AUTHORITY
WITHOUT
QUESTION
Welcome to Subliminal publication, a magazine that explores the notion of subconscious obeying of authority and poses the notion of challenging the perspectives we have formed. When creating this publication I was highly inspired by the notion of street typography and found it extremely fascinating the attitude and dominance the typography placed on street signs and markers held over the general public. Forming the foundations for these notions were the texts ‘Elements of Typographic Style’ by author Robert Bringhurst, as well as ‘Letters and Cities’ by Anna Paula Silva Gouveia, Priscila Lena Farias, Patricia Souza Gatto. Throughout the publication, we will explore the notion of subconscious authority expressed through normative PAGE 3-6; ‘ELEMENTS OF typography seen on the roads, unveiling how TYPOGRAPHIC STYLE’ BY letters and typefaces on street signs hold ROBERT BRINGHURST sovereignty over us. In extension to this, my concept also has undertones of moral concerns, diving into the notion of societal ethics and questioning the virtues of the individual. Although street signs represent authority and have an attitude that demands respect and submission, they are not physically enforced - with there being no immediate consequence for not following these signs. This theme stems from the notion of words having power and a life of their own, as expressed by Robert Bringhurst in the text ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’. Bringhurst states that ‘letters have a life and dignity of their own’ PAGE 13-16; ‘LETTERS AND expressing the notion of typefaces exerting an CITIES’ BY ANNA PAULA attitude upon the reader, in a similar way to street signs exert a subconscious aura SILVA GOUVEIA, PRISCILA which of authority.Additionally, “letterforms that LENA FARIAS, PATRICIA honour and elucidate what humans see and say SOUZA GATTO deserve to be honoured in their turn” echos the notion of a two way relationship between the type and the reader, with the type on a street sign acting as an extension of government rule and federal authority. I was also influenced by the notion of wayfinding and how we create mental maps within our subconscious by connecting pieces of recognisable type together. I considered how this idea could be applied to street typography, noting how I as an individual have created a subconscious map of my local area based on speed signs and associating areas of my suburb with a speed limit. I subconsciously know to slow down turning into my street as it changes from 70km to 50km, I know to slow down to 40km when going past the two service stations on the main road. Signs in my area have allowed me to wayfind and create a mental map of my suburb through their constant bold letters screaming at me to slow down and follow the speed limit.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy – the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand – and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise. As a craft, typography shares a long common boundary and many common concerns with writing and editing on the one side and with graphic design on the other; yet typography itself belongs to neither. Like oratory, music, dance, calligraphy – like anything that lends its grace to language – typography is an art that can be deliberately misused. It is a craft by which the meanings of a text (or its absence of meaning) can be clarified, honoured and shared, or, knowingly disguised. In a world rife with 1.1 FIRST PRINCIPLES unsolicited messages, typography 1.1.1 TYPOGRAPHY must draw attention to itself it will be read. Yet in order EXISTS TO HONOUR before to be read, it must relinquish CONTENT the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires 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. One of the principles of durable typography is always legibility; another is something more than legibility: some earned or unearned interest that gives its living energy to the page. It takes various forms and goes by various names, including serenity, liveliness, laughter, grace and joy. These principles apply, in different ways, to the typography of business cards, instruction sheets and postage stamps, as well as to editions of religious scriptures, literary classics and other books that aspire to join their ranks. Within limits, the same principles apply even to stock market reports, airline schedules, milk cartons, classified ads. But laughter, grace and joy, like legibility itself, all feed on meaning, which the writer, the words and the subject, not the typographer, must provide.
Letterforms that honour and elucidate what humans see and say deserve to be honoured in their turn. Well-chosen words deserve well-chosen letters; these in their turn deserve to be set with affection, intelligence, knowledge and skill. Typography is a link, and it ought, as a matter of honour, courtesy and pure delight, to be as strong as the others in the chain. Writing begins with the making of footprints, the leaving of signs. Like speaking, it is a perfectly natural act which humans have carried to complex extremes. The typographer’s task has always 1.1.2 LETTERS HAVE been to add a somewhat unnatural edge, a protective shell of artificial A LIFE AND DIGNITY order, to the power of the writing OF THEIR OWN hand. The tools have altered over the centuries, and the exact degree of unnaturalness desired has varied from place to place and time to time, but the character of the essential transformation between manuscript and type has scarcely changed. The original purpose of type was simply copying. The job of the typographer was to imitate the scribal hand in a form that permitted exact and fast replication. Dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of copies were printed in less time than a scribe would need to finish one. This excuse for setting texts in type has disappeared. In the age of photolithography, digital scanning and offset printing it is as easy to print directly from handwritten copy as from text that is typographically composed. Yet the typographer’s task is little changed. It is still to give the illusion of superhuman speed and stamina – and of superhuman patience and precision – to the writing hand. Typography is just that: idealised writing. Writers themselves now rarely have the calligraphic skill of earlier scribes, but they evoke countless versions of ideal script by their varying voices and literary styles. To these blind and often invisible visions, the typographer must respond in visible terms. In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a wellmade book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles. Simple as it may sound, the task of creative non-interference with letters is a rewarding and difficult calling. In ideal conditions, it is all that typographers are really asked to do – and it is enough.
LETTERS DIGNITY
HAVE OF
A LIFE AND THEIR OWN
LETTERFORMS THAT HONOUR AND ELUCIDATE WHAT HUMANS SEE AND SAY DESERVE TO BE HONOURED IN THEIR TURN
Literary style, says Walter Benjamin, “is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without slipping into banality.”1 Typographic style, in this large and intelligent sense of the word, does not mean any particular style – my style or 1.1.3 THERE IS A STYLE your style, Neo classical or Baroque style BEYOND STYLE – but the power to move freely through the whole domain of typography and to function at every step in a way that is graceful and vital instead of banal. It means typography can walk familiar ground without sliding into platitudes, typography that responds to new conditions with innovative solutions, and typography that does not vex the reader with its own originality in a self-conscious search for praise. Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness. Much typography is far removed from literature, for language has many uses, including packaging and propaganda. Like music, it can be used to manipulate behaviour and emotions. But this is not where typographers, musicians, or other human beings show us their finest side. Typography at its best is a slow performing art, worthy of the same informed appreciation that we sometimes give to musical performances, and capable of giving similar nourishment and pleasure in return. The same alphabets and page designs can be used for a biography of Mohandas Gandhi and for a manual on the use and deployment of biological weapons. Writing can be used both for love letters and for hate mail, and love letters themselves can be used for manipulation and extortion as well as to bring delight to body and soul. Evidently there is nothing inherently noble and trustworthy in the written or printed word. Yet generations of men and women have turned to writing and printing to house and share their deepest hopes, perceptions, dreams and fears. It is to them, not to the extortionist – nor to the opportunist of the profiteer – that the typographer must answer. 1 From part 2 of Benjamin’s essay on Karl Kraus, in Illuminationen, (Frankfurt, 1955). There is an English translation in Walter Benjamin, Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz (New York, 1978). Excerpts from Bringhurst, R. 2001. The Elements of Typographic Style (pg 11, 17–20) Hartley & Marks, Canada
In The Image of the City, Lynch investigates the quality of the visual environment, introducing new research procedures andnew concepts such as wayfinding and mental maps. He examinesthe legibility of the city structure from the point of view of user–dwellers and their use of mental maps, pointing out the relevance of urban landmarks, and the dweller’s mental image of the city. In READING Townscape, which is considered an important treatise on urban aesthetics, Cullen suggests THE CITY that environments we consider pleasant did not just happen by chance. The author records and systematizes urban interventions, making an investigative use of drawing and photography. The conic perspective, from the user-pedestrian’s point of view, is applied as a tool for checking the quality of th urban environment. In his drawings, Cullen uses optical effects, by means of lines and reticles, to highlight features of a particular place and its specific meaning, in a psychological approach to the urban landscape. According to these authors, the image of the environment is basedon people’s interactions with their surroundings– interactions that help them to make sense, code and evaluate their environment and then take appropriate action. In this context, a mental image can be seen as the final stage of the perceptive process. Such an image, therefore, is not solely a visual but a synesthetic product. Many of these theories, particularly Lynch’s wayfinding, were revived and reevaluated in 1999 in Robert Jacobson’s Information Design, which can be described as a collection of the main theories and methods in use in information design in the late 20th and early 21st century. Of particular note are the chaptersby architect Romedi Passini, who discusses the contributions of architecture and wayfinding to information design, and by communication theoretician Brenda Dervin who puts forwarda new methodology information systems called sense-making. Passini is also the author and co-author of two other books that are of great relevance in this line of studies: Wayfinding in Architecture (1984) and WAYFINDING AND Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture (Arthur Passini, 1992). Passini and Arthur INFORMATION describe wayfinding as a process that DESIGN involves the elaboration and implementation of action plans related to moving around in environments that are not necessarily familiar. According to the authors, understanding this kind of process should be the primary concern of architects and graphic designers engaged inplanning such environments. They argue that wayfinding maybe affected by space organization and architecture as well as by information provided by graphic, auditory and tactile elements.In addition, they discuss strategies that may be applied in configuring environments that facilitate users’ spatial orientation. In Visual Function (1997), designer Paul Mijksenaar discusses a number of cases in which information design may help an understanding of the built environment, and points out some restrictions imposed by the architectonic conception of some buildings. Mijksenaar criticizes modern and post-modernbuildings where the main entrance, whether accidentally or not, is concealed in the facade (pp. 8–10). According to the author, an efficient architectonic structure might not even need further information about destinations and routes (p. 10).
Based on Lynch’s (1997: 9) discussion, it could be argued that the visual, aesthetic and cultural identity of the city is madeup of, amongst other things, its graphic elements. These elements can act as indicators of urban flows (wayfinding) or aslandmarks that identify and name city locations TYPOGRAPHIC and therefore contribute to defining the city’s LANDSCAPES: READING informational structure. LETTERS AND NUMBERS Lettersand numbers in the IN THE CITY urban environment can thus be studied as part of the city’s identity and communicative efforts,and understood as a kind of discourse. What we call typographic landscape is the landscape formed by a subset of graphic elements in the urban environment: characters that form words, dates and other messages composed of letters and numbers. Typography is here understood in a broad sense, including reference to alphabetic and para-alphabetic characters obtained from processes that would be better described as lettering (painting, engraving, casting,etc.) and not only from automatic or mechanic processes that characterize typography in a more restricted sense. Such landscapes are formed by a number of insertions: historical evidences that last over different periods of time and that can be divided into eight major groups:
ARCHITECTONIC TYPOGRAPHY
permanent inscriptions, such as a building name or number, which are usually designed and built at the same time as the building.
HONORARY TYPOGRAPHY
inscriptions designed to honour historical characters or events, such as those found on most public monuments.
MEMORIAL TYPOGRAPHY
funerary inscriptions found in restricted urban spaces, such as gravestones found in churchs and cemeteries.
REGISTERED TYPOGRAPHY
trade inscriptions, by public or private companies, such as telephoneand sewage services providers, usually located in gratingsand manholes.
ARTISTIC TYPOGRAPHY
artistic lettering designed on commission, such as paintings and sculptures using letters and numbers.
NORMATIVE TYPOGRAPHY
inscriptions that are part of regulatory and information systems for city traffic, such as road and directional signs.
COMMERCIAL TYPOGRAPHY
lettering found on temporary signs, such as those on shop fascias,attached to a building after its construction and, in mostcases, replaced by other signs from time to time.
ACCIDENTAL TYPOGRAPHY
unofficial, unauthorized inscriptions, such as graffiti and tags,usually not planned, and inscribed without the permission ofarchitects, construction companies, developers and owners.