Type Time – A Type Publication

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  The Crystal Gob Printing Should be In Beatrice Warde

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The Science of Typogra Ellen Lupton

blet or 4 nvisible

18 aphy

Dumb Ideas Jeffery Keedy

An Address Before the Br itish Typographer s’ Guild at St. Br ide’s Institute, London

THE CRYSTAL GOBLET Or

PRINTING SHOULD BE INVISIBLE Beatrice Warde

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“What must it do?”

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magine that you have before you a flagon of wine . You may choose your own favour ite vintage for this imaginar y demonstr ation, so that it be a deep shimmer ing cr imson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patter ns.

The other is of cr ystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble , and as tr ansparent. Pour and dr ink; 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 dr inking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tr ibe , the amateur s of fine vintages, you will choose the cr ystal, because ever ything about it is calculated to reveal r ather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fr agr ant metaphor ; for you will find that almost all the vir tues of the perfect wineglass have a par allel in typogr aphy. There is the long, thin stem that obviates finger pr ints on the bowl.

Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fier y hear t of the liquid. Are not the mar gins on book pages similar ly meant to obviate the necessity of finger ing the type – page . Again: the glass is colour less or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine par tly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alter s it. There are a thousand manner isms in typogr aphy that are as impudent and arbitr ar y as putting por t in tumbler s of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for secur ity, it does not matter how clever ly it is weighted; you feel ner vous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may wor k well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously wor r ied by the fear of ‘doublin g’ lines, reading three words as one , and so for th.

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Now the man who fir st choose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘moder nist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that ter m.

That is, the fir st thing he asked of this par ticular object w as not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typogr aphy is moder nist.

Wine is so str ange and potent a thing that it has been used in the centr al r itual of religion in one place and time , and attacked by a vir ago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the wor ld that is capable of stir r ing and alter ing men’s minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man’s chief mir acle , unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact that I can make arbitr ar y sounds which wi ll lead a total str anger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conver sation by means of black mar ks on paper with an unknown per son half-way across the wor ld. Talking, broadcasting, wr iting, and pr inting are all quite liter ally for ms of thought tr ansference , and it is this ability and eager ness to tr ansfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e . that the impor tant thing about pr inting is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typogr aphy. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you star t by assuming that pr inting is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is ver y easy to find your self in the wrong house altogether.

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Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessar ily lead to. If books are pr inted in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14 pt Bold Sans is, according to the labor ator y tests, more ‘leg ible’ than one set in 11 pt Basker ville . A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice . It is the tr ansparent goblet again! I need not war n you that if you begin listening to the inflections and peaking rhythms of a voice from a platfor m, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not under stand, par t of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separ ate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties.

The fine ar ts do that; but that is not the pur pose of pr inting. Type well used is invisible as type , just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the tr ansmission of words, ideas.

We may say, therefore , that pr inting may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is impor tant, fir st and foremost, as a means of doing something.

That is why it is mischievous to call any pr inted piece a wor k of ar t, especially fine ar t: because that would imply that its fir st pur pose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses.

Calligr aphy can almost be considered a fine ar t nowadays, because its pr imar y economic and educational pur pose has been taken away; but pr inting in English will not qualify as an ar t until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future gener ations, and until pr inting itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

“Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.”

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There is no end to the maze of pr actices in typogr aphy, and this idea of pr inting as a conveyor is, at least in the minds o f all the great typogr apher s with whom I have had the pr ivilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze . Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designer s go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible . And with this clue , this pur posiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-o f things, and find that they justify you tr iumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flur r y of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstr act pr inciples.

I once was talking to a man who designed a ver y pleasing adver tising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what ar tists think about a cer tain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: ‘Ah, madam, we ar tists do not think – we feel!’ That same day I quoted that remar k to another designer of my acquaintance , and he , being less poetically inclined, mur mured: ‘I’m not feeling ver y well today, I think!’ He was r ight, he did think; he was the thinking sor t; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typogr apher and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason.

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I always suspect the typogr aphic enthusiast who takes a pr inted page from a book and fr ames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gr atify a sensor y delight he has mutilated something infinitely more impor tant.

I remember that T. M. Cleland, the famous Amer ican typogr apher, once showed me a ver y beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decor ations in colour. He did not have the actual text to wor k with in dr awing up his specimen pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of, if you have seen the old type foundr ies’ famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e . that Latin has few descender s and thus gives a remar kably even line). No, he told me that or iginally he had set up the dullest ‘ wording’ that he could find (I dare say it was from Hansard), and yet he discovered tha t the man to whom he submitted it would star t reading and making comments on the text. I made some remar k on the mentality of Boards of Director s, but Mr Cleland said, ‘No: you’re wrong; if the reader had not been pr actically forced to read – if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamour and significance – then the layout would have been a failure . Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying “This is not the text as it will appear”.’

Let me star t my specific conclusions with book typogr aphy, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about adver tising.

The book typogr apher has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape whichis the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of mar vellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some r ich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may wor k in what I call tr ansparent or invisible typogr aphy. I have a book at home , of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typogr aphy goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeer s and their comr ades swagger ing up and down the streets of Par is.

The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this cor responds to what is called ‘fine pr inting’ today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there , and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable , because of a ver y impor tant fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. This is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitr ar y war ping of design or excess of ‘colour’, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type . Our subconsciousness is always afr aid of blunder s (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can tr ick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The r unning headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hair-spaces – these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.

And if what I have said is tr ue of book pr inting, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in adver tising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message – that you are implanting a desire , str aight into the mind of the reader.

It is tr agically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an adver tisement by setting the simple and compelling ar gument in a face which is uncomfor tably alien to the classic reasonableness of the bookface . Get attention as you will by your headline , and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to wor k with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-ear ned money for the pr ivilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.

Pr inting demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine ar ts are even now flounder ing in self-conscious and maudlin exper iments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the tr ansparent page . Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline . When you realize that ugly typogr aphy never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else . The ‘stunt typogr apher’ lear ns the fickleness of r ich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over ser if and ker n, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other cr aftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless year s of happy exper iment in devising that cr ystalline goblet which is wor thy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

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From Emigre No. 66

DUMB IDEAS

Jeffrey Keedy

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esign theor y: is it back? Since the thr ill of digital technology has become an agony of endless upgr ades, dot com millionaires have come and gone , and ever yone has a roadside stand on the infor mation highway or has published a self-promotional SUV of a book, maybe now is a good time to think about what’s going on.

“...popular but dumb ideas in design.”

Reading design theor ies from the past, you can’t help but be str uck by how many times the same issues are discussed. It is as though ever y gener ation has to have essentially the same conver sation but in a new way. Web logs (biogs) are the new way that designer s are having that conver sation now. They r ange from Design Obser ver, which reads like the Op Ed pages of a design jour nal, to Speak Up, which reads like “Chicken Noodle Soup for the Designer’s Soul.” As one of the many spor adic “lur ker s” of design biogs, I of cour se enjoy hear ing what other designer s have to say, but it comes at a cost.

You must be willing to wade through a seemingly endless recitation of dumb ideas that have already been refuted long ago. The only thing more annoying than having your ideas ignored or for gotten by the next gener ation, is watching them make the same stupid mistakes you made . So as a kind of public ser vice , I thought I would star t a list of some of the most popular but dumb ideas in design.

Ideas that are popular because they seem to provide an answer, but dumb because they’re wrong.

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Designers just talking to other designers and “preaching to the choir” is a waste of time.

Yeah, if only plumber s, acupunctur ists, and nuclear physicists were allowed to talk about design, that would be soooo helpful. A similar cliche is that “a broader r ange of voices needs to be heard,” as if there were some malevolent force at wor k silencing a multitude of insightful design cr itics and theor ists. How they manage to do it now that any nitwit who can wor k a keyboard is free to opine on any and all topics on the web is a real myster y.

We need to have more designer s talking about design honestly and intelligently without the usual selfpromotion and mor al postur ing.

There ar e about 150,000 designer s in the U.S. alone; a couple of them are bound to have a few good ideas.

Obviously you can always lear n something from other disciplines, but are we unable to lear n anything from each other?

Design theorists and lecturers should refrain from using big words and quoting academic intellectuals. It just serves to obfuscate (see what I mean) their ideas, alienate the audience, and cover for the fact that they don’t really have any ideas of their own.

This is the anti-intellectual’s lament.

If you can’t say something quickly and simply, then you can’t expect a simpleton to under stand it. There is no shor tage of small worded, anecdotal, Reader s Digeststyle accounts of design in “these United States” as far as I can tell.

It’s a big countr y and an even bigger wor ld. Next time you find your self assaulted by flagr ant verbosity and misguided citations, tur n the page or tur n up your iPod. This too shall pass.

Or get a dictionar y, read some books, and take some classes, dumb ass. Or take the offending pontificator to school and teach them by your own concise yet intr icately nuanced example .

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Designers should always try to do work that is experimental.

I don’t even know what that word is supposed to mean in design anymor e . It used to mean wor k that is provisional, not complete or refined; a wor k in progress that is created to test a hypothesis. A student effor t. Something you do to test an idea or technique , not something you do to publish or show off. Not that there is anything wrong with a kind of gr atuitous showing off, but you shouldn’t tr y to justify it by calling it exper imental.

The idea that exper imental wor k is complex or obtuse and cutting edge is really cor nball. We should be much more cr itical of anything labeled exper imental. After all, that is the point of an exper iment: to see if it wor ked.

Legitimately exper imental wor k is par t of the design process and goes on all the time , a process that most designer s star ted in school, and many continue with. It’s a means, not an end.

Content is good, style is bad.

Mature designer s often don’t need to exper iment ver y much anymore , as they know what they are after and are wor king on refining and improving their vision and cr aft. For the most par t they keep their exper iments to themselves and just show us the good stuff.

Don’t get me star ted. This is a dumb idea that is deeply ingr ained in design. I, of cour se , blame moder nism, and am confident that we will get over this idiotic notion in this new centur y, as it has done entirely too much damage in the last.

It was helpful in the beginning for moder nists to make the point that making meaning is an impor tant par t of why we make things at all. But it’s not the onlyreason we make things.

Meaning and content are contextual anyway, so what exactly would a styleless context look like? Who said style has no meaning or content anyway? Ever yone should read The Substance of Style , by Vir ginia Postrel, the best design theor y book by a non-designer in year s. It may help designer s get over their style phobia: the fir st step is facing your fear and recognizing you have a problem - with style .

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Designers should develop their own personal voice; originality and authenticity should be their goal.

This idea is so last-centur y. The assumption here is that per sonal voice , authenticity, and or iginality are all good things, which they often are , but just as often are not. Ever yone has a per sonal voice but not ever yone can sing. If you have an authentically bad per sonal voice , you should leave the singing to someone else . And there is no shor tage of stupid or iginal ideas. It still makes for good adver tizing copy, but or iginality doesn’t count for much in design because design isn’t ver y or iginal. Design is about or ganizing and making, but not from scr atch and always in context of use .

Designers should strive for timelessness.

Yes, it’s still with us, and probably always w ill be , because dumb ideas are timeless. But we won’t know for sure , of cour se , until the actual end of ti me . Maybe if designer s stop using that word, they will have to use other words that have a sensible meaning, giving people the impression that designer s are sensible people .

A similar var iant of the timeless malar key is the equally dumb idea of “tr ansparency” or zero degree desi gn.

It’s like Santa Claus and democr acy: it seems to wor k as long as we prete nd to believe in it.

If someone designs an or iginal typeface , for example , they don’t invent new letter s; they invent new shapes for letter s that we under stand only because they are so similar to the shapes of letter s that already exist. It is not so much the or iginality of the par ticular shapes that are impor tant, but r ather the ingenuity of the letter for ms in the context of all the other letter for ms that existed before , and the meaning or significance they convey in that context. Uniqueness in and of itself is not ver y significant, nor is it as per vasive in design as we claim it is. Invention and imagination are ver y impor tant to design but they don’t come out of thin air, they come from the context they were created in, not from some self-taught genius.

“Design is about organizing and making, but not from scratch and always in context of use.”

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Designers need to redefine their context.

The concept of context seems to have gone from something you are already a par t of, to something you simply invent.

Unfor tunately, just because you say something doesn’t mean it is tr ue (even if it is on talk r adio or a blog).

Context isn’t something you make; it’s something that is. You can have any idea about design you want, but that idea won’t necessar ily have any effect on design, because design is in the wor ld not in you. The idea of re-contextualizing design is like playing a game where you get to make up the r ules as you go.

You are only to be judge d by your own cr iter ia. And guess what? You win!

Design has become way too decontextualized as it is. How many times have you read a designer profile in which absolutely no other designer is mentioned other than the one under review? As if they were the only designer that ever designed anything and ever ything they say is accepted as gospel “str aight from the hor se’s mouth.”

What’s the point? Must ever ything be a self-promotion? Do we really get to invent our own relevance?

Designers should be more autonomous.

The idea here is that autonomy will give designer s coherency through self-definition and a separ ation from the demands of the mar ketplace . Th is self-proclaimed autonomy is supposed to r ally the troops because they get to make up their own job descr iption.

But an autonomous community is a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it? You can only get away with being autonomous as long as someone else is picking up the garbage and making sure the tr ains r un on time . Sounds a lot like being an ar tist. At a time when designer s can ’t even agree on what to call themselves, or what exactly it is that they do, it is not hard to see why an “ever y man for himself ” attitude is popular. When I think of the autonomous designer, I imagine a selftaught ten year old with a laptop.

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Design criticism and theory are just personal opinions, not facts.

Well, duh! But opinions and so-called facts are not mutually exclusive .

Facts star t as opinions fir st. If they pass muster, they become facts.

Opinions are as valuable as facts in the development of knowledge .

The sentiment above implies that one per son’s opinions are as valid as and equal to anyone else’s. In spite of what you may have been told in kinder gar ten, or a lit. cr it. class in gr ad school, that is (in fact) not tr ue . However, uninfor med opinions do ser ve to illustr ate how not to think about something. That is why discer nment and the cr itical process are impor tant, why opinions are impor tant, not just facts (which should be contested from time to time as well).

People get good at what they do by wor king at it. Discussing, studying, and wr iting are all par t of the wor k that is essential to under stand what constitutes the pr imar y issues, values, and cr iter ia of a discipline , and develop the str ategies that move it forward. The dictionar y says that an opinion is “a belief stronger than an impression and less strong than per sonal knowledge , and it is a for mal statement by an exper t after careful study.” What ‘s wrong with that?

Design theory is for making sense of design practice.

I think of theor y as coming in three flavor s: methodology, cr iticism, and “pure” theor y. Methodology is probably the most directly related to pr actice because you fir st have to know “how to” pr actice . Cr iticism happens after the fact and is a bit more removed from pr actice by a “cr itical distance .” And finally, “pure” theor y may or may not be related to pr actice at all. Most design theor y consists of a mix of these three flavor s in var ious combinations and often has a bit of histor y , philosophy , and politics thrown in, as well.

When I fir st star ted teaching design theor y at Otis Par sons in 1987, I put a lot of effor t into making connections between theor y and pr actice for the students, as if to justify the need for a theor y class at all. By tr ying to “connect the dots” for them, I was teaching theor y as a cr itical methodology for use in pr actice . Although cr itical and methodological thinking is really useful, probably the most useful thing a designer can get from theor y is inspir ation. But by insisting on direct and (often obvious) relevance to pr actice , theor y becomes less useful as an idea because it loses its ability to inspire . I think that is why designer s who insist that “design is about ideas” don’t seem to ever have any. They think it is enough to be for the idea of having ideas. Who isn’t? But they lack the inspir ation to, find them.

In the theor y classes I teach at CalAr ts now, it is up to the students to “connect the dots” between theor y, the studio, their own wor k, and the wor ld .

Tibor Kalman said “We need more why and less how.” I think we need more why, how, and why not?

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What is needed in design is a new...

You can’t separate form from content.

Yes, you can. You can separ ate for m from its “or iginal” content and attach it to a new content (pastiche), but it always retains some vestige of its “or iginal” content. For example , Raymond Loewy’s pencil shar pener looks like it is going to take flight, because its streamlined for m was separ ated from the aerodynamics of air-planes. Things get even more complicated when you mix multiple for ms and contents together (eclecticism). You can separ ate a for m and content from each other, but you can’t have conte nt without for m or for m without content.

Even though designer s talk about “empty for malism,” for ms are never completely devoid of content, because for ms come from somewhere , and they br ing with them vestigial content.

Designer s play in the space between for m and content all the time , but they are pretty lax about ar ticulating the subtlety and complexity of the relationship between them, and words like pastiche and eclecticism are too sweeping in scope to be much help.

You can fill in the rest of the sentence with almost anything, and it will probably still qualify as a dumb idea. Past favor ites have been new r ules/context/ wave/resistance/sobr iety/complexity/ autonomy/par adigm for the new desktop/digitaVinter active/web/motion/ vir tuaVcor por ate/cultur al, whatever.

Usually championed by someone who didn’t really know much about the “old” whatever, other than the fact that it desper ately needs replacing.

I, for one , have cer tainly not been immune to the char ms of the new, and its pal “the next big thing.” They are full of promise , but seldom deliver. Tr y this little exper iment: ever y time you read, wr ite , or say the word “new” in relation to design: replace it with the word “good.”

It is a lot easier to be new than it is to be good. The cr iter ia for being new is only based on the past few year s, but the cr iter ia for being good is based on ever ything we have lear ned since th e beginning of time . However, you actually have to know histor y before you can use it as a cr iter ion for judgment. By wor king “intuitively” r ather than intellectually, designer s can convince themselves and their clients that they are creating “new” wor k, and newness is exactly what clients want to make bor ing products seem interesting. In this respect designer s are rewarded more for their ignor ance than for their insight. That’s why many designer s don’t bother with the past beyond what they have exper ienced themselves. When was the last time you heard a designer br agging about doi ng the “oldest” thing?

Designer s enjoy being the arbiter s of fashion and ignor ance is a small and easy pr ice to pay for the pr ivilege . The idea that “there is nothing new under the sun” is an old one , but do we really have to insist that ever ything be new? It is a lot more likely that a useless piece of cr ap will be new than old, because the test of time tends to throw most of the cr ap out. I’m willing to settle for just good.

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‘Scientific’ studies of typography and legibility are analysed by Ellen Lupton...

THE SCIENCE OF TYPOGRAPHY Ellen Lupton

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espite heroic effor ts to create a cr itical discour se for design, our fiel d remains r uled, lar gely, by convention and intuition.

Interested in alter native attitudes, I recently set out to examine the scientific liter ature on typogr aphy. From the late nineteenth centur y to the present, researcher s from var ious fields— psychology, er gonomics, human computer inter action (HCI), and design—have tested typogr aphic efficiency. This research, little known to pr acticing designer s, takes a refreshingly r igorous—though often tedious and ultimately inconclusive—approach to how people respond to wr itten words on page and screen.

What did I lar n from slogging through hundreds of pages photocopied or downloaded from jour nals with titles like Behavior and Infor mation Technology and Inter national Jour nal of Man-Machine Studies? Both a little and a lot.

Each study isolates and tests cer tain var iables (font style , line length, screen size , etc .).

Although r ational and scientific , this process is also problematic , as typogr aphic var iables inter act with each other—a pull on one par t of the system has repercussions elsewhere .

For example , in 1929 Donald G. Pater son and Miles A. Tinker published an analysis of type sizes—par t of a ser ies of studies they launched in pur suit of “the hygiene of reading.”1 Texts were set in 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-point type .

The study emphatically concluded that 10 points is the “optimum size” for efficient reading—a result relevant, however, only for texts set at a par ticular line length (80 mm), in a par ticular typeface (not disclosed).

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Another study by Pater son and Tinker tested ten different fonts, including tr aditional, ser ifed faces as well as the sans ser if Kabel Lite , the monospaced Amer ican Typewr iter, and the densely decor ated, neo-medieval Cloister Black.2 Only the last two fonts—Typewr iter and Cloister—caused any significant dip in reading speed. The author s’ conclusion: “Type faces [sic] in common use are equally legible” (613 ).

Science leaves the designer more or less at sea in ter ms of font choice .

A 1998 study testing fonts on the screen revealed conflicts between how user s perfor med and what they said they liked. An interdisciplinar y team at Car negie Mellon Univer sity compared Times Roman with Geor gia, a ser if font designed for the screen.3 Although the team found no objective difference , user s prefer red Geor gia, which they judged shar per, more pleasing, and easier to read. A second test compared Geor gia with Verdana, a sans ser if face designed for on-screen viewing. In this c ase , user s expressed a slight “subjective preference” for Verdana, but they perfor med better reading Geor gia. Once again, the study concludes with no definitive guide .

How is typogr aphic efficiency judged?

“Legibility” concer ns the ease with which a letter or word can be recognized (as in an eye exam), whereas “readability” descr ibes the ease with which a text can be under stood (as in the mental processing of meaningful sentences).

Designer s often distinguish “legibility” and “readability” as the objective and subjective sides of typogr aphi c exper ience . For scientists, however, readability can be objectively measured, as speed of reading + comprehension. Subjects in most of the studies cited here were asked to read a text and then answer questions. (Speed and comprehension are factored together because faster reading is often achieved at the expense of under standing content.)

`The literature on readability includes numerous articles on whether (and why) paper is preferred over screens. In 1987 researchers working for IBM isolated and tested variables that affect text on both screen and page, including image quality, typeface, and line spacing.4 While the team hoped to successfully identify the culprit behind the poor performance of the screen, they discovered something else instead: an interplay of factors seemed to be at work, each variable interacting with others. The screen itself proved not to be the root cause of its own inefficiency; fault lay, instead, in the way text was presented—in short, its design.

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In a second paper the IBM team proved that the efficiency difference between page and screen could be er ased entirely if the screen were made to more closely resemble the “nor mal” conditions of pr int.5 This study presented black, anti-aliased typefaces on a light, high-resolution screen—features that became more or less standard in the 1990s.

The IBM research thus established that design conventions evolved for pr int effectively tr anslate to the realm of the screen.

While such wor k confir ms the commonality of design for page and screen, other research defies some of our most cher ished assumptions. Consider the bur ning typogr aphic questions of line length and the appropr iate number of char acter s per line . The Swiss moder nists have long promoted shor t, neat lines as ideal for reading, from Josef MüllerBrockman (seven words per line) to Ruedi Rüegg (for ty to sixty char acter s). Such r ules of thumb have become basic instinct for many designer s.

Science , however, tells a different tale .

One study deter mined that long line lengths are more efficient than shor ter ones, concluding that columns of text should fill up as much screen real estate as possible .6 (Grotesque images swim to mind of mar ginless, unstr uctured pages of HTML, expanding to fill the screen with one fat column.)

Another study compared texts with 80 char acter s per line to texts with 40 char acter s per line . The 80-char acter lines were created— get this!—by collapsing the width of each letter, thus jamming more text into the same space .7 Despite this unfor givable cr ime against typogr aphy, the study found that subjects could read the denser lines more efficiently than lines with fewer—albeit nor mally propor tioned— char acter s. Ugliness, we lear n, does not always compromise function.

Upsetting assumptions is not a bad thing.

Although the research cited here may not tell us exactly how to set type , its conclusi ons could be useful in other ways. For example , it was once progressive to promote the use of “white space” in all things typogr aphic . Perhaps it is time to reconsider the value of density, from page to screen to urban environment. Down with spr awl, down with vast distances from a to b, and up with greater r ichness, diver sity, and compactness among infor mation and ideas, people and places.

What we might expect from the science of type is a seamless web of r ules. Such is not for thcoming. In its dr ive to uncover fixed standards, the research has affir med, instead, human toler ance for typogr aphic var iation and the elasticity of the typogr aphic system. Science can help r uffle our dogmas and create a clearer view of how var iables inter act to create living, breathing—and, yes, readable—typogr aphy.

“...variables interact to create living, breathing—and, yes, readable—typography.”

TYPE TIME

THE SCIENCE OF TYPOGRAPHY

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Notes 1. D. G. Pater son and M. A. Tinker, “Studies of Typogr aphical Factor s Influencing Speed of Reading: II. Size of Type ,” Jour nal of Applied Psychology, 13, 2 (1929): 120–30.

2. D. G. Pater son and M. A. Tinker, “Studies of Typogr aphical Factor s Influencing Speed of Reading: X. Style of Type Fac e ,” Jour nal of Applied Psychology, 16, 6 (1932): 605–613.

3. Daniel Boyar ski, Chr istine Neuwir th, Jodi For lizzi, and Susan Har kness Regli, “A Study of Fonts Designed for Screen Display,” CHI 98, 18–23 (Apr il 1998). Not paginated.

4. John D. Gould, Lizette Alfaro, Vincent Bar nes, Rich Finn, Nancy Gischkowsky, and Angelo Minuto, “Reading is Slower from CRT Displays than from Paper : Attempts to Isolate a Single-Var iable Explanation,” Human Factor s, 29, 3 (1987): 269–299.

5. John D. Gould, Lizette Alfaro, Rich Finn, Br ian Haupt, and Angelo Minuto, “Reading from CRT Displays Can Be as Fast as Reading from Paper,” Human Factor s, 29, 5 (1987): 497–517.

6. Rober t L. Duchnicky and Paul A. Koler s, “Readability of Text Scrolled on Visual Di splay Ter minals as a Function of Window Size ,” Human Factor s, 25, 6 (1983): 683–692.

7. Study by Koler s et al, cited in Carol Ber gfeld Mills, and Linda J. Weldon. “Reading Text from Computer Screens,” ACM Computing Sur veys, 19, 4 (December 1987): 329–358.

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COLOPHON

Ty pe T i me P ublished by E CU P re ss Emily Car r U ni ver si ty of Ar t an d D esi gn 520 East 1 st Avenu e Vancou ver, B C V5T 0H 2 , Can ad a E di t o r Chr i sti n e F w u Pub l i s h e r Chr i sti n e F w u De s i g n e d b y Chr i sti n e F w u Ty pe f ace s Didot & Gi l l San s