edition.
This isn’t to say that printers since 1460 haven’t attempted to impart a coherent definition to
the mechanics and aesthetics of the trade; they have, and persist to this day. But type has
demonstrated a remarkable history of resistance to integration—despite the best attempts of even
Modernists’ campaigns to mould formal criticism to their own agendas. The continued resiliency
of print can very likely be attributed to the fact that the business of typography has always been
integrally related to technology, and therefore each mechanical development brought structural
change in the look of movements in typographic design. The innovation of new printing processes
(lithography in the 1700s, gravure, dagguerotype and halftone process in the 1800s, and phototype
and digital typesetting in our own century) have kept printers on the defensive, seldom permitting
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The Significance of Visual Form
time to regroup and standardize any single view. But quite possibly this unconscious de-centeredness has been for the good.
A unification of a typographic aesthetic has been achieved, for the most part, in the industry of
book typography. The aesthetics of very influential designers in the first part of this century have
led to the very unornamented layout of today’s prose. As shall be seen in the pages to follow, this
conservative design for ‘literature’ was a reaction to the more flagrant exuberance of Victorian
excesses, in an attempt to ‘elevate’ high culture to timeless elegant simplicity, above the
indignity of anything so trivial as visual fashion. The experimental typography of the Bauhaus,
German and Swiss Modernisms, American ‘Pop’ and optical neoclassicism have been almost
completely excluded from ‘literary’ printing, with exception in only the marginal texts of
‘experimental’ writers such as cummings or Beckett. Experimentation with visual form became
the province of advertising and commercial design, and the vitality and interest which ‘fashion’
can excite has been channeled into ‘mere’ comic books and magazines. This is a loss, and this
chapter will suggest that the very stringent discursive regularities (of a Foucauldian sort) at play in
textual typography alienate readers from even their own traditions (such as poetry, which does not
conform to the ‘rectangular’ prose page of our own century).
How to use typographic history
Friedrich Nietzsche in his essay ‘On the Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life’
defines a sense of history as necessary for human activity; he goes on to discriminate between three
ways men have used history in the past, forms he terms the antiquarian, the monumental, and the
critical. The first is characterized by contemplation of lost historical forms, admiration of relics to
the exclusion of current or vital art—in typography the celebration of incunabula as pre-industrial
‘craftsmanship.’ Monumentalism, in a similarly erroneous move (according to Nietzsche),
sacrifices experimentation to Great Tradition. The third is capable, instead, of making the strange
and the past at one with the near or the present, and through the process of assimilation create new
and great works. All three of these approaches can be found in the chronicles of twentieth-century
typographers’ discourse, and a critic of the writers to follow should imagine and identify the sorts
of design which result from the aesthetics of such writers as William Morris, Frederic Goudy,
Walter Gropius, Stanley Morison, Beatrice Warde, Hermann Zapf and others.
ANTIQUARIAN TYPOGRAPHIC C RITICISM
William Morris
A survey of twentieth-century typographic scholars could not exclude the work and thought of
William Morris, who, though he died in 1896, could be said to have founded twentieth-century
rejuvenation of the discipline, and effected an undeniably profound and lasting impact on the craft.
He certainly interested the wealthy and intelligent men of Victorian and Edwardian Britain, among
whom stands prominently the calligrapher Edward Johnston, author of the 1906 revivalist Writing
30.
The Significance of Visual Form
& Illuminating & Lettering. And while his theory is of the sort I will here term ‘antiquarian’ and
therefore inadequate for contemporary critical use, it seems entirely likely that it is only from the
vitality and strength of such ‘centered’ self-righteousness as Morris’s Private Press Movement
fostered as a foundation, is made possible later relaxed, distanced, ‘postmodern’ criticism.
If any generalization could be made responsibly about printers’ writings, they could be said to
be long-winded. William Morris writes his socialist novels with startlingly simple, clear and
insightful prose; but in his essays on printing, from their very titles, the artist assumes a different
style. In one essay ‘A Note by William Morris on His Aims in Founding the Kelmscott Press’
dated November of 1895, less than a year before his death, Morris elaborated his principal aims in
establishing his publishing house, enumerating values which were to become the program of the
Private Press Movement:
I began printing books with the hope of producing some which would have a definite claim to
beauty, while at the same time they should be easy to read and should not dazzle the eye, or
trouble the intellect of the reader by eccentricity of form in the letters. I have always been a
great admirer of the calligraphy of the Middle Ages, and of the earlier printing which took its
place. As to the fifteenth century books, I had noticed that they were always beautiful by force
of the mere typography, even without the added ornament, with which many of them are so
lavishly supplied. And it was the essence of my undertaking to produce books which it would
be a pleasure to look upon as pieces of printing and arrangement of type. Looking at my
adventure from this point of view, then, I found I had to consider chiefly the following things:
the paper, the form of the type, the relative spacing of the letters, the words, and the lines, and
lastly the position of the printed matter on the page.’ 19
This is an excellent summary of Morris’s tenets, demonstrating his unquestionably accurate eye
for detail to prescribe the factors he felt crucial to production of aesthetic tone. These factors resolve
themselves into a semiotics of type which he will term ‘evocative typography,’ an important
subject to be discussed shortly, but one should first note the rhetoric of the passage above.
It certainly seems a compelling formulation, and a particularly positive one; rather than
defining good printing in contrast to examples of shoddy work, Morris speaks approvingly of the
‘classic’ incunabula. And there can be little to find objectionable in the endeavor to produce books
which are ‘a pleasure to look upon.’ But this passage is a rhetorical tool, one which will be
adopted by typographers often in the hundred years to follow: the writer obtains emotional
momentum from approval for his project, and only then enumerates his cause’s less self-evident
opinions:
Next as to type. By instinct rather than by conscious thinking it over, I began by getting
myself a fount of Roman type. And here what I wanted was a letter pure in form; severe,
without needless excrescences; solid, without the thickening and thinning of the line, which
is the essential fault of the ordinary Modern type and which makes it difficult to read; and not
19 William Morris
in Ashwin, 238-39.
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The Significance of Visual Form
compressed laterally, as all later type has grown to be owing to commercial exigencies. There
was only one source from which to take examples of this perfected Roman type, to wit, the
works of the great Venetian printers of the fifteenth century, of whom Nicolaus Jenson
produced the completest and most Roman characters from 1470 to 1476.’ 20
Here Morris defines his project in a highly oppositional manner. His type is not-Modern type; it
is crafted carefully, rather than commercially.
His history here is profoundly problematic. The roman type with which Kelmscott first began
to produce its editions was named the ‘Golden,’ and was based heavily on the Italian chancery
handwriting and printing of the late fifteenth century. But Manutius’s octavos were set in this face
for particularly commercial ‘exigencies,’ in a face developed for speed of writing by hand, and for
the compactness which permitted large texts to be fit onto few pages. To be fair, Morris widened
the style horizontally, so as to seem almost rich from an extravagant use of space, but for him to
endow Renaissance letterforms with virtue for their ‘unworldliness’ seems mistaken. Nicholas
Jenson certainly had a critical role in the evolution of roman type into its present form, yet for
Morris to date the best work of all time as between 1470-76 is bizarre, clearly very arbitrary. He is
an antiquarian, advocating the Roman and Gothic faces as beauty for beauty’s sake.
If one reads closely, what he objects to most vehemently in the faces of his own time are the
fact that they are ‘commercialized,’ designed for mass production and mass dissemination. And
his rejection of contemporary design may be prompted by an inability to come to terms with his
own England. The selection of fifteenth-century designs as his model may have been as much for
their remoteness from Victorian industrialism, as for any inherent virtue of craftsmanship.
Indeed the next step of his argument supports this hypothesis, by regressing further from the
Victorian world into Old English type, which he terms ‘Gothic’:
After a while I felt that I must have a Gothic as well as a Roman fount; and herein the task I
set myself was to redeem the Gothic character from the charge of unreadableness which is
commonly brought against it.’ 21
In the opening passage of his essay, if you remember, Morris proposed that his plan was to create
a type without needless excrescences. There seems little reason why he should choose to revive
black letter forms, little compulsive need for the most ornamental design in English language
printing.
His project, as Morris presents it, is not a restorative one so much as a new utopian one,
progress beyound and spiritually more virtuous than the industrial Victorian aesthetic his type was
to supersede—which just happens to be toward an aesthetic reminiscent of four hundred years
before. This motif is common in his utopian socialist novels, as well: our narrator in News from
Nowhere, for example, awakens to find himself in the twenty-first century—a world of Medieval
20 Ibid,
21 Ibid,
pp, 238-39.
pp, 238-39.
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The Significance of Visual Form
craftsmanship, villages, enlightened beyond the ‘primitive’ phase of industrialism. It is this
Hegelian evolutionarism (if I may be permitted the term) which associates him so integrally with
Modern graphic design,
It was only natural that I, a decorator by profession, should attempt to ornament my books
suitably; about this matter I will only say that I have always tried to keep in mind the necessity for making the decoration a part of the page of type. I may add that in designing the
magnificent and inimitable woodcuts that have adorned several of my books, and will above
all adorn the Chaucer which is now drawing near to completion, my friend Sir Edward
Burne-Jones has never lost sight of this important point, so that his work will not only give
us a series of the most beautiful and imaginative pictures, but form the most harmonious
decoration possible of the printed book.’ 22
The note ‘…On his aims in founding the Kelmscott Press’ concludes with the point which has
outlasted him, surviving in recognizable form to manuals of desktop publishing today: this
approach was termed ‘evocative typography.’ The notion that a book should bear a look
appropriate to the material seems simple, but suggests corollaries which are surprising. One
fascinating advantage of that a typographer of Morris’s school would enjoy is that he or she would
not have to worry overmuch about keeping ‘up to date’ with contemporary designers work, since
the ‘appropriateness’ of look to meaning is timeless. In the modern period, the tremendous
quantity of work certainly makes arduous the research a conscientious fashion-conscious
typographer might attempt. Evocative type makes this unnecessary.
As will be seen, it is this notion, that somehow typography can be ‘appropriate’ to the
material being conveyed, which will make evocative typography popular in the modern period—
because it commends design work without a need for a formal history of design, and without
having to account for complexities of fad and fashion which would diminish its ‘definite claim to
beauty’ 23 And this view will become a means of defining books themselves as timeless, an
argument proposed by figures like Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind.
ANTIHISTORICAL TYPOGRAPHIC C RITICISM
Walter Gropius
The influence of revolutionary movements in the fine arts can be seen in much of the
typographic work of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Cubism, Futurism, Dada and
Surrealism all evolved styles of representation which could be adapted by the graphic designer,
such as the use of collage, montage and asymmetry. A fascinating example of this response to the
fine arts is A. Tolmer’s Mise en page (1931), which contains a collection of graphic inventions
using a wide range of styles deriving from contemporary painting and sculpture.
22 Ibid,
pp, 243-44.
Morris in Ashwin, 238.
23 from above.
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‘Morris,’ claims Nicholaus Pevsner in the critical manifesto of Modernism, Pioneers of
Modern Design, ‘laid the foundation of the modern style; with Gropius its character was
ultimately determined.’ 24 Pevsner perhaps exaggerates in his evident admiration for these men,
but is essentially correct. Walter Gropius was the architect in Weimar Germany, who designed,
built, and became director of the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1919. The school was founded to be a
forceful rejection of the nineteenth-century ‘Victorian’ aesthetic. Modern designers had many
things for which to hold the previous generation accountable: the petty imperialism which fueled
World War I, the massive glut of posters and commercial advertising which polluted European
cities, and the turgid over-ornamentalism which characterized Victorian and Edwardian
typography; this new generation zealously endorsed removal of ornament on the premise that
‘simplified’ design could be familiar everywhere (the world became smaller every year), the
adoption of ‘assembly-line’ principles in design (to assimilate industrialism into modern life), and
the essentialization of print (which they hoped would render the tremendous quantity of modern
information manageable). Gropius writes in his Proposal for the Staatliches Bauhaus that:
The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has severed it from
our daily life; but art is always present when a people lives sincerely and healthily.…Our job
is therefore to invent a new system of education that may lead—by way of a new kind of
specialized teaching of science and technology—to a complete knowledge of human needs and
a universal awareness of them. 25
This formalism led, in typographic innovations, to proposals like that of Herbert Bayer’s (1900-),
who had been a student at the Bauhaus from 1921-23 and returned to serve as a teacher from 192528—a demand for the abolition of capital letters from contemporary alphabets. Bayer was strongly
supported by Gropius. ‘We do not speak in capital letters,’ they argued reasonably, ‘and so of
writing with them is clearly just a remnant of the dead past.’
Our task is to make a new kind of artist, a creator capable of understanding every kind of need:
not because he is a prodigy, but because he knows how to approach human needs according to
a precise method. We wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new
facts, and independent of formulas in his own work.26
Here the German lays out his theory quite lucidly: since Modern design springs directly from
the needs of communication, none of the mediating complications of history, artistic creativity, or
stylistic embellishment which littered ‘historical’ design remain important. Insofar as he wishes
to recognize the machine aesthetic (whatever that is) and promote the assimilation of technology
into everyday life, his theory seems beneficial.
24 Pevsner,
Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to W alter Gropius. p. 39.
in Munari, Bruno. Design as Art. Middlesex, England, Penguin Books, 1966. p. 27.
26 Ibid, p. 27.
25 Gropius
34.
The Significance of Visual Form
Gropius’s definition of the artist is necessarily non-historical, but he adds a clear and perhaps
gratuitous anti-historical bias to the campaign for a cultural creativity which integrates the modern
‘machine aesthetic.’ In doing this, however, he detaches his work from history—all his
typographer needs to know is a ‘complete understanding of human needs’; in fact, his theory
vilifies historically-grounded composition as ‘distracted’ or ‘reactionary.’ But one might be
curious why the machine is inherently incompatible with previous human history and culture—
Morris made the same assumption, and resolved it only by composing his utopias without
machines. Were such a thing thinkable, I might propose that a desktop-publishing microcomputer
can set sixteenth-century Humanist scripts as well as twentieth-century sans serifs, and that
therefore the only instrinsic exclusions of the computer are the illusions one brings to the desktop.
Gropius’s work, at least, seems to reflect only a convenient oppositional structure for his
definition of the Modern movement.
Jan Tschichold
The leading figure of Modernist type design, of what was to come to be known as the New
Typography, was the German designer Jan Tschichold (1902-1974). Like the British calligrapher
Edward Johnston, Tschichold was inspired as a young man by the beauty of traditional
calligraphic forms, and spent a good deal of time studying them and re-creating them in his own
work. However, he came to the view while working with Gropius that lettering and typography,
indeed the whole of graphic communication, needed a new look which served the needs of the
modern world and was not encrusted by the traditions and ornaments of the past. Tschichold
writes to attack William Morris’s esteem for fifteenth-century type:
Today, even to see in the Gutenberg Bible, whose great historical significance is undisputed,
a ‘never-more-attainable’ ideal is naïve, unfounded romanticism, which it is high time we
abandoned. If we wish to ‘prove ourselves worthy’ of the significant achievements of earlier
times, then we must set them against the achievements of our own born out of our own time.
They can only then become ‘classic,’ when they are unhistorical.’ 27
The designer is here a revolutionary—it was only later in life, after Gropius had emigrated to
the United States in the thirties, that Tschichold would denounce his more revolutionary
comments as too ‘extreme’ Modernism. But the formulaic rejection of tradition of his 1928 Die
Neue Typographie has a profound impact on Continental design of its age.
Look at how in these passages Tschichold subscribes to both elements of Gropius’s modernfunctional aesthetic.
Every day contemporary man has to assimilate an enormous amount of printed material,
whether he has ordered it or not, which is delivered to his home or which he encounters out of
doors in posters, shop windows, directional signs etc. In respect of the production of printed
27 Jan Tschichold, from Die Neue Typographie
28 Jan Tschichold, from Die Neue Typographie
in Ashwin, p.254.
in Ashwin, p.254.
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The Significance of Visual Form
material, the modern age differs from the past primarily not so much through form as through
quantity. However, with the increase in quantity the form of printed material will also be
subject to changes: for the speed with which today’s consumer of printed matter must be able
to absorb what is printed, the lack of time, which forces him to use the maximum economy in
the reading process, inevitably demands also an adaptation of the ‘form’ to the circumstances
of contemporary life. As a rule we no longer read the leisurely way line for line, but attempt at
first to scan the whole, and only when our interest is awakened to study the material more
thoroughly.’ 29
He advocates maximum economy in the reading process, and conflates this with the economy of
sans serif types. This point is worthy of extended analysis. In the previous chapter, and above
with Gropius, were mentioned (if cursorily) the simplifying letterform designs of Herbert Bayer.
Bayer theorized that if letters could be constructed regularly, from as few components as possible,
the reading process could be made faster and easier. Bayer seems, judging from the sixty years
since his face was invented, to have be wrong. His letterforms tend to look so similar to one
another, that the differentiation between letters, like the m, and the r n (the differentiation de
Saussure posited crucial to language) was completely lost. In long text passages, the so-called
‘geometric’ sans serifs caused for readers severe strain, as pointed out by Labuz in his 1989
work.30 What is important here theoretically is that without historical referents, there seem to be
no restrictions on the ability of a theorist to create self-justifying fiats to ‘prove’ his or her
opinions.
Lastly, then, anti-historical criticism compounds its error by then attempting to rationalize
how previous, inefficient ages could have prospered. Tschichold assumes:
The old style of typography, in regard to its mental [theoretical] content as well as its form, is
adapted to earlier generations of man, who, not oppressed by lack of time, could peacefully
read line by line. In those days, functionalism had no meaningful role to play. Hence the old
typography concerned itself less with function than with something which one described as
‘beauty,’ ‘art,’ or something similar. Problems of formal aesthetics (the choice of letter form,
combinations of letter forms, use of ornament) occupied the foreground of interest. Consequently the history of typography since Manutius is not so much a development to greater
clarity and purity of appearance, but as a phenomenon concurrent with the development of historical letterform and ornament. 31
It becomes quite clear here Tschichold has fallen for Morris’s description of Renaissance
typography: that Jenson and Manutius were craftsmen, who dedicated their lives to the creation of
beautiful, though unfunctional, works of art (coincidentally also a very accurate description of
Morris’s Kelmscott works). Nicolaus Pevsner, a contemporary of Tschichold’s, argues that
Morris’s over-ornamentalism was the fault of Edward Burne-Jones, the Kelmscott engraver and
29 Tschichold
in Ashwin, pp. 252-53.
Ronald. Typography and Typesetting. p. 83.
31 Tschichold in Ashwin, p. 253.
30 Labuz,
36.
The Significance of Visual Form
Morris’s good friend32 —consequently he is able to defend Morris’s heroism. But Tschichold’s
opinion in the above passage, while not clear, seems clearly hostile, if not condemnatory.
MONUMENTAL TYPOGRAPHY
They develop their tastes to a point of perversion, that they may be able to show a reason for
continually rejecting all the nourishing artistic fare that is offered them. For they do not want
greatness to arise….Monumental history is the cloak under which hatred of present power and
greatness masquerades as an extreme admiration for the past…they are acting as though their
motto were, ‘let the dead bury the living.’ 33
It is only when Nietzsche speaks of the monumental criticism that he begins to vilify his
opposition with an eloquence for which the philosopher is justly famous. In the essay ‘On the
Advantages and Disadvantages of History for Life,’ Nietzsche does not offer concrete examples of
the ‘monumental’ historians of his day and so it might have been difficult to identify such figures
in typographic criticism, were his penchant for hyperbole not so fully developed. The philosopher
describes in detail very few of the ramifications of monumental history on a discourse, and so it
seems appropriate to turn to the typographic theory of monumental designers themselves in order
to evaluate the consequences of such an aesthetic on the shaping of our concepts of ‘literature,’
‘expression,’ and ‘visual creativity.’
Stanley Morison
Stanley Morison’s importance to British typography dates from the late nineteen-twenties,
when he served in an advisory role as consultant for three major London printing-houses and the
London Times. When he supervised the redesign of the newspaper in 1932, the Englishman
replaced its black letter and neoclassical faces with his own design, Times New Roman, a face
both remarkably popular and instantly successful. In the three years following this success, he
lectured around Britain, and published the transcripts of these talks in a volume titled First
Principles of Typography.
Morison’s regard for the past, like Morris’s before him, privileges ancient forms over the
contemporary—skipping over the Continental work of the De Stijl, Futurists, Constructivists and
Bauhaus designers without mention, though this may perhaps be excused as cultural isolationism
due to national rivalry and antagonisms left over from the First World War.
The printer needs to be careful in choosing his type, realizing that the more often he is going
to use it, the more closely its design must approximate to the general idea held in the mind’s
eye of readers perforce ruled by the familiar magazine, newspaper and book….Aldus’s and
Caslon’s are both relatively feeble types, but they represent the forms accepted by the
community; and the printer, as a servant of the community, must use them, or one of their
32 Pevsner,
Nicholaus. Pioneers of Modern Design. p. 53.
Friedrich. ‘The Use and Abuse of History,’ in Thoughts out of season. pp. 22-23.
33 Nietzsche,
37.
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variants. No printer should say, ‘I am an artist, therefore I am not to be dictated to. I will
create my own letter forms,’ for, in this humble job, no printer is an artist in this sense.34
Morison’s position above, from a 1931 lecture, would alienate the purist followers of Morris,
Gropius and Tschichold—it seems to oppose the individualistic and humanistic theories of
artistic creativity on which Modernist designs are based. In attacking classic Renaissance
letterforms as well, Morison seems to want to display his ‘liberal,’ Modern, freedom from
bourgeois ideology. But he quickly defines the printer’s role in society as that of servant and
conservator, and in doing this distinguishes himself from the revolutionaries on the Continent. To
support his position, Morison quickly points out that his theory is not conservative because of
any political stance inherent to printing as a discipline, of his age or culture, or of his own
personal inclination, but due instead to the limitations of human beings in a mass:
Nor is it possible to-day, as it just was in the infancy of the craft, to persuade society into the
acceptance of strongly marked and highly individualistic types—because literate society is so
much greater in mass and correspondingly slower in movement. Type design moves at the
pace of its most conservative reader.35
While Morison developed this hypothesis, he was offered an appointment as the director of
typography for Monotype, at the time the second largest type-founder in the world. There was
considerable opposition to his appointment, amidst rumors that Morison hoped to foster a
renaissance of Garamonds in book types (his own Times Roman was a Garamond-type Old Style
roman). The Monotype Corporation, engaged in fierce competition with another American firm,
Mergenthaler Linotype, had sold much equipment to newspapers and commercial printers—one of
Monotype’s great advantages was the wide assortment of novelty faces available for its equipment,
due to a slight technical advantage for display-work and decorative type-setting. Some of
Monotype’s designers were concerned that the severity of Morison’s own letterforms might
indicate a dislike for ‘popular’ designs, and he soon confirmed their apprehensions:
If my friends think that the tail of my lower-case r or the lip of my lower-case e is rather jolly,
you may know that the fount would have been better had neither been made. A type which is
to have anything like a present, let alone a future, will neither be very ‘different’ nor very
‘jolly.’ 36
A possible and indeed very attractive explanation for Morison’s puritanism might be found in
the recent prominence of the typewriter in communications. A product of mass culture and
commercialism, representative of business, the machine should have been anathema to this
Briton’s aesthetic sensibility. Nevertheless, from his earliest writings Morison had formulated an
34 Morison,
Stanley, from the lecture ‘First Principles of Typography’ in Ashwin, Clive. History of
Graphic Design and Communication: A Source Book. pp. 251-252.
35 Ibid, 252.
36 Ibid, p . 252.
38.
The Significance of Visual Form
aesthetic of type which describes the eminentlly-legible monotone of the typewriter almost as well
as the type-setter:
A type of sound construction should conform, as the philosophers say, to the ‘universal.’ The
letters will in all cases preserve their essential form. They will have no unnecessary parts, no
exaggeration or dwarfing as between one letter and another; the distinguishing characteristics
will be marked; and the entire species will preserve a general consistency of treatment or
family likeness; they will possess evenness of colour and will of course be well founded, that
is to say, the letters will be so placed upon their respective bodies as to make up into words
with no unlovely gaps and disturbing spaces. Lastly there will be no obtrusion of the unexpected.37
In moments from the above passage, Morison seems almost to be conceding validity in the
experiments for ‘essentialized’ form underway in Dessau. But this is not the case. Morison’s
monumentalism could never permit, even to his death in 1967, a place for innovation: ‘Clearly
even the simple A.B.C. is a thing of mystery. Like all codes it should not be trifled with, but it is
to be feared that in modern times it has not always been respected...The cause of fine printing has
suffered much from a vulgar craze for queer proprietary types. We must remember that the basic
forms of our western types are settled, and that there is no justification for experiments.’ 38
Beatrice Warde
Beatrice Warde was a good friend of both Stanley Morison and Eric Gill, though notable less
for her contribution to typographic design than to its theory. Her rhetorical style is distinctive:
eloquent, reasonable, and persuasive. Her theoretical juxtaposition of style and content is hardly
perceptible in quotation from her writings—and she presents her understanding of both with an
acuity which is difficult to oppose. As a result her arguments are difficult to paraphrase objectively:
the ‘transparency’ she values so highly in type’s subtle inflection is a sort of consummate style,
and itself the primary support for her argument. Look at the following famous argument, from The
Crystal Goblet:
Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favorite vintage
for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You
have two goblets in front of you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns.
The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and
according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine.
For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of
drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost several thousand pounds; but if you are a
member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal,
because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which
it was meant to contain.’ 39
37 Morison,
Stanley. On Type Faces. London: Published jointly by the Medici Society and the Fleuron,
1923. p. vi.
38 Ibid, p. v.
39 Beatrice Warde, from the lecture ‘Type Should Be Invisible,’ in The Crystal Goblet. p. 11.
39.
The Significance of Visual Form
This is Warde’s manifesto: because medium and message are discrete entities, and the typographer’s realm is the delivery of ideas, typographic design ought to be ‘transparent,’ very
subtle, so as not to interfere with the communion of writer and reader.
There are similarities here to William Morris’s evocative typography—both call for a format
appropriate to the message conveyed. As with the Arts and Crafts Movement, Warde’s New
Style theory evokes a righteousness which lends it terrific powers, from the metaphysics of beauty
integral to her theory—fitness of design to its ‘true form’:
You will see ugly seed-catalogues today side by side with handsome ones intelligently
designed; you will, I hope, despise the ugly ones and rejoice over the good ones; but if you
ever find a seed-catalogue that looks like a Bible, or a newspaper, or a political pamphlet, you
will not simply be displeased but also actually confused and obscurely shocked. The primary
duty of the printer—a duty handed down from the days of Gutenberg—is to ‘style’ a job so
that it shall look like what it is; the unrecognizable seed-catalogue, if you do ever come across
it, will have been designed by some layman and produced over the indignant demurrer of its
printer.40
For Warde, the sensible printer is a priest of established aesthetics, whose praiseworthy function in
society is too-often disregarded. Curiously she describes his ‘duty’ as descended from Gutenberg,
though it seems doubtful that she means printers are responsible to Johann the historical figure.
Her evocation of the Swede seems an attempt to synecdoche the Founder of printing for the
Founder of beauty (God, one supposes), and in this way render aesthetic responsibility an
important as well as omnipresent task, the ‘duty’ of the knowledgable.
This duty should be perfectly clear, but Warde is indignant to discover the Modernist printers’
‘seminaries’ (to pursue the Catholic metaphor) teach completely inappropriate techniques. For her
formalism the tasks of ‘printer’ and ‘designer’ are not to be confused—and artistic cooperatives of
the Continent illustrate the epitome of this mistake:
Schools have been all too successful in training young compositors to ‘think’—as designers.
Too many of these young men have thought their way out of the Trade into much better-paid
jobs with no ‘hod-carrying’ duties. The typical compositor is not, never will be a designer,
i.e. one who constantly asks ‘Why?’ and ‘Why not?.’ He has the opposite genius. He is the
one man who has always been expected to know the correct, accepted style and follow it. 41
Her historical analyses of nineteenth-century contributions to the craft are almost sound, but for a
nostalgia for days before the polyphony of printing made impossible the old ‘standard forms’ of
design for specific applications. This, she argues, means that jobs today must employ a
professional designer in addition to the printer. ‘‘That never used to be necessary,’ argues the
printer, with truth; but he forgets that in previous centuries the problem of ‘styling’ the job was
settled in advance because every customer knew what he wanted (i.e. had a clear notion of what a
40 Beatrice
41 Warde,
Warde, from an untitled 1937 lecture, in The Crystal Goblet.. p. 33.
Beatrice. pp. 113-114.
40.
The Significance of Visual Form
handbill looked like and was content that it should look like that); also there were very few typefaces, nothing but hand-made paper—in fact, scarcely any opportunity to go wrong. There is no
hope of returning to those days. It is a waste of breath for the printer to say to his customers,
‘Give me a manuscript and trust me to turn out a good job, looking the way that sort of job
ought to look.’ He is too often talking to men who must desperately try to persuade the public
that Brand A is ‘different’ from Rival Brand B.’ 42 This juxtaposes the lost clarity and solidity of
book typography with a tenuous and tumultuous ‘chaos’ of mass media. Advertising is clearly
indicted as wrongheaded, here reminiscent of Morris’s contempt for his age. The difference lies
only in that Morris at least rejected 1890s work for a clearly-specified other aesthetic. Warde
contrasts today with a ‘good-old-days’ so vague as to be unrecognizable. Her childhood had been
in the 1890s that Morris, Morison, Gill and she herself so dislike.
Warde’s already difficult position demonstrates in its contempt for Modern inconstancy an
evident Luddite streak: ‘The unique position of the printer…can best be appreciated by remembering what normally happens when the machine invades a skilled craft. Its first and worst
effect is to drive a splitting-wedge into the crack of division, scarcely perceptible in many
handicrafts, between ‘design’ (deciding how the thing will look) and ‘production,’ or carryingthrough the decision.’ 43 Warde is clearly not entirely incorrect—her own theory demonstrates
industrialism can support a division of labor, she championed it herself on the previous page. But
it is a costly stance economically, for the steam, electric and electrostatic presses which have
evolved eliminate the dirty labor of hand-press work almost completely, at a tremendously lower
cost. When type-setting is brought onto the desktop, the distinct possibility arises that New Style
criticism such as it is may become so out-of-date as to be useless.
Warde’s writing is nevertheless perpetually invoked in publishing discourse, quotations from
her writing show up in the most progressive manuals such as Ronald Labuz’s Typography and
Typesetting. Part of the reason for this, as I’ve introduced before, is that typographic writings
generally represent an eclectic mix of opinions. But Warde’s popularity owes not a little to the
captivating eloquence of her prose:
It does genuinely matter that a designer should take trouble and delight in his choice of
typefaces. The trouble and delight are taken not merely ‘for art’s sake’ but for the sake of
something so subtly and intimately connected with all that is human that it can be described
by no other phrase than ‘the humanities.’ If ‘the tone of voice’ of a typeface does not count,
then nothing counts that distinguishes man from the other animals. The twinkle that softens a
rebuke; the scorn that can lurk under civility; the martyr’s super-logic and the child’s intuition; the fact that a fragment of moss can pull back into the memory a whole forest; these are
42 Warde,
43 Ibid,
Beatrice, p. 91.
p. 134.
41.
The Significance of Visual Form
proofs that there is reality in the imponderable, and that not only notation by connotation is
part of the proper study of mankind. 44
Even the most condemnatory critics of her theory conclude that her heart was in the right place.
CRITICAL TYPOGRAPHIC THOUGHT
Typography as malleable
Though print is very often considered a durable or permanent medium, persented by New Style
devotées an unhistorical means of record-keeping, perceptions of the printed word are notoriously
fickle. Whereas Medieval scribes cherished the visible representation of their preserved texts, many
Modern designers posited creative expression constituent of ideas, and literary publishing in the
latter part of this century argued ornamental design to be merely ignorant, vulgar showiness. For a
Nietzschean critical theorist this struggle with form, rather than form itself, becomes the locus of a
praxis of visual creativity.
Recurring typographic analogies and motifs
The most effective structuring tools of typographic criticism are the analogic extended
metaphor, the simile, and the synecdoche. Beatrice Warde’s terrific success with the ‘crystal
goblet’ has inspired in 1960s, 70s and 80s writings a surplus of poetic tropology. Typography is
often ‘like music’ or ‘like poetry,’ and, through the association of hundreds of more familiar
pursuits, is today coming to assume the polymorphic complexity of familiar/marginal discourses
like the modern novel, or personal computing. When this happens the term necessarily acquires
some ambiguity—defined by the associations any particular subject has internalized, rather than
some very specific ‘centralized’ meaning. Some desktop publishing experts, as I will show soon,
object to this and hope instead to restrict the innovation and redefinition of the medium by
preaching a Monumental criticism of Morison and Warde. But the purpose of this section is to
demonstrate the nature of the postmodern, ‘critical’ Nietzschean alternative, a celebration of the
vitality that creativity and innovation can bring.
Architecture
Analogies are often drawn between the arts of typography and architecture; the two both being
considered ‘useful’ graphic design—creativity for a purpose perhaps other than themselves. Both
require expertise, both employ invention which embellishes or essentializes design. Functional
Bauhaus architecture was producing revolution in design at the same time the functional Bauhaus
typography was achieving its greatest successes. And architectural metaphor is convenient because
the names we assign to periods of architecture may easily be applied to type: Gothic, Neoclassical
and Modern bear remarkably similar connotations in both areas.
Hermann Zapf, a German designer, writes in his Manuale Typographicum:
44 Ibid,
p. 148.
42.
The Significance of Visual Form
Typography is fundamentally two-dimensional architecture. The harmony of single
proportions, the grouping of lines of type, the judging of contrast and balance, the symmetry
and dynamic tension of axial arrangement—all these are shaping tools, so employed by the
typographer in a given task as to bring the reader a text in its most appealing form. The only
limits to his fantasy are the suitability of his material and the traditions of historic style. 45
Now clearly Zapf here has taken salient features in typography, found their correspondences in
architecture, and then constructed the analogy to appear as if print resembles architecture! But the
act of showing similarities is important in that it gives Zapf broad powers to define what
architecture and typography are. And the connection has numerous and very interesting other
secondary effects, including placing the layout of printed pages among very dignified peer
professions.
Poetry
Paul Valery distinguishes poetry from prose, using for a trope the difference between dancing
and walking. Dancing, he argues, is an exercise performed for its own sake, rather than for
utility—because it is itself rewarding, in a way that walking—which he characterizes as only ‘a
functional means of getting somewhere,’ lacks. Certainly printing has experienced throughout its
history the same taxonomic dilemma—is it a tool or an end? The consensus about book
typography today has fallen quite clearly, following the Bauhaus and New Style theorists, as a
functional device. This is, as we have seen, shaky ground in the midst of more recent
investigations of semiotics, not even to mention the creativity proven possible in this century by
advertisement and artistic uses of type. Valery’s model may be a good weapon. This distinction
between ‘poetic’ and ‘prosodic,’ (one is tempted to call Morison ‘prosaic’) may explain the
difficulties between experimental styles and the conservative New Style.
Theatre
Typography is often said to have an affinity with the art of the actor. Both are interpretive arts,
popularly understood to convey ideas in the form of words from the mind of the author to that of
the spectator via some mediating translation. The tone of the passage, whether frivolous or
solemn, commonplace or noble, trite or profound, cold or emotional, can be governed by the
actor’s mode of delivery, affected by the pitch, tempo and timbre of his voice, the length of his
pauses, and influence his postures and gestures. The typographer, by means of spacing, weight,
type size, choice of capitals, lowercase and italic creates a similar mood to produce a quality and
spirit for written words. In this sense, typography is visual elocution. It gives visible form to language. It seems unlikely that one could deny elocution adds meaning to a written work, and so
the typographer could arguably be obliged to understand the language he or she gives visible form
to.
45 Hermann
Zapf, Manuale Typographicum, p. 101.
43.
The Significance of Visual Form
A consummate actor’s portrayal of a character helps, not hinders the enjoyment of a play.
There is room for a designer’s style in book design—indeed colloquially to say an object has ‘no
style’ is to say it is poorly designed. But there may be such a thing as ‘over-design,’ just as there
is over-acting. This possibility appealed to Beatrice Warde, who argued:
The legibility of a typeface has an exact parallel in the audibility of a human voice. A lecturer
must make every word audible and distinct; yet within the limits of audibility lie the whole
range of speaking tones from a metallic monotonous drawl to the infinitely flexible and
persuasive tones of the good speaker.46
Of course Warde chooses the lecturer (a dignified, rarefied image) to represent type, rather than
Poor Tom or Didi and Gogo writhing on a floor. But the use of theatrical parallels permits a
progressive critic to bring in decidedly Modernist thinkers’ theory as well. With a belief that the
analogy between print and theatre is valid, one can bring to bear penetrating insights by Bertold
Brecht and Peter Brook—this is particularly useful because these men wrote in a time when their
field, the stage, was forced to re-evaluate its relationship to the popular new cinema.
Brecht, a confirmed experimenter, argued ‘It is not the play’s effect on the audience, but its
effect on the theatre that is decisive at this moment.’ 47 Were one to envision this a typographic
fiat, it would certainly strongly disagree with the New Style which claims very high regard for the
reader. Further Brecht argues that a placating, nonexperimental conservativism is mistaken in its
aims: ‘By imagining that they have got hold of an apparatus which has in fact got hold of them
they are supporting an apparatus which is out of their own control.’ 48
This sort of analysis encourages drawing new connections. The creative appropriation of Brecht
shows that using a laser printers to simply mimic a typewriter—as the New Style typographers
might wish, monotonous but very legible—is a conscious neglect of the visual form of one’s
work, and in the face of creative design, in the age of desktop publishing, IBM Selectric IIs cannot
maintain their past aura of officious quality. ‘Old forms of communication are not unaffected by
new ones, nor do they survive alongside them. The filmgoer develops a different way of reading
stories. But the man who writes the stories is a filmgoer, too.’ 49 Brecht would advise writers to
learn the creative techniques of desktop publishing, if only because the sphere of writing is
changing with or without them; those that attempt new work dictate the future of their medium.
Peter Brook, the British director, in his 1968 book The Empty Space offers a very similar sort
of analysis concerning dramatic interpretation. ‘A word,’ he contends, ‘does not start as a word—
it is an end product which begins as an impulse, stimulated by attitude and behavior which
dictates the need for expression. This process occurs inside the dramatist; it is repeated inside the
46 Beatrice
Warde, The Crystal Goblet, p. 137.
Brecht, in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of An Aesthetic. John Willett, ed. p. 22.
48 Ibid, p. 34.
49 Ibid, p. 47.
47 Bertold
44.
The Significance of Visual Form
actor. Both may be conscious only of the words, but for both the author and then the actor the
word is a small visible portion of a gigantic unseen formation…they recognize that the only way
to find the true path to the speaking of a word is through a process which parallels the original
creative one.50 That typographic work in some way parallels the work of creative writing is an
empowering notion for printers.
This acceptance of power is not without responsibility. About five years, Brook says, is the
most a particular staging of a play can live. 51 The shorthands of behavior that represent for us
certain emotions; our gestures, figures of speech, and habits of dress are fluctuating on an invisible
stock exchange all the time. Life continues to move, and influences play on both actor and
audience—other plays, other arts, and current events tend to rewrite history and amend the daily
truth. As a result, he feels, a living theatre which thinks it can stand above anything as trivial as
fashion will wilt. The postmodern typographer is committed to keeping his art current and true to
language:
There have been times in the theatre’s history when the actor’s work has been based on
certain accepted gestures and expressions: there have been frozen systems of attitudes which
we reject today….in basing his gestures on his own observation or on his own spontaneity
the actor is not drawing on any great creativity. He is reaching inside himself for an alphabet
that is also fossilized, for the language of signs from life that he knows is the language not of
invention but of conditioning. 52
In the theatrical metaphor can we find the richest support for the use of analogy in typographic
criticism. If there has never been a cogent, articulate criticism of New Style typography’s premises
and conclusions (there hasn’t) it is likely that within another discipline can be found the tools and
theories to construct an excellent alternative. Warde describes standardized ‘stock’ designs as
dead, and, mourning for them, advocates passive quietude. Peter Brook and Bertold Brecht
celebrate the death, and provide a means of accepting the ramifications of a loss of our simplicity.
Frederic Goudy
Frederic Goudy is perhaps the most successful type creator in history. He was certainly the first
to design type-faces professionally, living not as a printer but instead as a designer. His faces range
widely in styles, from a very conservative Caslon revival to flamboyant Art Deco families. There
was a time in the nineteen-thirties when over fifty percent of the advertising in America was set in
a Goudy face. But his theoretical writing, mostly from his 1940 Typologia, Goudy is very
progressive, and his description of the mechanisms of fashion in typography is much more mature
than those of his contemporaries in England or Germany:
50 Brook,
Peter. The Empty Stage. New York: Atheneum, 1978. pp. 97-98.
p. 103.
52 Ibid, p. 105.
51 Ibid,
45.
The Significance of Visual Form
The types of Garamond, Bodoni, Didot, Caslon, Baskerville, and other well-known faces (or
type founders’ imitations of them) have been available for years to printers generally, and
practically any piece of printing required can be done adequately and satisfactorily with one or
another of them, old as they are. It is no less true, however, that the wearing apparel of the
citizen of Shakespeare’s time was adequate and suited to his times, and might, so far as
practicality is concerned, be just as suitable for our own. But there is the matter of ‘style’ to
consider, and just as in the matter of clothes, style in types change capriciously.’ 53
Goudy here can be linked to the much later work of Peter Brook. In the above passage he purges
from his thought the self-righteousness of Morris’s Private Press and prevents his designs from
claiming true beauty, grounding them instead in ‘local color.’ Goudy was by no means some
inspired prophet, rising above the delusions of a gilded age—his theory is very mired in the
bourgeois liberalism of his time.
The immediate business of an artist may be the practice of but one craft, but unless his
interest is concerned with the whole range of art, he will fall short of attaining the fullest
ideals of his own. If he would express in his work vivacity, charm, invention, grace, and an
interesting variety, he must cultivate a fine taste and a liberal spirit by a study of the masterpieces of all the arts. He will thus gain a breadth and depth of vision, an insight into fundamental principles, and courage to face technical difficulties.’ 54
His sexism is perhaps excusable, as there was only one woman prominent in American typography (Warde), and Goudy wished to have little to do with her. But interestingly in renouncing the exclusivity and narrowness of printers’ discourse he doesn’t detach himself from the
concepts of ‘masterpieces’ and the glories of the past. He avoids the monumentalism of Morison
because he is of the Humanist tradition which presumes a creative artistic individual subject; but
the only principal difference between his work and that of the Private Press is that Morris studies
the years 1460-66, whereas Goudy scrutinizes his own age. What Morris hopes to achieve from
his appreciation of the past is to resuscitate its beauties in a misguided present. Goudy instead
argues that one looks to the past to train one’s eye, to appreciate and internalize the spirit which
art evokes, but then produces whatever he or she wishes. And by doing this the American avoids
Morris’s schizophrenia (in the sense of the inability to cope with the world around him).
Reginald Hutchings
Reginald Hutchings, in his manual The Western Heritage of Type Design, extends Goudy’s
advance to its logical next step—by admitting that printers’ opinions and subjectivity are the
result of a willing (if tacit) participation in the dynamics of fashion. ‘The fashion status of
typefaces,’ he writes, ‘has, in fact, very little to do with intrinsic quality or characteristics of
design. Typographers often justify their preferences or prejudices at any given moment by means of
53 Goudy,
Frederic. Typologia: Studies in Type Design & Type Making. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1940. p. 33.
54 Goudy, p. 38.
46.
The Significance of Visual Form
aesthetic rationalizations, but in practice they find no difficulty in condemning a face when it is
unfashionable and finding equally convincing reasons for defending it when it is fashionable.’ This
begs the question of the origin of fashion—if it does not emanate from typographers, then from
whom?—but this deference can most profitably be passed back to literary criticism, where it was
instituionalized by Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Death of the Author’ twenty years ago. Hutchings
continues, ‘There is probably no display type ever produced in the past that could not become
fashionable at some time in the future, no matter how ‘impossible’ or ‘indefensible’ we may
judge it to be today—just as every successful revival of the past and present has previously been
discarded as useless.’ 55 The above passage is probably the deepest critical theory of type quoted in
this thesis, because it has a profoundly ‘de-centering’ effect in exposing the one role a professional
printer takes to heart—his or her aesthetics. Hutchings puts type into the historical process, in
which fashions change (quickly)—while at the same time problematizing any comfortable,
stationary niche the designer might discover.
The virtue of the familiar
Goudy and Hutchings make problematic the synchronic analysis of type—the semiotic
evaluation of quality based on a stable set of rules internal to the material being surveyed. This
presents many problems, since much of the formalist Modern movement assumed its theory was
based on previously-undiscovered truths about these rules. In a postmodern age, one which terms
itself related to the Modern (we share a surname), it would be unreasonable (and very likely
impossible) to surgically, hermetically excise the ‘mistaken’ twentieth-century thought from the
valid.
An example of this conflict will demonstrate why the issue is important. Modernist designers
adopted the sans serif, hailing it as a revolutionary type, more legible because it abandoned the
‘clutter’ and ‘useless ornamentation’ of traditional styles. Conservative designers decried these
faces, accusing them of being ‘less legible’ than roman faces (some continue their challenge to this
day, with arguments that serifs assist the eye in its horizontal movement across the page). Both
proffered legibility research to support their claims. But what emerged is an understanding that
typographic designs are legible when their faces are familiar. Aspirations, then, to ‘perpetual’ or
‘permanent’ beauty in letterforms are cast into doubt. But this hypothesis does explain how blackletter scripts could have existed popularly in the twelfth through fifteenth centuries—however
illegible they appear today, however unreadable, this is less because of an intrinsic obscurity than
because of a cultural marginalization, and the simple inability of twentieth-century scholars to
agree about intrinsic merits of the serif versus sans serif races demonstrate a profound dilemma in
any attempt to base aesthetic judgment in ‘essential’ weakness.
55 Hutchings, from Lettering.
p. 13.
47.
The Significance of Visual Form
Hermann Zapf
Hermann Zapf is a contemporary German typographer, a designer who in many ways
exemplifies the ideal critical designer. His stature in the world of desktop publishing approaches
eminence—every PostScript laser printer sold today has six Zapf faces built into it (this is two
more than his closest competitor, Stanley Morison, who has four). But apochryphal tales of his
creative misappropriation of the accepted saturate his public persona with a winning nonchalance.
In 1951, Zapf released through the Stempel foundries in Switzerland (the new West Germany’s
type-foundries not yet having recovered from the War) Palatino, considered by Kathleen Tinkel the
best family in the LaserWriter’s arsenal. 56 It is of the Renaissance Humanist style, with elegant
triangular serifs. But in 1952, Zapf released a technically superb face named Optima—basically
Palatino, a Humanist roman, with its serifs chopped off! No-one had ever thought to design a
Humanist sans (the distinctiveness of this style lies predominently in its sharp serifs, though Zapf
demonstrated these were dispensible), and to this day the style is distinctive, and among the most
popular in the world. The headings for this thesis are in Optima—Hermann Zapf’s name above is
set in Optima Bold.
Zapf is appropriate to a postmodern age for two distinctive qualities: first, for making typefaces
for state-of-the-art printing technologies (Optima was conceived for phototype, and has been
available in that format for thirty-five years):
Of a useful text type created by the purpose of our time, more is asked today than it be only a
readily legible book type. There are no universal types suited to every use, since the many
different printing processes render that impossible. We should all be satisfied that so splendid
an armory of printing types is available for these tasks. Alongside the tried and tested classical
faces, however, the efforts for a form true to our time also have their justification, since they
must often serve the requirements of the modern printing processes, to which indeed they owe
their origin. 57
Secondly, he is popular because his solutions abuse established practice in a way which results in
a more reasonable solution than discursive strictures would themselves permit (if he listened to
them). Optima’s crisp legibility is one example of this. Another, more recent anecdote, is even
better: because Mergenthaler Linotype owns the licensing rights to Palatino in the United States,
and releases it only to approved corporations for controlled release at high fees, Zapf was invited
by one of the three major new desktop publishing design houses, Bitstream, to design a face for
them ‘like Palatino.’ He was flown to the United States, and produced in four months a knock-off
of his own 1951 design—the new style, entitled ‘Zapf Calligraphic,’ so accurate it can be used as
a placeholder for type later substituted to Palatino. Zapf himself receives royalties for both designs,
56 Tinkel,
Kathleen. in ‘Using Type,’ her regular column in Personal Publishing. November, 1988, p.
27.
57 Zapf, Hermann. About alphabets: some marginal notes on type design. Cambridge, Massachussets:
The M.I.T. Press, 1970. p. 86.
48.
The Significance of Visual Form
desktop publishers can afford his types, and as a ‘Brer Rabbit’ fable, this story is politically
important in that it portrays counterpellative strategies in which amateur typographers respond to
an ineffectual New Style establishment which wishes to classify them ‘ignorant’—by means of
productive and empowering ‘poaching.’
Bad Combinations
The proliferation of desktop publishing equipment has produced a tremendous market for
typographic instruction manuals: among the newcomers here is a text titled Desktop Publishing
By Design, by Ronnie Shushan and Don Wright. I choose it as an example because it is a good
text, of its sort, from Microsoft Press, a good publishing house.
The electronic age has increased our information overload, the two state at the beiginning; this
begins to sound like the Modern world of 1928. ‘Desktop publishing,’ however, ‘reaffirms the
fundamental power of print.’ 58 Computer-typesetting makes more efficient communication
possible, because it lets more text fit on a page, and because the look is higher-quality more
people will read the message.59 These are samples of the sophistication of typographic criticism
levelled at the reader—simplistic in its portrayal of the discursive regularities of type, to be sure.
The book assumes a New Style didacticism which does not wear well. Shushan speaking at
the end of the Introduction invokes the responsibility a desktop publisher is to carry, 500 years of
tradition. He asserts the ability of type to impart a mood (this is presented as yet another
responsibility, bewildering because of course initiates haven’t a clear idea of the diffeence between
one face and another, and certainly don’t know the names ‘Caslon,’ ‘Bodoni,’ and ‘Garamond’).
He asserts the newcomer’s ignorance and lack of discipline, and enforces his argument by speaking
over his audience’s head (something Morison, at least, would never consciously do) in the hope of
intimidating his readers into respecting his authority. 60
This technique is one they seem to have appropriated from a past master of the New Style in
America today. Jan V. White is perhaps the most authoritative author for desktop publishing—
certainly one of the better-known names in a field of newcomers to typography, and undeniably
aware of the nuances of type. His books, particularly the classic 1976 Graphic Design for the Electronic Age can claim to be well-informed by New Style typographic theory (though there is little
allusion to Modernist or American work).
Functional typography is invisible because it goes unnoticed. The aim is to create a visual
medium that is so attractive, so inviting, and so appropriate to its material, that the process of
reading (which most people dislike as work) becomes a pleasure. Type should never stand
between the reader and the message: the act of reading should be made so easy that the reader
concentrates on the substance, unconscious of the intellectual energy expended in absorbing it.
58 Shushan
and Wright. Desktop Publishing By Design. p. 2.
pp. 2-3.
60 Ibid, p. 14.
59 Ibid,
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The Significance of Visual Form
Ideally, it should be so inviting that the reader is sorry when the end of the piece is reached
(although the subject matter may have something to do with that, too).61
He recapitulates Beatrice Warde’s description of the typographic project almost to the point of
plagiarism, and adopts her style/content dichotomy as well. White develops his attempt to
undermine the autonomy of individual creators in a more complete manner than Warde could have
ever dreamed by equating the responsibility of producing ‘Print’ with a fear of computational
technology.
Today’s ever-changing technology with its miraculous speed, accuracy, and flexibility, as
well as its apparently limitless typographic options, can be daunting. Daunting? No, that is
an understatement. The proper word is terrifying. Terrifying, that is, to anyone but the
technician or expert. That’s why we must go back to the basics, because the wonders of technology are nothing more than tools for us to use for the same old purpose of human
communication. That will remain constant, no matter what wonder-machine produces it. 62
Warde, if you remember, despised the division of labor which ‘machinery’ introduced into a work
environment. White cannot complain of the same thing, in a postindustrial America the
relationship of individual to technology is no longer the same. But he taps the one insecurity sure
to yield results. And then in order to finish the introduction completely, then, he should also then
subjugate technology to the tradition of publishing—which the designer does, in very simple,
commonsense language so as to remove any threatening tone from a disempowering ideology.
The unexpected factor that the new technology has introduced is not mechanical but human.
The new equipment is so clever and so easy to use that anyone can be taught its techniques in
a few hours. As a result, people who have no training in typesetting, production, graphic arts,
design, journalism, or any of the other skills slowly developed over the centuries in the
traditional printed media are being thrown into positions of responsibility. To make matters
worse, more often than not they are alone with only their machines to talk to and work with.
Of course they are daunted by decisions they do not feel competent to make.’ 63
61 Ibid,
p. 2.
Jan. Graphic Design in the Electronic Age: A Manual for Traditional and Desktop
Publishers. p. 1.
63 Ibid.
62 White,
50.
The Significance of Visual Form
CONCLUSION
Typographic style is a formal essence, extant, although historically not determined by a
work’s author. A published work is designed by professionals who know their trade, and who
decide consciously how it should be presented to the reader. As was suggested in the Introduction,
however, some authors reserved the authority to control the visual form of their literature: William
Blake, a printer as well as a poet, designed his Poems of Innocence and Experience in a very
considered fashion; Bernard Shaw found excellent printers, R & R Clark in Edinburgh, and established strict guidelines about how his plays should be typeset (his idiosyncratic style, though
unfashionable today, is still respected (his characters’ expletives, for instance, are l e t t e r s p a c e d
rather than italicized or set in a bold face); Lawrence Sterne went to the extreme of including
diagrams of Tristram Shandy’s fictitious autobiography, and used single words or paragraphs
standing alone on a white page. From the very limited length of this list, one could conclude that
desktop visual theory as a formal discipline is in its infancy. But current technological trends
indicate this field will, as it grows in popularity, soon require greater sophistication and much
deeper thought.
The invention of movable type did not change any urge towards the beautiful in graphic
presentation, but it did displace it—print provided a means denied to the ancients of reproducing
the original work and so widening the public who would see and read. The historical relationship
of the printing press to mass culture problematized it for the whole of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries (as the term ‘press’ came to be synechdochally synonymous with mass
journalism), but in the latter twentieth century new oppositional media such as film, radio, and
television have effectively
‘re-centered’
it within high culture. Desktop publishing’s
overwhelming quantity itself will probably prove enough to alter the tenuous association of print
with high culture: drama, literature, and scholarship in general—certainly enough to rejuvenate
another Private Press sort of reaction.
But the shaping influences of the simple mechanics of electronic text processing and
composition will leave an indelible mark on whatever typographic criticisms may emerge in the
next few decades. Some of contemporary equipment’s most remarkable achievements will have to
be assimilated into any coherent aesthetic—and it is from this level that a postmodern or
Nietzschean criticism can hope to gain the prestige necessary to shape the future of typographic
discourse.
Type democratized
Word processing
Word processing seems to have very effectively eroded ‘first draft–second draft–final revision’
linear paradigms of writing, perhaps because the personal computer is one perceived to be what
McLuhan would term ‘nonsequential.’ Texts actually composed on word processors (not simply
51.
The Significance of Visual Form
typed or transcribed on one) tend to make use of the very powerful tools for revision and
manipulation. Once the writer has internalized the supported methodology of composition,
assembling fragments of thought into coherent works on-line, substantive changes in textual style
results.
It is possible to very quickly achieve the full finished length of a manuscript when word
processing—simply by typing for long periods the user can establish a foundation for later
conglomeration. But the notion of openly re-arranging writing did not spring into the mind of the
programmers of Script™, the earliest word processor: the concept must have been encouraged by a
deep cultural acceptance of editing documents as pieces—or else the programming staff at IBM, far
removed from literary criticism and very likely not comfortable enough in the field to innovate
liberally, should never have completed the package.
This isn’t either to say that word processing sprung whole from Zeus’s head, a finished
product waiting to be sold. The enthusiastic response of a growing number of technologicallyaware writers made economically possible the research and development which in twenty years has
evolved today’s very impressive applications. The tool created discursive support for research, and
the research created larger markets for the tools.
Desktop publishing
Desktop publishing becomes fascinating because it is, in many ways, in its early formative
years. Desktop publishing logically continues the innovations of the word processor, but
introduces a dimension of formal control, the visual, which will foster (if it remains as successful
as the last two years have indicated it may become) radical rethinking of composition on many
levels. Graphic design’s established methodology works from a paradigm as primitive as writing’s sequential ‘drafts’ ten years ago: first the artist collects twenty-five to fifty ‘thumbnail’
sketches (rough ideas); next, he or she draws carefully perhaps four ‘roughs,’ crafted
approximations of layouts, in actual size and with proposed text hand-drawn—these are presented
to the client for consultation; finally, one presentation ‘comp’ is assembled—this piece in color (if
applicable), with type set and camera-ready artwork placed. The comp traditionally serves as a
what-you-see-is-what-you-get final proof of a design.
The very rich quality of contemporary graphic design—photography, advertising, typography
and furnishing—demonstrates that postmodern culture is both visually-aware enough and wealthy
enough to support to an innovative new paradigm of design. And the technological availability of
digital rendering and editing techniques exist to freshen art the way compact discs have for
music—with the exception of being readable and writable instead of read-only.
Charles Darwin recorded in his Autobiography how the development of his theory of natural
selection saddened him tremendously. His discovery was that only by the random production of
thousands of misfit mutations (ill-equipped to survive) could nature produce evolutionary change
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The Significance of Visual Form
helpful to a species’ survival. ‘The waste,’ he wrote sadly, ‘seems inefficient but unavoidable.’
But from the new outlook of desktop publishing, the ‘waste’ of a thumbnail-rough-comp mode of
preparation is avoidable—because DTP works like visual word processing. A computer-assisted
graphic designer at first will continue the methodology to which he or she is accustomed—but on
the computer. As the production of twenty-five to fifty sketches is not easily accomplished on a
computer, and the quality of rough type and photographic effects are as easily generated as handsketched approximations, any formal procedure of drafts, roughs, and comps will be undermined
from below.
The designer may take the first idea which pops into his or her head—by using a DTP or
graphics package, refine it as it is implemented. The same fluidity of composition is available for
visual composition as in word processing, and text processing has already established a precedent
for software’s evolution of features. Best of all, rough sketches of geometric forms by designers
who can’t draw a straight line come out (when printed on a laser printer) looking fantastic—like
a spelling checker, desktop publishing will become accepted in a range of sophistication from
entry-level personal tools to very serious, professional ones. Lastly, as in the nineteen-eighties the
general quality of word processed printing became very high, the only way to discriminate
professional manuscripts from amateur was with sophisticated appreciation of texts—in an age of
popular desktop publishing, the distinction of fine from poor typography will require a much
higher level of technical competence in the community. This is all to the good.
Conclusion
An electronic medium, as we have seen in the review of word processing on the previous page,
is both constituted by the discourse it envelops and reconstitutive of the discourse itself in
interesting ways. More importantly, determination of the future course which the electronic
discipline will create is not consciously manipulated by some central agency. Given these two
phenomena, it seems reasonable to assume that the direction which desktop publishing assumes
for itself in these, its formative years, will be critical to to typographic criticism of the next few
decades.
As we have seen, the theoretical legacy of a group writing at the begin of the decline of ‘hot’
lead type, the New Style typographers, remains a potent influence to this day (where, arguably, it
is out-of-date). This theory will become more inappropriate to electronic publishing if that new
field follows its predecessor word processing, or its contemporary, postmodern graphic design in
general. If the second-generation New Style typographers like Shushan, Wright and White are able
to maintain their position as influential experts, newcomers to desktop publishing will be
compelled to assemble their own understanding of type with only semi-coherent and
unsympathetic quotations from Morison, Gill and Warde to support them. And so it seems clear
that possibilities latent within such electronic genres as desktop publishing could benefit from the
53.
The Significance of Visual Form
introduction of a sophisticated critical/theoretical analysis (more comprehensive than this short
thesis) to typographic discourse.
54.
The Significance of Visual Form
GLOSSARY
All-capitals are seldom used in typesetting, but they represent one way to accentuate a word or
phrase. In book typography it is never seen, because the book designer relies heavily
on the leading between his typeset lines—the white space between lines which forms
a ‘groove’ down which the eye returns to the left of the column after reading each
line. Capital letters broach this white space, and are therefore seldom used.
Ascenders are those portions of the letterform which extend above the characters’ x-height (the
height of normal lowercase letters). Those portions of the b, d, l and those uppercase
characters which extend above the body of text vertically are ascenders.
Asymmetric typography was a design approach espoused by Jan Tschichold and other members
of the Bauhaus which attacked the classic typographic style of centering all copy on
the page. It was particularly notable because of its combination of extremely spare,
unornamented type designs with active and vital page layouts.
Balance is the arrangement of one or more elements so that they ‘equal’ each other visually.
Achieving physical balance is simple: the weight of one object must be counterbalanced by the weight of another on the opposite end of a fulcrum. Optical balance
is is determined by weighing the ‘objects’ visually—for instance, a huge mass of
grey can be balanced by a small mass of black.
Baseline is the imaginary line upon which all letters rest.
Bauhaus was an artistic school, founded by Walter Gropius shortly after World War I, which
stressed function and the elimination of decoration. Its goal was to apply formal
techniques to many disciplines including interior design, architecture, painting and
typography.
Black letter is the type of script that evolved in northern Europe from the twelfth century AD . It is
commonly known as Old English, Textura, or Fraktur.
Boldface arrests the reader in a way quite unsuited to contemporary book typography. It is very
useful in display type, however (in headlines, for instance), and so may be found in
journals or advertisements. It really only came into being in the nineteenth century
broadsheets, placards and posters of Victorian design.
Bowl refers to the curved stroke which creates counters in such letters as a, b, d, n, and o.
Cold type is print set via photographic or digital means, as opposed to ‘hot’ lead printed by
metal blocks in letterpress.
Condensed, compressed, or narrow faces are types which have been designed as thin, or
mathematically or optically-squeezed horizontally. The resulting letterforms permit
55.
The Significance of Visual Form
greater copy in the same amount of space and adds a pronouncedly vertical stress to a
design.
Counters are interior spaces of letterforms, areas like the bowl inside a capital P or the whole
inside of an O. It also applies to smaller contained spaces, such as the space inside
the upper bowl of the lowercase e. They are of consequence because anything which
permits the counter to be filled-in or blurred during printing severely impair
legibility.
Descenders are the counterparts of ascenders (see above); they are the parts of type which descend
below the baseline of body text. Uppercase characters in most families have no
descenders besides the Q, but the lowercase characters g, p, and q do.
Desktop publishing is the process of employing a microcomputer and a laser printer to produces
auto-paginated typesetting.
Evocative printing is the typographic theory of William Morris, which asserts that type should
create a suitable mood for the fullest partaking of a message.
Expanded or extended faces are types which have been crafted as unusually wide, or mathematically or optically stretched horizontally. The resulting letterforms add emphasis, but
reduce the copy in the same amount of space; they imbue a horizontal stress to design.
Face is one means of specifying a particular design of type, specifying family, weight, posture, and
width. Times Bold Italic, for instance, is a face (also known as a font).
Family refers to a complete series of related type faces, including all variations in weight, posture,
size and width. Helvetica, for instance is a type family.
Feathering is the art of adding or subtracting minute linespacing to a work, in order to condense
or extend its length to match a desired size.
Font is a term which was originally used to refer to one complete set of lead characters for a
specific type face in a specific size (from the British fount, the basin in which letters
were stored); with desktop publishing, however, it has come to be interchangeable
with the term face, or even sometimes (incorrectly) the term family.
Gravure is the most important commercial application of intaglio, or recessed printing. The
plates are copper cylinders in which tiny wells forming the pattern of the image are
etched. After the copper cylinder is inked, paper is pressed onto the cylinder and an
impression results. Because the copper cylinders are expensive, gravure printing is
limited to relatively large press runs (usually over 100,000).
Grid is a layout system which requires the typographer to create a uniform modular ‘graph paper’
onto which all design elements are placed. This skeleton for the page shows the
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The Significance of Visual Form
number of columns and their locations, and often presents a general scheme for how
to integrate artwork and photographs into text.
Ideograph is a picture or symbol that represents an idea by resembling it in a stylized form.
Incunabula, or more properly incunabula typographica, are those books printed between 1450
and 1500 (from the Latin incunabula, which meant cradle).
Italic began as a type design quite independent of ‘normal,’ or roman type. In the year 1500,
Aldus Manutius composed a small pocket edition using italics, because he discovered they took less space than vertically-postured text. In Italy, the face was almost
immediately named the Aldine. Elsewhere, because of its Venetian birthplace, the
style was called the italic, the name by which we know oblique letters today. Italic
is used most often in book typography for emphasis, because italic has only a minimally adverse effect on the ‘color’ of a page.
Justification is a term used to refer to the alignment of text in copy: it can be left-justified (which
provides a constant left margin but a ragged right), right-justified (very seldom
used—provides a solid right, but a ragged left side), centered, or full justified
(constant and straight on both left and right sides).
Kerning is the reduction of space between letterforms. This is not the same as condensing,
because the shape of the letterforms is unchanged—they are left as wide as ever—
only the space between them is reduced.
Leading (pronounced ledding) refers to linespacing, and is the traditional term (harking back to
when linespacing was achieved by the placement of thin strips of lead between lines
of metal type). This is done in order to ameliorate reading.
Letterspacing refers to the control of space between letterforms; while it can be used to indicate
both the increase or decrease in space between characters, because the more specific
term kerning exists to refer to reducing space, letterspacing often picks up the
connotation of only the increase of spacing.
Line length has been proven crucial to readability studies; there exists a ten-to-twelve-word
standard for line length.
Linespacing burdens or ameliorates the reading of a page, particularly when line length is less
easily controlled. It is the distance, measured in points, from one baseline to the
next. Increasing linespacing can make wide columns easier to read.
Margins are a useful tool for ‘softening’ the hardest, most domineering pages. The term refers to
the region of white space surrounding the text or graphics of a page. Margins are
necessary elements of book design, needed to account for the vagaries of binding and
trimming—with small margins or without any at all, type could be lost.
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The Significance of Visual Form
Modern romans are neoclassical typefaces designed from 1750 to 1820, characterized by great
contrast between major and minor strokes. They mark a break from the Old Style
tradition of the previous three hundred years, and bear strong design similarities to
the lettering of the Roman ruins.
Moods of typefaces, because designed with varied ‘looks,’ impart a great deal of character to the
work. Whether this character be friendly or stoic, sixteenth-century or avidly
twentieth-century, any type selection will add a tone of some sort to typeset design.
There can be no ‘value-neutral’ typefaces.
National hands were the styles of handwriting that were used in various parts of Europe in the
Middle Ages. The three which most influenced the later history of typography were
the Celtic, the Gothic, and the Roman.
New Style was a typographic movement begun in the late 1920s that stressed legibility and
timelessness in typefounding. Its important advocates included Eric Gill, Stanley
Morison, and Beatrice Warde.
New Wave is a typographic style of the later 1970s and early 1980s that stresses the visual, rather
than the verbal, message.
Oblique is another term used for the italic-style letterform, but differs from the italic in one
important way. Obliqued type is merely slanted optically (or mathematically, with
PostScript), whereas italic typefaces are actually drawn specifically with adornments
to differentiate it from the roman.
Offset lithography is the most popular printing method in the United States today. The offset
principle involves transferring the inked image from an intermediate cylinder before
impressing it onto paper. The lithographic principle, perfected for printing by Alois
Senefelder in 1796, is that grease and water do not mix.
Old Style is the first of the roman typeface classifications. Letters have a rounded stress and little
contrast between major and minor strokes.
Open letterspacing in the nineteenth century was used often to spotlight expletives. George
Bernard Shaw specified that letterspacing should be used for emphasis in the
typesetting of all his plays, and they have been cast that way ever since. But because
contemporary typesetting valorizes very tight kerning, it is less often seen today.
Personal Style was a typographic movement started in the 1920s that held that typography
should reflect the time in which it was created.
Pica is a unit of measure used by layout specialists—six picas roughly equal one inch. In the
world of PostScript, six picas equal exactly one inch. There is an interesting wealth
of possibilities that arise from the difference in proportions a base-six system can
impose. Professionals always measure column widths and heights in picas.
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The Significance of Visual Form
Point is one-twelfth of a pica (see pica above); this yields seventy-two points to an inch. Type
specifications are always given in points, measuring the height of a face from the top
of its ascenders to the bottom of its descenders. Twelve-point type, then, yields six
lines of text to the inch.
Position refers to the relationship established between an element and its background. Since
position influences the forces within a picture plane, a designer must carefully plan
the placement of elements within the space. It is difficult to understand position
without being aware of the effect it has on balance. Certain spaces, for example, are
more protective of their elements than others. A dot placed in the center of a square
will appear secure in its position because the energy of the surrounding space
confines it within the area. If that same dot is placed off center, the composition may
seem more interesting, but it will not appear as secure.
Posture refers to the angle of text type, whether roman (vertical) or italic (obliqued, slanted at a
10°-15° angle).
Private Press Movement was a typographic movement founded by William Morris with his
Kelmscott Press of the 1890s, that stressed a return to the methods and paradigms of
traditional printing.
Ragged setting is text unjustified on one or both sides of the column. Ragged-right setting, by far
the most common, possesses a justified (flush) left margin, but the right-hand margin
is staggered with the words as they naturally break at the right. Ragged-left is very
uncommon, and offers a flush right margin and a ragged left. Centered alignment is
ragged on both right and left edges.
Recto is a right-hand page.
Roman is the term used to describe a typeface with serifs, after the model of the Column of Trajan
erected in Rome in 114 AD . It can also be used, however, to mean ‘not italic’ and
‘not boldface’ but instead to imply ‘normal’ formatting.
Saccadic jumps are, according to social science research, the method by which we perceive
groups of words at one glance, moving on to the next group after the previous one is
understood.
Sans serif typefaces lack a serif (see serif).
Script is a typeface which looks like handwriting, characterized by letters that touch one another
when typeset.
Serif is the term used to refer to a cross-stroke added to the ends of the main strokes of a character.
The term may also refer to the whole class of families which possess serifs.
Size can be used to add a certain character to text, particularly on typographically-varied pages. On
the front page of a newspaper, for example, both large and small sizes may be used
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The Significance of Visual Form
together—headlines set in display sizes attract attention first, body text sizes classify
the articles as reading material, and photograph and art captions are set in even
smaller sizes, as reference (should anybody want to read them). In this manner, an
unquestionable hierarchy is established. Type size is always measured in points.
Small capitals are a more prevalent means of emphasis than all-capitals, but less common than
boldface or italics. Small capitals actually use capital letterforms set smaller to represent lowercase letters—these capitals are only as tall as the x-height of the face’s
normal lowercase.
Texture is the pattern created by the repetition of certain characteristics inherent in the individual
letters of a type face. Texture can therefore only exist in a line or mass, wherever
there are enough letters in an area for a textural pattern to take form.
Typographic color may be defined as the uniform shade of grey produced by black type on a
white page. Typefaces have been designed which tended to produce a very uneven
color over the range of a page, and typographic scholars have termed this very unaesthetic. The use of boldface, underlining, and larger faces all disturb the color of a
passage, as may excessive punctuation.
Uncial was a writing hand of the Middle Ages characterized by an elegant roundness.
Underlining is derisively scorned by professionals—the addition of a black, ungainly horizontal
line beneath text severely mars the typographic color of a passage in a way italics and
other emphases do not. Historically, underscoring was invented for the typewriter because the typewriter was mechanically unable to emphasize text any other justifiable
way. In manuscript preparation, underlining in typewritten documents is always
converted into italics.
Verso is a left-hand page.
Weight refers to the blackness (or heaviness) of a letter: light, medium, bold, or whatever.
X-height is a term which refers to the height of lowercase in proportion to uppercase letters. In old
style romans the x-height was traditionally very small; over the course of five
hundred years it has, with few interruptions, continually increased in size. PostScript
redrawings of faces like Garamond have been reworked to adopt a large x-height, and
therefore a more contemporary look. Also, the imaginary line that marks the top of
most lowercase letters.
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The Significance of Visual Form
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The Significance of Visual Form
INDEX
Adobe Systems 27
Alcuin of York 18
Aristotle 7
Arts and Crafts Movement 22
Baskerville
John 20
roman 21, 49
Bauhaus 23, 24, 36, 45, 59
Bayer, Herbert 24
Beardsley, Monroe 7
Bible
Gutenberg’s 7, 18, 38
black letter 18
Blake, William 55
Bodoni
Giambattista 21
roman 26, 49
Brecht, Bertold 47
Brook, Peter 48
Burne-Jones, Sir Edward 35, 39
calligraphy 21, 33
Caroline miniscule 18
Caslon
roman 40, 49
William 20
Charlemagne 17
Chaucer, Geoffrey 35
Column of Trajan 16
Darwin, Charles 57
desktop publishing 8, 56
Didot, Firmin 21
Die Neue Typographie 24
discursive form 7
Egyptian romans 21
Essay on Typography 25
Faerie Queene 16
Fat Face 21
Figgins, Vincent 21
Fleuron 25
Foucault, Michel 7
Frutiger, Adrian 25
Garamond
Claude 19
roman 20, 49, 65
geometric sans serif 24
Gill
Eric 14, 25
Gill Sans 25
Gothic 18, 19, 35, 45
Goudy, Frederic
typographic theory of 48-50
Griffo, Francesco 19
Gropius, Walter
typographic theory of 36-37
Gutenberg Galaxy v
Gutenberg, Johann 7, 18
Helvetica 25
Humanist
scholars 7
types 18, 19
incunabula typographica 18, 33
Industrial revolution 21
italic 19
Jenson, Nicolaus 19, 34
Kelmscott Press 23
LaserWriter 27
Linotype 28, 41, 52
Manutius, Aldus 8, 19
Meidinger, Max 25
Middle Ages 33
Monotype 11, 41
Morison, Stanley 8, 14, 17, 24, 25
typographic theory of 40-42
Morris, William 8, 14, 20, 22, 24
and the New Style 24
typographic theory of 33-36
national hands 17
New Wave typography 27
Nietzsche, Friedrich 39
Old English (see black letter) 18
Old Style 65
Old Style romans 19, 20, 21, 22
Paradise Lost 16
Perpetua 25
Phototypesetting 26
Poems of Innocence and Experience 55
PostScript 27, 28
Private Press Movement 23, 33, 63
Renner, Paul 24
roman 19, 34, 63
Modern 21
sans serif
invention 21
Serif 64
64.
The Significance of Visual Form
Shakespeare, William 16, 49
Shaw, Bernard 8, 55
Sterne, Lawrence 8, 55
structural form 7
Sweynheim and Pannartz 19
textural form 7
The empty stage 48
the PostScript 27
Thorne, Robert 21
Times New Roman 24
Transitional roman 20
Tristram Shandy 55
Tschichold, Jan 23, 24
typographic theory of 37-39
Typographic color 64
typography 16, 22, 23, 39, 45
Bauhaus 24
Univers 25
Venetian 19
visual form 7
Walker, Sir Emery 22
Warde, Beatrice 14, 25
typographic theory of 42-44
word processing 55
WYSIWYG 28, 56
Zapf, Hermann 46
typographic theory of 51
65.