Process Book: Function Flies Farther by maggiechuang

EDITORIAL DESIGN

Maggie Chuang

Editorial Design

Typography II Fall 2017

Typography II

This project began with an examination of The Crystal Goblet by Beatrice Warde. I was asked to focus on an argument in her article, and find a secondary text that complimented my own thesis. My final product was then a book that integrated the two texts together, with a visual language that supported an overall stance on Wardeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s views of typography.

Editorial Design

Typography II

1. RESEARCH

What did you turn to for reference, inspiration, and understanding for your project? How did it influenceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; directly or indirectlyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;what you made?

2. DISCOVERY

What was your process for generating possible ideas for the project? How wide and deep did you explore before coming to a final idea? Did your discovery process generate outcomes that were successful?

3. REFINEMENT

How did you refine your work? How did you make decisions as you refined your idea? What criteria did you use for evaluation? Did you find your final refined idea to be the final iteration of your idea?

4. CRITICISM

What criticism did you receive from your peers and faculty about your project? Did you agree or disagree with it? What did you learn from criticism?

Editorial Design

RESEARCH

Typography II

Through reading The Crystal Goblet, I found myself drawn to Warde’s argument that type should be first focused on function. I interpreted her ideas as saying that the expressiveness of type needs to be minimal, because type that isn’t perfectly functional isn’t good type. Her illustrative metaphors also inspired me, and I wanted to find a similarly formed text, such as a children’s story, that could reach the same thesis. This methodology lead me to choosing Aesop’s The Peacock & The Crane, which succinctly illustrates why something functional is always better than something ornamental. For my visual research, I began with finding contemporary editorials that I liked, including The New York Times and Nature Journal. I knew from the beginning I wanted a minimal, open feeling in my book, to match the simple functionality Warde supported in her thesis. Once I found the Aesop’s fable, I found myself looking at much older book designs. I analyzed medieval manuscripts, 19th century texts, and other classical designs to gain guidance on paragraph layouts and header/footer treatment.

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Peacock and the Crane Aesop’s Fables “IT here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

Peacock and the Crane Aesop’s Fables “It here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible 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 crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent.

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible Peacock and the Crane Aesop’s Fables “IT here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

Peacock and the Crane Aesop’s Fables

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible

“It here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

Peacock & the Crane Aesop’s Fables

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible

“IT here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

Peacock & the Crane Aesop’s Fables

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible

Peacock & the Crane Aesop’s Fables

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible

Typography II

Peacock & the Crane Aesop’s Fables “IT here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

Peacock & the Crane Aesop’s Fables “It here was a peacock who often boasted about his beauty. Everyday he walked to the banks of a large lake and looked his own reflections and said “Oh! What a beautiful bird I am! Look at my colourful tail”.

Editorial Design

Typography II

Andrea Minini

The Scenic Route

Susan Polston

Charles Williams

visual research for editorial design and illustrations for image generation

Editorial Design

DISCOVERY

Typography II

I spent most of my discovery phase in thumb-nailing my book concepts. Being able to see the general layout of my book at a higher level helped me get a sense of the pacing, and allowed me to balance out scale and contrast changes at a higher level. Many of my earlier concepts felt much more modern and would have led to more experimental layouts; eventually, I decided that approach would deter from the overall concept of my book, so I changed direction and tried classic designs. This whole process also helped me determine the visuals in my book; through lots of exploration, I felt that the most effective way to communicate the simply functional argument was to use type as image, and take away ornamentation throughout the book.

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full-book sketches of my initial ideas for the book

Typography II

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Once the peacock saw a crane on the banks of the lake. He said with a sneer to the crane,

What a colourless bird you are! You have no beauty and colourful feathers like mine.

S I M P LY FUNCTIONAL

INCLUDING ESSAYS: The Crystal Goblet by beatrice warde The Peacock & The Crane from aesop’s fables

THE CRYSTAL GOBLET or Printing Should Be Invisible by Beatrice Warde (1900–1969)

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 crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain. Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the 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 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 4

setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth. Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that 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 good typography is modernist.

washere herea apeacock peacock who ItItwas who oftenboasted boastedabout abouthishis often beauty. beauty.Everyday Everydayhehewalked walked totothe thebanks banksofofa alarge large lake lakeand andlooked lookedhishisown own reflections reflectionsand andsaid said“Oh! “Oh! What I am! Whata abeautiful beautifulbird bird I am! Look tail”. Lookatatmymycolourful colourful tail”. 5

An early digitized draft of my book, with a more modern and experimental approach

Typography II

function flies farther

Function Flies Farther

The Crystal Goblet 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 crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

How Aesop Finds Beauty in Functional Type

Featuring: The Crystal Goblet and The Peacock & the Crane

function flies farther

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the 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 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 enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

function flies farther

The first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that 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 good typography is modernist.

function flies farther

image credits All instances of type as image were hand-drawn by the designer of this book.

bibliography The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible Beatrice Warde (Originally printed in London in 1932, under the pseudonym Paul Beaujon. This version printed in London 1955) The Peacock & The Crane from Aesop’s Fables

colophon This book was designed by Maggie Chuang in the fall of 2017 for the Typography II course at Washington University in St. Louis. Font used for the body copy is Quadraat, designed in 1992 by Fred Smeijers. Body copy is set at 11pt.

After iterations and feedback, I turned to this more classical style

Editorial Design

REFINEMENT

Typography II

In the refinement of this book, I constantly toggled between making micro and macro changes, more so focusing on the micro. Solidifying my header/footer treatment was a process throughout this whole project, and involved dozens of iterations of tracking, font size, paragraph rule placement, and spacing. The styling of pullouts and sub headers was also a critical factor that I worked on consistently. On a macro level, I ended up changing the page size to be wider and bigger overall, so that I had more room for a minimal and airy design. I also had to change the paragraph layouts several times to create more interesting changes throughout the book. The cover and inside cover were major considerations toward the end, and I grappled for a long time to find a way to effectively introduce the bookâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s mood and content. The hand-lettered pages also had several refinements of their own. There was problems initially of readability and understanding the concept I was getting at, which required me to redraw the spreads and find a more systematic way of removing the decorative elements.

Editorial Design

function flies farther

Function Flies Farther How Aesop Finds Beauty in Functional Type

How Aesop Finds Beauty in Functional Type

function flies farther

magine 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 crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain. Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the 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

function flies farther

We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons,

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 involving abstract principles. I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly 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,

but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means for doing something

he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason. I always suspect the typographic enthusiast who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight he has mutilated something infinitely 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 have seen the old typefoundries’ famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably

Typography II

function flies farther

The type which...gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is bad type.

and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

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 could 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 involving abstract principles.

I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something

function flies farther

The type which...gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is bad type.

and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something

samples from iterations of header and footer treatments

Editorial Design

function flies farther

Function Flies Farther featuring The Crystal Goblet Beatrice Warde The Peacock & The Crane from Aesopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fables

function flies farther

image credits All instances of type as image were hand-drawn by the designer of this book.

Typography II

Editorial Design

function flies farther

CRITICISM

Typography II

A criticism I received during the creation of this book was that it felt too minimal, or that some of the elements felt unconsidered and default. Having never done such a classical, simple design before, I understand where the feedback was coming from, and definitely struggled with creating enough interest in my product. I could have incorporated different color schemes or tried different grid systems to give a new twist to my design. If I were to do the project again, I might try and approach the work with a more modern visual aesthetic. Although I enjoy the mood my book has, I think it could have been interesting to see how the storytelling changed if I gave The Crystal Goblet/Aesopâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fables and very modern and experimental treatment.

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function flies farther

How Aesop Finds Beauty in Functional Type

Typography II

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Typography II