Type Perspective

TYPE PERSPECTIVE

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THE CRYSTAL GOBLET OR PRINTING SHOULD BE INVISIBLE Beatrice Warde

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DESTRUCTION OF SYNTAX— IMAGINATION WITHOUT STRINGS— WORDS-IN-FREEDOM Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

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TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL TYPE Herbert Bayer

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NEW LIFE IN PRINT Jan Tschichold

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GRID AND DESIGN PHILOSOPHY Josef M端ller-Brockman

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DESIGNING PROGRAMMES Karl Gerstner

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Beatrice Warde 1932

THE CRYSTAL GOBLET OR PRINTING SHOULD BE INVISIBLE

Introduction

Prior to the turn of the century, practitioners often argued over the virtues of personal style versus neutrality, which was the underlying topic of a lecture given by Beatrice Warde (1900–1969) to the Society of Typographic Designers in London (later published as an essay).

Warde, who used the pen name Paul Beaujon, was a respected type historian and critic of the graphic arts industry. In 1927, on the strength Beaujon’s writing in the Fleuron, she was appointed editor of the Monotype Recorder, published in England by the Lanstone Monotype Company. “The Crystal Goblet” is Warde’s best-known (and most reprinted) essay on the clarity of type and design. In the introduction to her book of collected writing, The Crystal Goblet, she asserts that the essay contains ideas that must be “said over again in other terms to many…people who in the nature of their work have to deal with the putting of printed words on paper—and who, for one reason or another, are in danger of becoming as fascinated by the intricacies of its techniques as birds are supposed to be by the eye of a serpent.”

– Steven Heller

THE TWO GOBLETS Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine.

You may choose your own favorite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. 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 to 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 wineglass 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 arid 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 colorless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its color and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as

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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.

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 this particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

Quotations from the writings of Beatrice Warde, 1953 PAGE 9

COMMUNICATING IDEAS Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it 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 coherent expression of thought. That is man’s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact I can make arbitrary sounds that 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 halfway across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is this ability and eagerness to transfer 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 most important thing about printing 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 typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether.

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

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

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 printing. 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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We may say, therefore, that printing may he delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because 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 printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

This Is a Printing Office, by Beatrice Warde, 1932 PAGE 12

APPROACHING TYPE 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 that 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, 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.

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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 color. 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 even line). No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest ‘wording’ that he could find (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 sonic 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 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 start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising.

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THE ROLE OF TYPOGRAPHY The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of marvelous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to he looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their comrades 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 enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psy-

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chology of the subconscious mind. This is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it.

The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of ‘color,’ gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed is a bad type. Our subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The running 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 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 conveying 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 that is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness 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 you to remember that thousands of people pay 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.

Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack PAGE 16

of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments.

There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realize that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The ‘stunt typographer’ learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

Address to the Society of Typographic Designers, formerly the British Typographers Guild, London, 1932 Published in Beatrice Warde: The Crystal Goblet—Sixteen Essays on Typography (Cleveland and New York World Publishing Co, 1956).

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02

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 1913

DESTRUCTION OF SYNTAX— IMAGINATION WITHOUT STRINGS— WORDS-INFREEDOM

Introduction

At a time when graphic design had yet to emerge as awfully defined commercial practice, the writings and experiments of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) embodied a vigorous alternative set of possibilities for graphic communication.

As a poet reacting against his Symbolist predecessors, Marinetti’s primary concern was with the free expressive potential of language, and his typographic researches were all conducted to this end (though the approach would later be applied to advertising by Fortunato Depero and others). Marinetti was the self-publicizing author of the first Futurist hymn to speed, dynamism, war, and the end of tradition–published in Le Figaro newspaper in 1909—and between 1912 and 1914 he articulated his radical aesthetic agenda in a series of manifestos. This extract, with its section on “typographical revolution” is the most explicit in typographic terms. In the poems collected in his book Les mots en liberté futuristes (1919), Marinetti collaged letterforms and fragments into a state of violent agitation, with words moving at the velocity of the trains, planes, waves, and atoms that inspired the Futurists. Verbal language is dematerialized, even as its material aspects are elevated, while the sensibility guiding these paper-bound explosions is cybernetic.

—Rick Poynor

WORDS-IN-FREEDOM Casting aside every stupid formula and all the confused verbalisms of the professors, I now declare that lyricism is the exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself with life, of filling life with the inebriation of oneself. The faculty of changing into wine the muddy water of the life that swirls and engulfs us. The ability to color the world with the unique colors of our changeable selves.

Now suppose that a friend of yours gifted with this faculty finds himself in a zone of intense life (revolution, war, shipwreck, earthquake, and so on) and starts right away to tell you his impressions. Do you know what this lyric, excited friend of yours will instinctively do?

He will begin by brutally destroying the syntax of his speech. He wastes no time in building sentences.

Punctuation and the right adjectives will mean nothing to him. He will despise subtleties and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will assault your nerves with visual, auditory, olfactory sensations, just as they come to him. The rush of steam-emotion will burst the sentence’s steam pipe, the valves of punctuation, and the adjectival clamp. Fistfuls of essential words in no conventional order. Sole preoccupation of the narrator, to render every vibration of his being.

If the mind of this gifted lyrical narrator is also populated by general ideas, he will involuntarily bind up his sensations with the entire universe that he intuitively knows. And in order to render the true worth and dimensions of his lived life, he will cast immense PAGE 20

nets of analogy across the world. In this way he will reveal the analogical foundation of life, telegraphically, with the same economical speed that the telegraph imposes on reporters and war correspondents in their swift reportings. This urgent laconism answers not only to the laws of speed that govern us but also to the rapport of centuries between poet and audience. Between poet and audience, in fact, the same rapport exists as between two old friends.

They can make themselves understood with half a word, a gesture, a glance. So the poet’s imagination must weave together distant things with no connecting strings, by means of essential free words.

DEATH OF FREE VERSE Free verse once had countless reasons for existing but now is destined to be replaced by words-in-freedom.

The evolution of poetry and human sensibility has shown us the two incurable defects of free verse.

1. Free verse fatally pushes the poet towards facile sound effects, banal double meanings, monotonous cadences, a foolish chiming, and an inevitable echo-play, internal and external.

2. Free verse artificially channels the flow of lyric emotion between the high walls of syntax and the weirs of grammar. The free intuitive inspiration that addresses itself directly to the intuition of the ideal reader finds itself imprisoned and distributed like purified water for the nourishment of all fussy, restless intelligences.

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When I speak of destroying the canals of syntax, I am neither categorical nor systematic. Traces of conventional syntax and even of true logical sentences will be found here and there in the words-in-freedom of my unchained lyricism. This inequality in conciseness and freedom is natural and inevitable. Since poetry is in truth only a superior, more concentrated and intense life than what we live from day today, like the latter it is composed of hyper-alive elements and moribund elements.

We ought not, therefore, to be too much preoccupied with these elements. But we should at all costs avoid rhetoric and banalities telegraphically expressed.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Words in Freedom, 1919 PAGE 22

THE IMAGINATION WITHOUT STRINGS By the imagination without strings I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies, expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation.

Up to now writers have been restricted to immediate analogies. For instance, they have compared an animal with a man or with another animal, which is almost the same as a kind of photography. (They have compared, for example, a fox terrier to a very small thoroughbred. Others, more advanced, might compare the same trembling fox terrier to a little Morse Code machine. I, on the other hand, compare it with gurgling water. In this there is an ever vaster gradation of analogies, there are ever deeper and more solid affinities, however remote.)

Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things.

An orchestral style, at once polychromatic, polyphonic, and polymorphous, can embrace the life of matter only by means of the most extensive analogies.

When, in my Battle of Tripoli, I compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme fatale, I intuitively introduced a large part of the universe into a short episode of African battle.

Images are not flowers to be chosen and picked with parsimony, as Voltaire said. They are the very lifeblood of poetry. Poetry should be an uninterrupted sequence of new imag-

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es, or it is mere anemia and greensickness.

The broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to amaze.

(Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature) The imagination without strings, and words-in-freedom, will bring us to the essence of material. As we discover new analogies between distant and apparently contrary things, we will endow them with an ever more intimate value. Instead of humanizing animals, vegetables, and minerals (an outmoded system) we will be able to animalize, vegetize, mineralize, electrify, or liquefy our style, making it live the life of material. For example, to represent the life of a blade of grass, I say: “Tomorrow I’ll be greener.”

With words-in-freedom we will have: CONDENSED METAPHORS. TELEGRAPHIC IMAGES. MAXIMUM VIBRATIONS. NODES OF THOUGHT. CLOSED OR OPEN FANS OF MOVEMENT. COMPRESSED ANALOGIES. COLOR BALANCES. DIMENSIONS, WEIGHTS, MEASURES, AND THE SPEED OF SENSATIONS.THE PLUNGE OF THE ESSENTIAL WORD INTO THE WATER OF SENSIBILITY, MINUS THE CONCENTRIC CIRCLES THAT THE WORD PRODUCES. RESTFUL MOMENTS OF INTUITION. MOVEMENTS IN TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE DIFFERENT RHYTHMS. THE ANALYTIC, EXPLORATORY POLES THAT SUSTAIN THE BUNDLE OF INTUITIVE STRINGS.

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DEATH OF THE LITERARY I Molecular life and material My technical manifesto opposed the obsessive I that up to now the poets have described, sung, analyzed, and vomited up. To rid ourselves of this obsessive I, we must abandon the habit of humanizing nature by attributing human passions and preoccupations to animals, plants, water, stone, and clouds. Instead we should express the infinite smallness that surrounds us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms, the Brownian movements, all the passionate hypotheses and all the domains explored by the high-powered microscope. To explain: I want to introduce the infinite molecular life into poetry not as a scientific document but as an intuitive element. It should mix, in the work of art, with the infinitely great spectacles and dramas, because this fusion constitutes the integral synthesis of life.

To give some aid to the intuition of my ideal reader I use italics for all words- in-freedom that express the infinitely small and the molecular life.

SEMAPHORIC ADJECTIVE Lighthouse-adjective or atmosphere-adjective Everywhere we tend to suppress the qualifying adjective because it presupposes an arrest in intuition, too minute a definition of the noun. None of this is categorical. I speak of a tendency. We must make use of the adjective as little as possible and in a manner completely different from its use hitherto. One should treat adjectives like railway

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The infinitive in itself denies the existence of the sentence and prevents the style from slowing and stopping at a definite point.

signals of style, employ them to mark the tempo, the retards and pauses along the way. So, too, with analogies. As many as twenty of these semaphoric adjectives might accumulate in this way.

What I call a semaphoric adjective, lighthouse-adjective, or atmosphere-adjective is the adjective apart from nouns, isolated in parentheses. This makes it a kind of absolute noun, broader and more powerful than the noun proper. The semaphoric adjective or lighthouse-adjective, suspended on high in its glassed-in parenthetical cage, throws its far-reaching, probing light on everything around it.

The profile of this adjective crumbles, spreads abroad, illuminating, impregnating, and enveloping a whole zone of words-in-freedom. If, for instance, in an agglomerate of words-in-freedom describing a sea voyage I place the following semaphoric adjectives between parentheses: (calm, blue, methodical, habitual) not only the sea PAGE 26

is calm, blue, methodical, habitual, but the ship, its machinery, the passengers. What I do and my very spirit are calm, blue, methodical, habitual.

THE INFINITIVE VERB Here, too, my pronouncements are not categorical. I maintain, however, that in a violent and dynamic lyricism the infinitive verb might well be indispensable. Round as a wheel, like a wheel adaptable to every car in the train of analogies, it constitutes the very speed of the style.

The infinitive in itself denies the existence of the sentence and prevents the style from slowing and stopping at a definite point. While the infinitive is round and as mobile as a wheel, the other moods and tenses of the verb are either triangular, square, or oval.

ONOMATOPOEIA AND MATHEMATICAL SYMBOLS When I said that we must spit on the Altar of Art, I incited the Futurists to liberate lyricism from the solemn atmosphere of compunction and incense that one normally calls by the name of Art with a capital A. Art with a capital A constitutes the clericalism of the creative spirit. I used this approach to incite the Futurists to destroy and mock the garlands, the palms, the aureoles, the exquisite frames, the mantles and stoles, the whole historical wardrobe and the romantic bric-a-brac that comprise a large part of all poetry up to now. I proposed instead a swift, brutal, and immediate lyricism, a lyricism

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that must seem anti-poetic to all our predecessors, a telegraphic lyricism with no taste of the book about it but, rather, as much as possible of the taste of life. Beyond that the bold introduction of onomatopoetic harmonies to render all the sounds and noises of modern life, even the most cacophonic.

Onomatopoeia that vivifies lyricism with crude and brutal elements of reality was used in poetry (from Arisrophanes to Pascoli) more or less timidly. We Futurists initiate the constant, audacious use of onomatopoeia. This should not be systematic. For instance, my Adrianople Siege-Orchestra and my Battle Weight + Smell required many onomatopoetic harmonies. Always with the aim of giving the

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Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Vive la France, 1914–1915.

greatest number of vibrations and a deeper synthesis of life, we abolish all stylistic bonds, all the bright buckles with which the traditional poets link images together in their prosody. Instead we employ the very brief or anonymous mathematical and musical symbols and we put between parentheses indications such as (fast) (faster) (slower) (two-beat time) to control the speed of the style. These parentheses can even cut into a word or an onomatopoetic harmony.

TYPOGRAPHICAL REVOLUTION I initiate a typographical revolution aimed at the bestial, nauseating idea of the book of passÊist and D’Annunzian verse, on seventeenth-century handmade paper bordered with helmets, Minervas, Apollos, elaborate red initials, vegetables, mythological missal ribbons, epigraphs, and roman numerals.

The book must be the Futurist expression of our Futurist thought. Not only that. My revolution is aimed at the so-called typographical harmony of the page, which is contrary to the flux and reflux, the leaps and bursts of style that run through the page.

On the same page, therefore, we will use three or four colors of ink, or even twenty different typefaces if necessary. For example: italics for a series of similar or swift sensations, boldface for the violent onomatopoeias, and so on. With this typographical revolution and this multicolored variety in the letters I mean to redouble the expressive force of words.

I oppose the decorative, precious aesthetic of MallarmĂŠ and his search for the rare word, the one indispensable, elegant, suggestive, exquisite adjecPAGE 29

tive. I do not want to suggest an idea or a sensation with passéist airs and graces. Instead I want to grasp them brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.

Moreover, I combat Mallarmé’s static ideal with this typographical revolution that allows me to impress on the words (already free, dynamic, and torpedo-like) every velocity of the stars, the clouds, aeroplanes, trains, waves, explosives, globules of sea foam, molecules, and atoms.

Thus I realize the fourth principle of my First Futurist Manifesto (20 February 1909): “We affirm that the world’s beauty is enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

MULTILINEAR LYRICISM In addition, I have conceived multilinear lyricism, with which I succeed in reaching that lyric simultaneity that obsessed the Futurist painters as well: multilinear lyricism by means of which I am sure to achieve the most complex lyric simultaneities.

On several parallel lines, the poet will throw out several chains of color, sound, smell, noise, weight, thickness, analogy. One of these lines might, for instance, be olfactory, another musical, another pictorial.

Let us suppose that the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies dominates the others. In this case it will be printed in a heavier typeface than the second and third lines (one of them containing, for example, the chain of musi-

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F. T. Marinetti, Air Raid (n. 67) (Bombardamento aereo [n. 67]), 1915–16 (detail)

cal sensations and analogies, the other the chain of olfactory sensations and analogies).

Given a page that contains many bundles of sensations and analogies, each of which is composed of three or four lines, the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies (printed in boldface) will form the first line of the first bundle and will continue (always in the same type) on the first line of all the other bundles.

The chain of musical sensations and analogies, less important than the chain of pictorial sensations and analogies (first line) but more important than that of the olfactory sensations and analogies (third line), will be printed in smaller type than that of the first line and larger than that of the third.

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FREE EXPRESSIVE ORTHOGRAPHY The historical necessity of free expressive orthography is demonstrated by the successive revolutions that have continuously freed the lyric powers of the human race from shackles and rules.

1. In fact, the poets began by channeling their lyric intoxication into a series of equal breaths, with accents, echoes, assonances, or rhymes at preestablished intervals (traditional metric). Then the poets varied these different measured breaths of their predecessors’ lungs with a certain freedom.

2. Later the poets realized that the different moments of their lyric intoxication had to create breaths suited to the most varied and surprising intervals, with absolute freedom of accentuation. Thus they arrived at free verse, but they still preserved the syntactic order of the words, so that the lyric intoxication could flow down to the listeners by the logical canal of syntax.

3. Today we no longer want the lyric intoxication to order the words syntactically before launching them forth with the breaths we have invented, and we have words-in-freedom. Moreover our lyric intoxication should freely deform, refresh the words, cutting them short, stretching them out, reinforcing the center or the extremities, augmenting or diminishing the number of vowels and consonants. Thus we will have the new orthography that I call free expressive. This instinctive deformation of words corresponds to our natural tendency towards onomatopoeia. It matters little if the deformed word becomes ambiguous. It will marry itself to the onomatopoetic harmonies, or PAGE 32

the noise-summaries, and will permit us soon to reach the onomatopoetic psychic harmony, the sonorous but abstract expression of an emotion or a pure thought. But one may object that my words-in-freedom, my imagination without strings, demand special speakers if they are to be understood.

Although I do not care for the comprehension of the multitude, I will reply that the number of Futurist public speakers is increasing and that any admired traditional poem, for that matter, requires a special speaker if it is to be understood.

First published in Lacerba (Florettee: 15 June 1913).

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03

Herbert Bayer

TOWARDS A UNIVERSAL TYPE

1935

Introduction

Beginning in the1920s, German type reformers sought ways of replacing the national alphabet—the spiky Blackletter—with simplified gothic letters. A leading advocate was Austrian-born Herbert Bayer (1900–1985), who was educated at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where, from 1925 to 1928, he was director of the school’s department of typography and advertising. During this time, his interests-and the department’s emphasis-shifted from lithography and hand-printing to more mechanical processes and more inventive typographic exploration.

A devout modernist who was profoundly influenced by the De Stijl movement (1917–1932), Bayer railed against the redundancy of serifs and capital letters, arguing instead for the efficiency of lowercase and the economy of a sans-serif alphabet. His universal alphabet of 1925–1927 emphatically illuminates this argument. In this article, published seven years after the Bauhaus was closed, Bayer—who was at this time living in Nazi Germany—explains the practical conveniences of a typographic system that mirrors the functional requirements of modern life. Here, a renunciation of thick-to-thin strokes is contrasted by a celebration of the purity of geometric form.

—Jessica Helfland

One glance at the specimen book of types issued by even an up-to-date printing firm, reveals a collection of the most varied sorts of letters, which as a whole constitute a conglomeration of style of the worst kind. arranged in groups and compared with other expressions of the periods from which they have descended, they remind us that: today we do not build in gothic, but in our contemporary way. no longer do we travel on horseback, but in cars, train and planes. we do not dress in crinolines nowadays, but in a more rational manner. every period has its own formal and cultural features, expressed in its contemporary habits of life, in its architecture and literature. the same applies to language and writing. we recognize clearly enough that literary forms of past ages do not belong to the present times. a man would make himself ridiculous who insisted on talking today in the manner of the middle ages. later, we shall see that the type designs of tradition do not respond to the essential requirements of type suitable for use today. we look back upon a long line of development in type design, and we have no intention of criticizing the heritage which now oppresses us. but we have reached a stage when we must decide to break with the past. when we are confronted with a collection of traditional styles we ought to see that we can turn away from the antiquated forms of the

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middle ages with a clear conscience to the possibilities of designing a new kind of type more suitable to the present and what we can foresee of the future. in the course of the centuries our language has changed. it has become shorter, sound-changes have taken place, new words have been coined, new concepts have been formed. language itself needs complete reorganization-but this is a tremendous subject. we shall not enter upon it, but limit ourselves to consideration of type-design.

personally, i believe in the following logical conception: the simpler the shape of the letter, the easier the type is to see, read, and learn.

out of the conglomerate mass of type faces, some of which are illustrated, there has emerged, as a last phase, the form of classical roman type, with variations until we arrive at the simplified form without serifs, popularly known as “sans-serif” or “sans,”

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Herbert Bayer, Collection Soehlke | Bank of Thuringia Banknotes, 1923

Herbert Bayer, Universal Typeface, 1925

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in england the most familiar type of this order is commonly known as “gill sans,” after the name of its designer, eric gill. sans-serif type is the child of our period. in form it is in complete harmony with other visible forms and phenomena of modern life. we welcome it as our most modern type. we cannot set about inventing an entirely new form of type, as this would have to be parallel with a radical reorganization of the language. We must remain true to our basic letter-forms, and try to develop them further. classic roman type, the original form of all historical variations of type, must still be our starting point. all the variations of shape have been formed freely according to the style and the calligraphy of the type designer, and it is just this freedom which has been responsible for so many mistakes. geometry, however, gives us the most exact forms. albrecht durer’s endeavours to resolve both the roman and the german gothic type into their constructive basic elements, unfortunately were never carried beyond their experimental stage. the bayer-type produced by the berthold type foundry represents a practical attempt to give a modern expression to classical roman type by means of geometrical construction of form. a tremendous amount of reading is done today and there should be no difficulties put in the way of the reader. some things have to be read from afar, and letters must be visible from considerable distances. it is not without reason that oculists use clear cut type faces when testing the state of the patient’s eyesight. much has been written about the legibility of type. oculists can offer no definite proofs, because their

PAGE 39

experiments are influenced by habits to which patients are accustomed. for example, it is found that old people with bad eyesight often read complicated gothic type more easily than clear roman type, because they are used to the former. but from research, however, it has been concluded that the more the individual letters resemble one another in shape, the less visible is the type. this conclusion may be wrong, as it would be easy to find illegible type-faces in which the individual letters differ very widely from one another, if that be the only consideration. and then where shall we look for harmony of form and the fundamental constructional form of our types? other research has established that whole groups of letters-not single letters, but words-are taken in by the eye at one glance. if we carried this conclusion to its logical end we should have optical word pictures (similar to chinese signs) and no type with separate letters. personally, i believe in the following logical conception: the simpler the shape of the letter, the easier the type is to see, read, and learn. in classic times capital letters (the only letters in use) were drawn with a slate pencil and incised with a chisel. no doubt their form was intimately associated with these tools. lower case developed in the early middle ages from the use of the pen, and therefore inherits the characteristics of handwriting. later, both alphabets adapted themselves, and we observe in all types up to the present the characteristic basic element of the thin up-stroke and the thick down-stroke. these characteristics have preserved themselves up to this day. but do we need such a pretense of precedent at a time when 90 percent PAGE 40

Herbert Bayer, Catalog of Patterns, 1923

Herbert Bayer, Section Allemande Exposition, 1930

of all that is read is either written on a typewriter or printed on a printing press, when handwriting plays only a secondary role, and when type could be much simpler and more consistent in form? hence, i believe the requirements of a new alphabet are as follows: geometric foundation of each letter, resulting in a synthetic construction out of a few basic e1clnents. avoidance of all suggestion of a hand-written character, uniform thickness of all parts of the letter, and renunciation of all suggestions of up and down strokes. simplification of form for the sake of legibility (the simpler the optical appearance the easier the comprehension). a basic form which will suffice for diverse applications so that the same character is adapt-

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able for various functions: printing, typewriting, hand and stencil writing, etc. these considerations will explain the attempt to design a new type. but why do we write and print with two alphabets? a large and a small sign are not necessary for one sound. we do not speak a capital a and a small a. we need a one-letter type alphabet. it gives us exactly the same result as the mixed type of capitals and lower-case letters, and at the same time is less of a burden to school children, students, professional and business men. it can be written considerably more quickly, especially on the typewriter, where a shift key would be unnecessary. typewriting would therefore be more easily learned. typewriters would be cheaper because of simpler construction. typesetting would be cheaper, type cases smaller; printing establishments would save space. writing and addressing done in offices would be much cheaper. these facts apply with special force in the english language, in which the use of capital letters occurs so infrequently. it seems incomprehensible why such a huge amount of apparatus should be necessary for such little use of capitals. if it is considered necessary to emphasize the beginnings of sentences, this could be done by heavy type or wider spacing. proper names could also be shown in another way, and for the “i� a uniform sign would have to be created. pursuing this thought to its logical conclusion we perceive that the sound of the language ought to be given a systematic optical shape. in order to aim at a simplified type, as against that used toPAGE 42

day, syllables that frequently recur, and combined sounds (diphthongs, etc. should be given new letter signs).THE CAPITAL LETTERS OF ANCIENT TIMES ARE HARDLY LEGIBLE WHEN THEY ARE FORMED INTO SENTENCES. THEY CANNOT, THEREFORE, BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION. there remains only the small letters of our present-day lower case alphabet. this must be the foundation of our one-letter alphabet. and is not a sentence in a one-letter alphabet, which intrinsically possesses a formally compact construction, more harmonious, logically, than a sentence consisting of two alphabets, which completely differ from each other in shape and size?

First published in PM 4, no. 2 (December-January 1939-1940).

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04

NEW LIFE IN PRINT

Jan Tschichold 1930

Introduction

In the October 1925 issue of Typographische Mitteilungen, a printer’s trade journal, guest editor Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) introduced international examples of elementare typographie (elementary typography), the experiments in reductive design practice by the European avant-garde (de Stijl, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus). Three years later, in 1928, he published his most influential book, Die neue Typographie (trans. The New Typography, 1995), a manual for German typographers on how to apply progressive, modern typographic concepts and thus reject antiquated ideas of composition. As codifier of the New Typography, Tschichold was in demand as both practitioner and commentator; he wrote a stream of books, pamphlets, and articles in Germany and abroad. His second book, Eine Stunde Druckgestaltung, included an introduction titled “Was ist und was will Die neue Typographie?” (“The new typography: What is it and what does it want?”); published as “New life in print” in the British journal Commercial Art, it is considered his most concise discussion on the subject. From 1930 to 1931, Commercial Art featured a series of articles by Tschichold that championed the adoption of asymmetry and sans-serif type.

– Steven Heller

The general term “The New Typography� embraces the activities of a few of the younger typographers working principally in Germany, the Soviet Union, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and in Switzerland and Hungary. The inception of the movement in Germany reaches back into the war period. The existence of the New Typography can be said to be due to the personal achievements of its initiators; but to me it seems more accurate to regard these as the exponents of the tendencies and practical needs of our time, a view which by no means attempts to underestimate their extraordinary achievements and creative power or the inestimable value of their individual pioneer work. The movement would never have been so widespread, as in Central Europe it incontestably is, had it not served practical contem-

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Jan Tschichold, Advertising Leaflet Designs, 1926

porary needs, and this it does so excellently because its primary aim is the unprejudiced adaptation of typography to the purposes of the task in hand.

Here I think it necessary briefly to describe the state of prewar typographical development. Following upon the stylistic confusion of the eighties, England gave birth to the Arts and Craft movement (Morris 1892), which at least from a typographical standpoint, was mainly influenced by traditional tendencies (limitation of incunabula). In the “Youth style” (Jugendstil, ca. 1900) an attempt was made, without however any permanent success, to break away from traditional models, arriving at a misunderstood off-shoot of the Natural Form (Eckmann), finally to end in a renovated Biedermeier type (Wieynck)-in a word, in a new traditionalism. Then the traditional models were rediscovered and further imitated, albeit on this occasion with better understanding (German Book Production 1911-14-20). The reverence for traditional forms evoked by a more intensive research-work, resulted naturally in a limitation of creative freedom and forced it at length into inanition. Contrary to expectation, the most important gain resulting from these years was the rediscovery of original traditional faces (Walbaum, Unger, Didot, Bodoni, Garamond, etc.), which for some time and with every justification have been preferred above their “precursors,” in reality their imitators.

The natural reaction to the inanition of prewar typography was the New Typography aiming above all at suppleness in its methods of design.

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Two aims can be discerned in all typographical work: the recognition and fulfillment of practical requirements-and the visual design. (Visual design is a question of aesthetic; it is senseless to attempt to avoid this expression). At this point typography differs not a little from architecture: it is possible (and it has indeed been done by the best architects) that the form of a house may be determined by its practical purpose, but in the case of typography the aesthetic side in the question of design makes itself clearly manifest. This factor relates typography far more nearly to the domain of “free” design on a plane

Two aims can be discerned in all typographical work: the recognition and fulfillment of practical requirements-and the visual design.

surface (painting, drawing) than to that of architectural art. Both typography and the graphic arts are always concerned with surface (plane) design. Here at this stage the reason why none other than the “new” painters, the “abstract” painters, were destined to be PAGE 48

the initiators of the New Typography. It is too wide a subject here to give any account of the development of abstract painting in this connection: visit any exhibition of their work and its relation to the New Typography is immediately discernible. This connection is not, as many believe, a formalist one but is genetic, a fact which abstract painters themselves have failed to understand. Abstract painting is the “unpurposing� relating of pure color and form without any literary admixtures. Typography signifies the visual (or aesthetic) ordering of given elements (practical requirements, type, pictures, color, etc.), on a plane surface. The difference between painting and typography exists only inasmuch as in the former there is a free choice of elements and the resulting design has no practical purpose. Modern typography therefore cannot be better occupied than with an intensive study of surface composition in abstract painting.

Let us examine the principles followed by prewar typography. The majestic traditional model knew of only one scheme of design-the medial axis, the axial symmetry whose plainest example was the title page. The whole of typography followed this scheme, whatever its immediate task might be, whether printing a newspaper or a circular, letterheads or advertisements.

Only in the postwar period did the dim realization dawn that all these were quite different tasks, making entirely different practical demands to be met creatively by the typographer.

A distinction between the New Typography and the

PAGE 49

old can only be drawn by means of a negation-the New Typography does not traditionalize. And at the door of the old, whose tendency was purely traditional, the blame for this negation must be laid. But at the same time the New Typography, became of its utter rejection of any formalist limitations, is less antitraditional than nontraditional. For instance, to achieve typographical design it is permissible to use every traditional and nontraditional face, every manner of plane relationship and every direction of line. The sole aim is design: the creative harmonious ordering of the practical requirements. Therefore there exist no limitations such as are imposed by the positing of “permissible” and “forbidden” type conjunctions. The old, unique aim of design to present a “restful” page is also reversed-we are at liberty to present a designed “unrest.”

The swift tempo of modern business forces us further to a most accurate calculation of economic presentation. Typography had not only to find a simpler and more easily realizable constructive form (than the medial axis) but at the same time had to make this itself more visually attractive and varied in design. Dadaism, through Marinetti in Italy with his “Les mots en liberte futuriste (1919)” and even earlier in Germany, gave the first impulse to the new development in typography. Even today Dadaism is looked upon as sheer idiocy by many who have not taken the trouble to understand its dynamic; only in time to come will the important pioneer work done by those in the schools of Hausmann, Heartfield, Gross, Hulsenbeck, and other Dadaists, be estimated at their proper val-

PAGE 50

ue. In any case, the handbills and other publications of the Dadaists (which date back into the wartime) were the earliest documents of the New Typography. In 1922 the movement spread; a few abstract painters began typographical experiments. A further impulse was given by the author’s supplement (“Elementare Typographie”) of the “Typographische Mitteilungen” (1925, out of print), in which the efforts made and results achieved were demonstrated for the first time and which, published in an edition of 28,000, was broadcast to the printing world. The views of the New Typography were the object of savage attack on all sides – today none but a few disgruntled die-hards ever think of raising their voice against them. The New Typography has won through.

Next to its nontraditional attitude the New Typography is characterized by its preference for new technical processes. It prefers:

typefounder’s type

to engraved type

machine setting

to hand setting

machine-made paper

to handmade paper

machine presses

to hand presses

photographs

to drawings

photo process blocks

to woodcuts

standardization

to individualization, etc.

Further, the New Typography, by virtue of its methods of design, embraces the whole domain of printing and not merely the narrow field of pure type. Thus in photography we possess an objective means of

PAGE 51

reproducing objectivity and one which is comprehensible to all. Photography because it is merely another method of visual speech is also regarded as type.

The method of the New Typography is based upon a clear realization of purpose and the best means of achieving it. No modern typography, be it never so “beautiful,” is “new” if it sacrifices purpose to form. “Form” is the result of work done and not the realization of an external conception of form.

This fact has not been grasped by a whole troupe of pseudo-moderns. The chief demand of the New Typography is the most ideal adaptation to purpose.

This makes the omission of any decorative ingredients self-understood. Purpose further demands, and this cannot be too strongly emphasized, really good legibility. Lines too narrowly or too widely spaced and set are difficult to read and therefore, if for no other reason, to be avoided. The proper use of the various new processes produces in nearly every case specific forms and it is the typographer’s proper study to recognize these and adapt his design to them. Thus a good typographer without a most thorough knowledge of technical requirements is unthinkable.

The present mass of printed matter, circulars (a thing which closely affects the individual as he receives no small part of them), renders the use of a standardized format necessary.

Of the available standing types, the New Typography is most partial to the “grotesque” or “block” type, as this is simply formed and easy to read.

PAGE 52

The use of others, easily legible, or even traditional faces, in the new sense is quite admissible, as they are “evaluated” one against the other, i.e., if the contrast between them be designed. It is not therefore demanded that everything be set in “grotesque,” although in most cases this is indicated as most fitting. This face in its many variations (thin, semi-bold, bold-faced, condensed, expanded, hair-spaced, etc.) is open to many effects which in juxtaposition are capable of rich and varied contrasts. Varying contrasts can be obtained by the introduction of antique faces (Egyptienne, Walbaum, Garamond, Italic, etc.), and there is no reason why these effects should not be used in conjunction.

Typescript is also a very peculiar and effective face.

Jan Tschichold, Die Neue Typographie Invitation, 1927

PAGE 53

Design is the most legible ordering and the correct choice of type dimensions according to their value within the logical bounds of the text (which can be intensified or diminished). The conscious use of movement by means of type or now and again a thick or thin rule, or group of rules, the visual agitated contrast of upper and lower case, thin and bold face, condensed and expanded type, gray and colored patches, slanting and horizontal, compact, and loose groups of type, etc., are further means of design.

They represent the “aesthetic� side of typographical composition. Within the definite limits set by practical requirement and logical structure it is possible to tread various paths so that from this point onwards the visual sensibilities of the typographer must be the deciding factor. Thus it comes about that when several typographers are engaged upon the one definite task, they each achieve a varying result, each of which may have the same practical advantages.

The various men whose work is illustrated in this article reveal tremendously varying possibilities, in spite of the use of the same means and methods of design. Thus, means which are practically identical meet with an extraordinary variety of usage.

And these examples show that modern methods, in spite of frequent surmise, do not lead to monotony of expression, but on the contrary to results of extreme dissimilarity and which above all possess more originality than those of prewar typography.

Color is just such another effective element as type.

In a certain sense the unprinted surface must be reckoned in with it and the discovery of its ef-

PAGE 54

fectiveness must be put to the credit of the New Typographers. The white surface is not regarded as a passive background but as an active element.

Among actual colors preference is given to red; as “The” color it forms the most effective contrast to the normal black. The clear tones yellow and blue must also be given place in the foreground of interest as these two are not diffuse. Color is not used as a decorative, “beautifying” ingredient, but the peculiar psychophysical properties of each are used as a means to heighten (or tone down) effects.

Illustration is supplied by photography.

By this means we are given the most objective rendering of the object.

Whether photography is in itself an art or not an art need not concern us here; in conjunction with type and a plane surface it can be an art, as then it is purely a matter of values, of fitness in structural contrasts and relationships. Many people incline to mistrust graphic illustrations; the old (often falsifying) graphic illustrations no longer convince us and their individualistic pose and mannerisms affect us unpleasantly. If it be desired to give several pictorial impressions at the same time, to display several contrasting things, montage must be called into service. For this the same general methods of design as in typography hold good; used in conjunction with type, the photograph becomes a part of the whole and must be properly evaluated in this connection so as to achieve harmonious design. A rare but very attractive photographic possibility is the photogram of which an example is shown.

PAGE 55

A photogram is taken without a camera simply by placing a more or less transparent object on a sensitized medium (paper, film or plates). Typography + Photography is termed “Typophoto.”

The extraordinary adaptability of the New Typography to every conceivable purpose renders it an important phenomenon in contemporary life.

Its very attitude and position reveal that it is no mere fashion of a moment but is destined to form the basis of all further typographical progress.

Karel Teige of Prague has formulated the main characteristics of the New Typography as follows: “Constructivist Typography” (a synonym for the New Typography) means and requires:

1. Freedom from tradition and prejudice; overthrow of archaicism and academicism and the rejection of decoration. No respect for academic and traditional rules unsupported by visual reason and which are here lifeless form (“the golden section,” unity of type).

2. A choice of type, more perfect, more legible and cut with more geometric simplicity. Understanding of the spirit of the types suitable and their me in accord with the character of the text, contrast of typographical material to emphasize content.

3. Constant appreciation of purpose• and fulfillment of requirement. Differentiation in special aims. Advertisements meant to be seen from a distance require different treatment to a scientific work or a volume of verse.

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4. Harmonious disposition of surface and text in accordance with objective visual law; surveyable structure and geometric organization.

5. Exploitation of all means, which are or may be offered by present and future technical discoveries; conjunction of illustration and text by typophoto.

6. The closest cooperation between typographers and experts in the composing room is desirable, just as the designing architect cooperates with the constructional engineer, etc., specialization and division of labor are quite as necessary as close contact.

There is nothing to be added to the above beyond that the “golden section� together with other exact proportional formulas are often far more effective than chance relationships and should therefore not suffer fundamental exclusion.

First published in Commercial Art (London: July 1930).

PAGE 57

05

Josef M端ller-Brockman

GRID AND DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

1981

Introduction

Josef Müller-Brockman divided and ordered graphic design into the grid of Swiss typography. He took design elements that were subjective, irrational, and chaotic and brought them under tight, measured control. He dealt deep into form and content, spending his life in Zurich bearing down his work to the essentials necessary for what he considered an objective—even timeless— method of communication. They grid was key to his pursuit. As Müller-Brockman’s notes in the essay at right, “working within the grid system means submitting to laws of universal validity.”

He popularized the grid while spreading the principles of Swiss typography internationally through graphic design, lectures, and publications. In 1958 he founded New Graphic, and influential trilingual magazine promoting Swiss typography. He embodied the expansive precision of this movement. When asked about David Carson, postmodern designer and surfer, in 1996, Müller-Brockman replied, “I don’t surf, I dive.” His intense quest to achieve a universal system of communication calls to contemporary designers seeking ideal global forms for the world of new media.

– Steven Heller

The use of the grid as an ordering system is the expression of a certain mental attitude inasmuch as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future. This is the expression of a professional ethos: the designer’s work should have the clearly intelligible, objective, functional, and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking. His work should thus be a contribution to general culture and itself form part of it. Constructivist design that is capable of analysis and reproduction can influence and enhance the taste of a society and the way it conceives forms and colors. Design that is objective, committed to the common weal, well composed, of refined constitutes the basis of democratic behavior.

Constructivist design means the conversion of design laws into practical solutions. Work done systematically and in accordance with strict formal principles makes those demands for directness, intelligibility, and the integration of all factors that are also vital in sociopolitical life. Working with the grid system just means submitting to laws of universal validity.

PAGE 60

Josef Müller-Brockman. The “musica viva” poster is built up on a grid 4.5 fields wide and 4 fields deep. The two words “musica viva” are arranged in a cross, the letters of “musica” being set at irregular intervals so that a rhythm is produced. The lines of the program in small type align with the letters of “musica viva.” In this way an impression is created of a severe but elegant architecture. Format: 128 X 90.5 cm, upright. Colors: blue-green-white.

PAGE 61

Work done systematically and in accordance with strict formal principles makes those demands for directness, intelligibility, and the integration of all factors that are also vital in sociopolitical life.

The use of a grid system implies the will to systematize, to clarify There will to penetrate to the essentials, to concentrate The will cultivate objectivity instead of subjectivity, The will to rationalize that creative and technical production processes The will to integrate elements of color, form, and material The will to achieve architectural dominion over surface and space I The will to adopt a positive, forward-looking attitude

PAGE 62

Josef M端ller-Brockmann, Beethoven Poster, 1955

The recognition of the importance of education and the effect of work devised in a constructive and creative spirit.

Every visual creative work is a manifestation of the character of the designer. It is a reflection of his knowledge, his ability, and his mentality.

See Kerry William Purcell, Josef M端ller-Brockman (New York: Phaidon Press, 2006), 277.

PAGE 63

06

Karl Gerstner 1964

DESIGNING PROGRAMMES

Introduction

Karl Gerstner created a rational, systematic approach to graphic design. As a boy and Basel this pioneer of Swiss typography longed to be a chemist. Unable to afford the extensive training, he turned instead to the visual synthesis of graphic design. Gerstner merged art with science. He developed a comprehensive system capable of generating a broad range of design solutions, and he connected this system to be evolving field of computer programming. Gerstner detailed his approach in Designing Programmes, a book that became a 1960s cult classic. For three decades he run GGK, the advertising agency he founded with Markus Kutter in 1959. He’s barely work with systems-oriented design reveals, in his words, “How much computers change’s—or can change—not only the procedure of the work but the work itself.”

– Helen Armstrong

Instead of solutions for problems, programmes for solutions—this subtitle can also be understood in these terms: for no problem (so to speak) is there an absolute solution. Reason: the possibilities cannot be delimited absolutely. There is always a group of solutions, one of which is the best under certain conditions. To describe the problem is part of the solution. This implies: not to make creative decisions as prompted by feeling but by intellectual criteria. The more exact and complete these criteria are, the more creative the work becomes. The creative process is to be reduced to an act of selection. Designing means: to pick out determining elements combine them.

Seeing in these terms, designing calls for method.

The most suitable I know is that one Fritz Zwicky has developed, although actually his is intended for scientists rather than designers. (Die morphologische Forschung, 1953, Kommissionsverlag, Winterthur.) I have produced the diagram below in accordance with his instructions and, following his terminology, I have called it “the morphological box of the typogram.” Is the criteria—the parameters on the left, the relative components on the right—following which marks and signs are to be designed from letters. The criteria are rough. As the work proceeds, of course, they are to be refined as desired. The components are to be made into parameters and new components are to be specified, etc. Moreover, they are not only rough, they are also not self-contained. The component “something else” is the parcel in which the leftovers are packed if the parameter does not breakdown neatly. The designations are imprecise PAGE 66

in some cases. There are many imperfections. But it

is precisely in drawing up the scheme, in striving for perfection, that the work really lies. The work is not diminished; it is merely transferred to another plane.

The inadequacy of this box is my own and not inherent in the method. Even so: it contains thousands of solutions that—as could be shown by checking an example— are arrived at by the blind concatenation of components. It is a kind of designing automatic.

PAGE 67

Solutions from the Programme (Not all the solutions were found with the aid of the morphological box. But all those phones can be assigned to a place in it and analyzed.) If all the components contained in the trademark intermöbel are added, we obtain the following chain: a 11. (word) – 21. (sans-serif) – 33. (composed) b 14. (shades combined, viz. light and dark) – 12. (achromatic) c 12. (size immaterial, therefore medium) – 22. (proportion usual) – 33. (fat) – 41. (roman) d 11. (from left to right) - 22. (normal spacing) – 31. (form unmodified) – 43. (something replaced, viz., the face of the letter r by superimposition of the two parts of the word).

Not all the components are of equal importance; only two are actually decisive: b 14 + d 43.

The importance of “combined” is shown in example b 14: the components light-medium-dark are not very expressive in themselves because they do not represent an assessable value (apart from black always being dark). But if letters of varying degrees of darkness are combined (as there) the parameter of shade may be the point at which the solution crystallizes out. Parameters as points of crystallization: I will illustrate photos in the section “Expression” by the following examples: “Reading direction” determines the expression of the typograms Krupp and National Zei-

PAGE 68

Karl Gerstner, poster, 1960. Courtesy Grid

Karl Gerstner, typogram, undated. Courtesy

Systems by Kimberly Elam

Grid Systems by Kimberly Elam

tung. In both instances the component d 15 (combined) forms the basis. In Krupp d 11 (from left to right) is combined with d 14 (otherwise, i.e., from right to left). In the case of National Zeitung the components are d 12 and 13. “Spacing,� once again combined in the component, is determining in Braun Electric and Autokredit A.G.

PAGE 69

PROGRAMME AS GRID Is the grid programme? Let me put it more specifically: if the grid is considered as a promotional regulator, a system, it is a programme par excellence. Squared paper is a (arithmetic) grid, but not programme. Unlike, say, the (geometric) module of Le Corbusier, which can, of course, be used as a grid but is primarily a programme. Albert Einstein said of the module: “is the scale of proportions that makes the bad difficult and a good easy.” That is a programmatic statement of what I take to be the aim of “Designing Programmes.”

The typographic grid is a proportional regulator for composition, tables, pictures, etc. it is a formal programme to accommodate x unknown items. The difficulty is: to find a balance, the maximum of conformity to a rule with the maximum of freedom. Or: the maximum of constants with the greatest possible variability.

In our agency we have evolved the “mobile grid.” An example is the arrangement below: the grid for the periodical Capital.

The Basic unit is 10 points; the size of the basic typeface including the lead. The text and picture area are divided at the same time into one, two, three, four, five, and six columns. There are 58 units along the whole width. This number is a logical one when there are always two units between the columns. That is: it divides in every case without a remainder: with two columns and 58 units are composed of 2 x 28 + 2 (space between columns); with 3 columns 3 x 18 + 2 PAGE 70

x 2; with 4 columns 4 x 13 + 3 x 2; with 5 columns 5 x 10 + 4 x 2; with6 columns 6 x 8 + 5 x 2 10-point units.

The grid looks complicated to anyone not knowing the key. For the initiate it is easy to use and (almost) inexhaustible as a programme.

Karl Gerstner, Designing programs Grid diagram, 1963 (redrawn), Zurich

Manfred Kröplien, “Status Quo at 66” in Karl Gerstner, Review of 5 x 10 Years of Graphic Design etc. (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 242.

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Publication © 2015 ECUAD All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission of the publisher.

Editing: Naitik Mehta Design: Naitik Mehta Printed in Canada.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Type Perspectives, Naitik Mehta editor Type Perspectives/ Naitik Mehta; with contributions from Herbert Bayer, Josef Müller Brockmann, Karl Gerstner, F.T. Marinetti, Jan Tschichold, Beatrice Warde.

Catalogue of typographic philosophy for Communication Design 204.

ISBN 975-1-696359-81-7 (pbk.)

1. Typography--Essays. 2. Graphic Design and Communication Design--Classroom. Emily Carr University of Art + Design, host institution V. Title.

N8236.P35B83 2015 | 704.9’4933827282 | C2013903923-6

COLOPHON PAGE 72

PAGE 73

EPYT EVITCEPSREP