Typography
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Sentences and words do not exist by themselves
Sentences and words do not exist by themselves, but have natural, inevitable, unavoidable interactions with their surrounding spaces, words, and other sentences. Sentences are not independent of their spatial context, and interactions can create meanings and harms. Sentences survive content-indifferent and content-hostile spacings, but surviving is not thriving. Text space should not be owned and governed by generic productions grids, which make for convenient production but inconvenient meaning. Space can and should be content-responsive, actively contributing to meaning – forever practices in poetry, maps, math, computer code, comics, theater/movie scrips, posters. Subtle visual spacing differentiates and clarifies sentences, and meaning becomes more consequential, memorable, retrievable.
Central-axis text
Central-axis provides a clear signal of the next line, so that readers and speakers don't have to search on the left margin, sometimes accidentally skipping down a line. Ragged-left typography is used for dialogue in novels and scripts. In central-axis, each line is activated at both left and right margins – unlike squared-off conventional text. Readers/speakers are aware of the length of the next line at both its beginning and end. That knowledge may also help readers detect the pace and rhythm of the words, as in reading poetry aloud.
The pernicious issue with pangrams
The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the
E
that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with theZ
that appears just once every 1,111 letters. Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — theJ
is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors theH
thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, theW
,Y
,V
,K
,X
,J
, andZ
, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.To abandon control
In print the designer is god. An enormous industry has emerged from WYSIWYG, and many of the web’s designers are grounded in the beliefs and practices, the ritual of that medium. As designers we need to rethink this role, to abandon control, and seek a new relationship with the page.
The control which designers know in the print medium, and often desire in the web medium, is simply a function of the limitation of the printed page. We should embrace the fact that the web doesn’t have the same constraints, and design for this flexibility. But first, we must “accept the ebb and flow of things.”
Typographic grid
Just one of many examples of beautiful typography and layout throughout the book. Love the page design.
A state of energetic repose
Read the text before designing it.
Discover the outer logic of the typography in the inner logic of the text.
Make the visible relationship between the text and other elements (photographs, captions, tables, diagrams, notes) a reflection of their real relationship.
Give full typographic attention even to incidental details.
Invite the reader into the text.
Reveal the tenor and meaning of the text.
Clarify the structure and the order of the text.
Link the text with other existing elements.Induce a state of energetic repose, which is the ideal condition for reading.
Simple forms
The concept that “the simpler the form of a letter the simpler its reading” was an obsession of beginning constructivism. It became something like a dogma, and is still followed by “modernistic” typographers.
This notion has proved to be wrong, because in reading we do not read letters but words, words as a whole, as a “word picture.” Ophthalmology has disclosed that the more the letters are differentiated from each other, the easier is the reading.
Without going into comparisons and the details, it should be realized that words consisting of only capital letters present the most difficult reading—because of their equal height, equal volume, and, with most, their equal width. When comparing serif letters with sans-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading. The fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.
Typography exists to honor content
In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspired to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.
The higher courts
Refer typographic disputes to the higher courts of speech and thinking.
Type is idealized writing, and its normal function is to record idealized speech. Acronyms such as CD and TV or USA and UFO are set in caps because that is the way we pronounce them. Acronyms such as UNESCO, ASCII, and FORTRAN, which are pronounced not as letters but as words, are in the process of becoming precisely that. When a writer accepts them fully into her speech and urges readers to do likewise, it is time for the typographer to accept them into the common speech of typography by setting them in lower case. Other acronymic words, such as laser and radar, have long since traveled the same road.
Pure but silent
Architects build perfectly proportioned kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms in which their clients will make, among other things, a mess. Typographers likewise build perfectly proportioned pages, then distort them on demand. The text takes precedence over the purity of the design, and the typographic texture of the text takes precedence over the absolute proportions of the pure but silent page.
An end in itself
Typography, like language, is more important to me for what it allows to happen than for anything it accomplishes on its own. I hope that in writing a book on the subject I have not given the impression that either typography or design is an end in itself.
Respect
Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type designer third, the foundry fourth.
The needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of the font, the integrity of the letterforms over the ego of the designer, the artistic sensibility of the designer over the foundry’s desire for profit, and the founder’s craft over a good deal else.
A gradual refinement
The steel rail is an artifact whose form has been carefully optimized. This gradual refinement of the design was done not by a single brilliant engineer but by more than a century of industrial evolution. The rail was never meant to be an object of beauty, but its cross section has all the elegance of fine typography.
The Elements of Typographic Style
A Book by Robert BringhurstTo Make a Book, Walk on a Book
An Essay by Craig ModThe ability of the physical world — a floor, a wall — to act as a screen of near infinite resolution becomes more powerful the more time we spend heads-down in our handheld computers, screens the size of palms. In fact, it’s almost impossible to see the visual patterns — the inherent adjacencies — of a physical book unless you deconstruct it and splay it out on the floor.
Web Design is 95% Typography
An Article by Oliver Reichenstein95% of the information on the web is written language. It is only logical to say that a web designer should get good training in the main discipline of shaping written information, in other words: Typography.
What of the lowly page number
An Article by Marlon J. EttingerStatement of intent, chronological guidepost, or cheap trick to inflate the length of a text, page number placement is anything but an afterthought. Behind these innocuous and overlooked symbols, I found many stories to be told.
Care for the Text
An Article by Robin RendleWhenever I’m stuck pondering the question: "How do I make this website better?" I know the answer is always this: Care for the text.
Without great writing, a website is harder to read, extremely difficult to navigate, and impossible to remember. Without great writing, it’s hardly a website at all. But it’s tough to remember this day in and day out—especially when it’s not our job to care about the text—yet each and every <p> tag and <button> element is an opportunity for great writing. It’s a moment to inject some humor or add a considerate note that helps people.
…These are the details that make a good website great.
In search of visual texture
An Article by Rachel PruddenI’m now more inclined to attribute Looseleaf’s power to its visual texture than to some cognitive media-style abstraction. And the visual texture owes more to the beauty (yes, beauty!) of the original pdfs from the Vasulka Archive. Perhaps the demo is best understood not as a prototype generic tool, but as a specific curated experience in its own right, with form and content claiming equal importance in its overall success.
Even so, I think there are some general lessons that can be drawn from this demo:
- Content is not inert
- Visual texture lets content breathe
- Visual texture lets the eye wander without losing itself
Chartwell
A FontThis set of tools for easily creating graphs is conveniently disguised as a set of fonts. OpenType features are used to interpret and visualize the data. The data remains as editable text, allowing for painless updates.
Whomst styles?
An Article by Robin SloanThis is a “whostyle”: an attempt to carry the ~timbre~ of an author’s voice, in the form of their design sensibility, through into a quotation. It’s the author who defines their whostyle; the quoting site just honors it, a frame around their words.
I think the whostyle makes a few arguments. Among them:
- Text is more than a string of character codes. Its design matters, typography and layout alike; these things support (or subvert!) its affect, argument, and more.
- The web should be more colorful and chaotic, along nearly every dimension. The past five years have brought a flood of new capabilities, hugely expressive — let’s use them!
- Quoting is touchy, and anything you can do to cushion it with respect and hospitality is a plus.
Unicode Arrows
A Fragment by Rachel Binx↬ welcome to the best part of the unicode spec ↫
APL386 Unicode
A Font by Adám BrudzewskyAPL font based on Adrian Smith's APL385 font with a fun, whimsical look, inspired by Comic Sans Serif.
APL (named after the book A Programming Language) is a programming language developed in the 1960s by Kenneth E. Iverson. Its central datatype is the multidimensional array. It uses a large range of special graphic symbols to represent most functions and operators, leading to very concise code. It has been an important influence on the development of concept modeling, spreadsheets, functional programming, and computer math packages. It has also inspired several other programming languages.
The Sense of Style
Classic style
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity.
The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world.
The assumption of equality
Classic writing, with its assumption of equality between writer and reader, makes the reader feel like a genius. Bad writing makes the reader feel like a dunce.
Nominalization
The English language provides bad writers with a dangerous weapon called nominalization: making something into a noun.
Instead of affirming an idea, you effect its affirmation; rather than postponing something, you implement a postponement.
"Comprehension checks were used as exclusion criteria” would be better said as “we excluded people who failed to understand the instructions.”
“There is not any anticipation there will be a cancellation” would be better as “I don’t anticipate that I will have to cancel.”
Zombie sounds, unlike the verbs whose bodies they snatched, can shamble around without subjects. That is what they have in common with the passive constructions that also bog down these examples.
The curse of knowledge
The better you know something, the less you remember about how hard it was to learn.
The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows - that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail.
Structural parallelism
If the new phrase has the same structure as the preceding one, its words can be slotted into the waiting tree, and the reader will absorb it effortlessly. The pattern is called structural parallelism, and it is one of the oldest tricks in the book for elegant (and often stirring) prose.
“He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”
You live only once
The logician would argue, You only live once should be rewritten as You live only once, with only next to the thing it qualifies, once.
The logician would be unbearably pedantic, but there is a grain of good taste in the pedantry. Writing is often clearer and more elegant when a writer pushes an only or a not next to the thing that it quantifies. In 1962 John F. Kennedy declared, “We choose to go to the moon not because it is easy but because it is hard.” That sounds a lot classier than “We don’t choose to go to the moon because it is easy but because it is hard."
Such tortuous syntax
How does a writer manage to turn out such tortuous syntax? It happens when he shovels phrase after phrase onto the page in the order which each one occurs to him.
The problem is that the order in which thoughts occur to the writer is different from the order in which they are easily discovered by a reader. It’s a syntactic version of the curse of knowledge. The writer can see the links among the concepts in his internal web of knowledge, and has forgotten that a reader needs to build an orderly tree to decipher them from his string of words.