Elements of Typographic Style Robert Bringhurst
The Crystal Goblet Beatrice Ward
The Grand Design 1.1 First Principles 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 mean‑ ings of a text (or its absence of meaning) can be clarified, honored and shared, or knowingly disguised. In a world rift 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 aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. Its other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superior‑ ity 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.
Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystalÂ‑clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. 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, literacy classics
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,
and other books that aspire to join their ranks. Within
you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a
limits, the same principles apply even to stock market
vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you
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 generally provide. The satisfactions of the craft comes from elucidating, and perhaps even ennobling, the text, not from deluding the unwary reader by applying scents, paints and iron stays to empty prose. But humble texts, such as classified ads or the telephone directory, may profit as much as anything from a good typographical bath and a change of clothes. And in many a book, like many a warrior or dancer or priest of either sex, may look well with some paint on its face, or indeed with a bone in its nose.
are a member of that vanishing tribe, that amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.
Letterforms that honor and elucidate what
In the age of photolithography, digital
humans see and say deserve to be honored
scanning and offset printing, it is as easy
in their turn. Well-chosen words deserve
to print directly from handwritten copy as
well-chosen letters; these in their turn
from text that is typographically composed.
deserve affection, intelligence, knowledge,
Yet the typographer’s task is little changed.
and skill. Typography is a link, and it
It is still to give the illusion of superhu‑
ought, as a matter of honor, courtesy and
man speed and stamina — and of super‑
pure delight, to be as strong as the others
human patience and precision — to the
in the chain.
writing hand.
Writing begins with the making of foot‑
Typography is just that: idealized writing.
prints, the leaving of human signs. Like
Writers themselves now rarely have the
speaking, it is a perfectly natural act which
calligraphic skill of earlier scribes, but they
humans have carried to complete extremes.
evoke countless versions of ideal script by
The typographer’s task has always been to
their varying voices and literary styles. To
add a somewhat unnatural edge, a protec‑
these blind and often invisible visions, the
tive shell of artificial order, to the power
typographer must respond in visible terms.
of the writing hand.
In a badly designed book, the letters mill
The tools have altered over the centuries,
and stand like starving horses in a field. In
and the exact degree of unnaturalness
a book designed by rote, they sit like stale
desired has varied from place to place and
bread and mutton on the page. In a well-
time to time, but the character of the es‑
made book, where designer, compositor
sential transformation between manuscript
and printer have all done their jobs, no mat‑
and type has scarcely changed.
ter how many thousands of lines and pages,
The original purpose of type was simply copying. The job of the typographer was to imitate the scribal hand in a form that
the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.
permitted exact and fast replication. Doz‑
Simple as it may sound, the task of creative
ens, then hundreds then thousands of cop‑
non-interference with letters is a rewarding
ies were printed in less time than a scribe
and difficult calling. In ideal conditions, it
would need to finish one. This excuse for
is all that typographers are really asked to
setting texts in type has disappeared.
do — and it is enough.
There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I have thought possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involv‑ ing abstract principles.
Literary style, says Walter Benjamin, “is the power to move freely in the length and breadth of linguistic thinking without slipping into banality.” Typographic style, in this large and intelligent sense of the word, does not mean any particular style — my style or your style, or Neoclassical or Baroque 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 that can walk familiar ground without sliding into platitudes, typogra‑ phy that response 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.
If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e. that the most impor‑ tant thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to another minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundred of rooms;
Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an
but unless you start by assuming that print‑
essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or
ing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas; it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether.
obtueseness. Much typography is far removed from literature, for lan‑ guage has many uses, including packaging and propaganda. Like music, it can be used to manipulate behavior 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 biologi‑ cal 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 inher‑ ently 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.
1.2
Tactics The typographer’s one essential task is to interpret and communicate the text. Its tone, its tempo, its logical structure, its physical size, all determine the possibilities of its typographic form. The typographer is to the text as the theatrical director to the script, or the musician to the score. A novel often purports to be a seamless river of words from beginning to end, or a series of unnamed scenes. Research papers, textbooks, cookbooks, and other works of nonfic‑ tion rarely look so smooth. They are often layered with chapter heads, section heads, subheads, block quotations, footnotes, endnotes, lists and illustrative examples. Such features may be obscure in the manuscript, even if they are clear in the author’s mind. For the sake of the reader, each
Now the man who first
requires its own typographic identity and form. Every layer
chose glass instead of clay
and level of the text must be consistent, distinct, yet (usu‑
or metal to hold his wine
ally) harmonious in form. The first task of the typographer is therefore to read and understand the text; the second task is to analyze and map it. Only then can typographic interpretation begin.
was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use the term. That is,the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all typography is modernist.
If the text has many layers or sections, it may need not only heads and subheads but running heads as well, reappearing on every page or two-page spread, to remind readers which intel‑ lectual neighborhood they happen to be viewing. Novels seldom need such signposts, but they often require typographic markers of other kinds. Peter Mattiessen’s novel Far Tortuga uses two sizes of type, three different margins, free-floating block paragraphs and other typographic devices to separate thought, speech, and action. Ken Kesey’s novel Sometimes a Great Nation seems to flow like conventional prose, yet it shifts repeatedly in mid-sentence between roman and italic to distinguish what characters say to each other from what they say in silence to themselves. In poetry and drama, a larger typographic palette is sometimes required. Some of Douglass Parket’s translations from classical Greek and Dennis Tedlock’s translations from Zuni use roman, italic, bold, small caps and full caps in various sizes to emulate the dynamic mark‑ ings of music. Robert Massin’s typographic performances of Eugene Ionesco’s plays use intersecting lines of type, stretched and melted letters, inkblots, pictograms, and a separate typeface for each person in the play. In the works of other artists such as Guillaume Apol‑ linaire and Guy Davenport, boundaries between author and designer sometimes vanish. Writing merges with typography, and the text becomes its own illustration.
Let me start my specific conclusion with
afraid of blunders (which illogical setting,
book typography, because that contains all
tight spacing, and too-wide unleaded lines
the fundamentals, and then go on to a few
can trick us into), of boredom, and of offi‑
points about advertising. The book typog‑
ciousness. The running headline that keeps
rapher has the job of erecting a window
shouting at us, the line that looks like one
between the reader inside the room and
long word, the capitals jammed together
that landscape which is the author’s words.
without hair-spaces — these mean subcon‑
He may put up a stained-glass window of
scious squinting and loss of mental focus.
marvellous beauty, but a failure as a win‑ dow; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typog‑ raphy. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their com‑ rades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called ‘fine printing’ today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has en‑ joyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with psychology of the subconscious mind. That is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping 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
And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are converting a message — that you are implanting a desire, straight into the mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is un‑ comfortably alien to the classic reasonable‑ ness of the book-face. 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 work with, I beg of you to remember that thousands of people play hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.
The typographer must analyze and reveal the inner order of the text, as a musician must reveal the inner order of the music he performs. But the reader, like the listener, should in retrospect be able to close her eyes and see what lies inside the words We may say therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it
she has been reading. The typographic performance must reveal, not replace, the
is important, first and foremost, as a means
inner composition. Typographers, like other
of doing something. That is why it is mis‑
artists and craftsmen — musicians, compos‑
chievous to call any printed piece of work
ers and authors as well — must as a rule do
a work of art, especially fine art: because
their work and disappear.
that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until print‑ ing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.
If the text is tied to other elements, where do they belong? If there are notes, do they go at the side of the page, the foot of the page, the end of the chapter, the end of the book? If there are photographs or other illustrations, should they be embedded in the text or should they form a special section of their own? And if the photographs have captions or credits or labels, should these sit close beside the photographs or should they be separately housed? If there is more than one text — as in countless publications issued in Canada, Switzerland, Belgium and other multilingual countries — how will the separate but equal text be arrayed? Will they run side by side to emphasize their equality (and perhaps to share in a single set of illus‑ trations), or will they be printed back-to-back, to emphasize their distinctness? No matter what their relation to the text, photos or maps
Wine is so strange and potent a thing that is has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men’s minds to the same extent, and that is the co‑ herent expression of thought. That is man’s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way
must sometimes be grouped apart from it because they
across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and print‑
require a separate paper or different inks. If this is the
ing are all quite literally forms of though transference, and
case, what typographic cross-references will be required? These and similar questions, which confront the working typographer on a daily basis, must be answered case by case. The typographic page is a map of the mind; it is fre‑ quently also a map of the social order from which it comes. And for better or worse, mind and social orders change.
it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.
This is the beginning , middle and end of
bled in a different form. The compositor’s
the practice of typography: choose and use
typecase is one of the primary ancestors of
the type with sensitivity and intelligence.
the computer — and it is no surprise that
Letterforms have tone, timbre, character, just as words and sentences do. The mo‑ ment a text and a typeface are chosen two
while typesetting was one of the last crafts to be mechanized, it was one of the first to be computerized.
streams of thought, two rhythmical systems,
But the bits of information handled by
two sets of habits, or if you like, two
typographers differ in one essential respect
personalities, intersect. They need not live
from the computer programmer’s bits.
together contentedly forever, but they must
Whether the type is set in hard metal by
not as a rule collide.
hand, or in softer metal by machine, or
The root metaphor of typesetting is that the alphabet (or in Chinese, the entire lexi‑ con) is a system of interchangeable parts. The word form can be surgically revised instead of rewritten, to become the word farm or firm or fort or fork or from, or with a little more trouble, to become the word
in digital form on paper or film, every comma, every parenthesis, every e, and in context, even every empty space, has style as well as bald symbolic value. Letters are microscopic works of art as well as useful symbols. They mean what they are as well as what they say.
pineapple. The old compositor’s typecase is
Typography is the art and craft of handling
a partitioned wooden tray holding hundreds
these doubly meaningful bits of informa‑
of such interchangeable bits of information.
tion. A good typographer handles them in
These subsemantic particles, these bits —
intelligent, coherent, sensitive ways. When
called sorts by litter press printers — are
the type is poorly chosen, what the words
letters cast on standardized bodies of metal,
say linguistically and what the letters imply
waiting to be assembled into meaningful
visually are disharmonious, dishonest, out
combination, then dispersed and reassem‑
of tune.
Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed 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 laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. 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 transparent goblet again! I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and speaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of print. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.
I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubt‑ edly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: ‘Ah, madam, we artists do not think — we feel!’ That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: ‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’ He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is wy he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten time better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason. I always suspect the typographic believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight he has mutilated something indefinitely more important. I remember that T.M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in colour. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing 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 hav see the old typefound‑ ries’ famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a re‑ markably clean line). No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest ‘wording’ that he could fine (I dare say it was from Hansard), and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr. Cleland said, ‘No: you’re wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read — if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with lamour 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”.’
Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that al‑ most all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thing stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must Selecting the shape of the page and placing the type upon it is much like
come between your eyes and the fiery heart
framing and hanging a painting. A cubist painting in an eighteenth-century
of the liquid. Are not the margins on the
gilded frame, or a seventeenth-century still-life in a slim chrome box, will
book pages similarly meant to obviate the
look no sillier than a nineteenth-century text from England set in types that come from seventeenth-century France, asymmetrically positioned on a German Modernist page. If the text is long or the space is short, or if the elements are many, mul‑ tiple columns may be required. If illustrations and text march side by side, does one take precedence over the other? And does the order or degree of prominence change? Does the text suggest perpetual symmetry, perpetual asymmetry, or something in between? Again, does the text suggest the continuous unruffled flow of justified prose, or the continued flirtation with order and chaos evoked by flush-left ragged-right composition? Shaping the pages goes hand in hand with choos‑ ing the type, and both are permanent typographical preoccupations.
necessity of fingering the type-page?
Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks Some of what a typographer must set, like some of what any musician must play, is simply passage work. Even an edition of Plato or Shakespeare will contain a certain
too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well
amount of routine text: page numbers, scene numbers,
enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried
textual notes, the copyright claim, the publisher’s name
by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as
and address, and the hyperbole on the jacket, not to men‑ tion the passage work or background writing that is implicit in the text itself. But just as a good musician can make a heart-wrenching ballad from a few banal words and a trivial tune, so the typographer can make poignant and lovely typography from bibliographical paraphernalia and textual chaff. The ability to do so rests on respect for the text as a whole, and on respect for the letters themselves. Perhaps the principle should read: give full typographic attention especially to incidental details.
one, and so forth.
1.3
Summary There are always exceptions, always excuses for stunts and surprises. But perhaps we can agree that, as a rule, typogra‑ phy should perform these services for the reader: • 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. While serving the reader in this way, typography, like a musical performance or a theatrical production, should serve two other ends. It should honor the text for its own sake — always assuming that the text is worth a typogra‑ pher’s trouble — and it should honor and contribute to its own tradition: that of typography itself.