Texts on
Type critical writings on typography
edited by Steven Heller & Philip B. Meggs
v Foreword Steven Heller
vii Introduction Philip B. Meggs
1 2 3 Aesthetics
Criticism
on form and expression
type as discourse
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Found Poetry: The Dude Typogrophers Alastair Johnston
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A Plea for Authentic Type Design Hermann Zapf
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Old and New Fashions in Typography Talbot Baines Reed
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The Obscene Typography Machine Philip B. Meggs
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Type is Dead: Long Live Type Matthew Butterick
16 Art in Type Design Frederic W. Goudy 19 The Modern Type Family Charles Brodie 21 An Existential Guide to Type Karrie Jacobs
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Designing Hate Steven Heller
45 A Post-Mortem on Deconstruction? Ellen Lupton
Anatomy
understanding typefaces
54 Adobe Garamond Jerry Kelly 65 Modern Style with a Human Face John D. Berry 68 Mrs. Eaves Zusana Licko 70 An Examination of Egyptians Ruari McLean 77 Lead Soldiers Paul Shaw 82 Futura Alexander Nesbitt
48 Rumors of the Death of 88 Univers: A New Sans Typography Have Been Serif Type by Adrian Greatly Exaggerated Frutiger Peter Fraterdeus Emil Ruder 51 American Gothic 90 Sideshows in the Rick Poynor Evolution of the Alphabet Jerry Kelly
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5
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defining modernism
how type works
type and passion
Movement
Practice
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First Principles of Typography Stanley Morison
93 The Space Between the Letters Moira Cullen
100 From De Stijl to a New Typography Kees Broos
178 Is the Abolishment of Justification Desirable? Anonymous
108 The New Typography Laszlo Moholy-Nagy 110 on typography Herbert Bayer 115 The Principles of New Typography Jan Tschichold
182 Typographic Heresies Eugene M. Ettenberg 183 Typographical Topography Stefan Themerson 193 On the Choice of Typeface Beatrice Warde
129 The Bauhaus Tradition and the New Typography 198 Grid and Design L. Sandusky Philosophy 139 The Consistency of Josef Müller-Brockmann Jan Tschichold 201 On Classifying Type Jerry Kelly Jonathan Hoefler 143 The Cult of Lower Case 210 Type Is to Read Douglas C. McMurtrie William Golden 146 The Philosophy of 215 Typography — Modernism in "The Eye Is a Creature Typography of Habit" Douglas C. McMurtrie David Ogilvy 149 Why Go Modern Frederic W. Goudy
Reflections
218 I Am Type Frederic W. Goudy 219 I Am Type! Revisited Philip B. Meggs 221 The Dog of Alcibiades M. F. Agha 223 The Trouble with Type Rudy VanderLans 228 Experiments in Type Design Tobias Frere-Jones 235 Electronic Typography Jessica Helfand 239 A Face by Any Other Name Is Still My Face: A Tale of Type Piracy David Pankow 257 Bad Credit Zuzana Licko & Rudy VanderLans 260 The Land of Dancing Serifs Peter Hall
154 The Good Old Neue Typografie Paul Rand 156 Typographic Warfare Otl Aicher 159 Zombie Modernism Mr. Keedy
263 The Authors 268 Acknowledgments 269 Index
1 Aesthetics
on form
and expression
2 Criticism
type as
discourse
A Plea for Authentic Type Design Herman Zapf
I
am an artist who has been designing types for many years. As we all know, to make a living as a freelance designer, you have to work hard with your mind as well as your hand. For you to want to earn at least enough money to dress your wife nicely, feed your children every day, and live in a house where the rain doesn’t come through the roof onto your drawing pad.
no copyright protection for alphabets, most conspicuously in the U.S. By copying typefaces, a smart businessman can make money without investing a nickel in the design or paying anything to the original designer. What is generally accepted as a fair arrangement in the fields of music and literature is, strangely enough, not yet accepted in a creative art like type design.
As long as you are creative, as long as you are in good health, everybody thinks you cannot have problems of real importance. But type designers do have problems.
The copyright laws in many countries are outdated. A revision of some parts of the U.S. Copyright Law of January 1, 1978, is necessary, for it does not take into account video, PCs, photocopiers, or even low-resolution designs used by laser printers. Copyright protects the creator of a piece of art during the lifetime of an artist, plus fifty years thereafter.
I have, in the past, designed several successful typefaces. To make one type family, you have to spend several months on each alphabet. This investment of time, the designer hopes, will be repaid bit by bit over time in the form of royalties. But some people claim that all alphabets are in the public domain, so the creative work of a designer is something that can be freely copied; and in fact there is
Type designs have so far not been included in U.S. copyright laws. Some protection is offered to them by the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), and by the Berne Convention. But the latter has never been signed by the U.S. Assume, for example, that Leonard Bernstein conducts a special performance of his West Side Story for Columbia Records. This performance is released under the Columbia label and, as a consequence, royalties accrue to Bernstein. If someone copies
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this record and sells it at a cheaper price (for he avoids the expense of royalties), would this not be a gross injustice to Bernstein? In fact, would it not actually be illegal? Pirates don’t spend money to develop and introduce unknown or new faces, by which they might further the art of type design. Instead, they go after proven, successful types, make a profit on them, but never use their profits to commission new ideas, as is customary practice in honest business. These people are Alaskacool and emotionally unconcerned about the rights of artists. None of the copied alphabets offered in specimen books under the bizarre description “similar to” has ever been given away to printers or typographers for free. At least I have never heard of such a generous offer. Do we know of any companies producing alphabets just to further truth and better global understanding, or to spread moral values?
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There are a lot of variations of my typefaces around for which I am not responsible. Without my approval, they are sold by big companies, sometimes under strange names. Typographers and users should therefore examine very carefully what kind of original type or poor copy they order. And they should know that the copyist does nothing creative at all; he is exploiting an artist’s work. But these days, besides the piracy of alphabets, we face another problem. Unfortunately, many people — even professionals — don’t see the differences between the details of a good original typeface and a sloppy copy in low resolution. The visual sensibility of many of our contemporaries is becoming more and more deadened by all the poor— sometimes primitive — letterforms they absorb, day by day, in low resolution on PCs, VDTs, computer printouts, and even television. Type designing is connected with printing, often called the “black art.” Are we a disadvantaged minority within the graphic arts
community, our rights unacknowledged and ignored? People who would rather not respect the property rights of a type designer— his creative work— apparently expect the designer to be a kind of philanthropic dreamer devoting himself to mankind. In their eyes, he is a cow to milk. These very poor people, however, would never accept the notion the they should work for several months for the benefit of the public without any reward. Let me end with an anecdote that expresses my situation, for I hold the world’s record for the most type designs copied without permission. At one time I had neighbors who grew apples commercially. I also grew apples, and I had spent a great amount of time and money in cultivating my trees. As a result, I developed some unique varieties unobtainable elsewhere. Occasionally, my neighbors would sneak over and pick my apples in order to sell them. Their won apples were merely ordinary, while mine were of the “Palatino” and “Optima” variety. Before long, I realized what was going on. “What do you think you are doing?” I said to them. “You can’t take my best apples. That isn’t right.” “But
Nov × Dec 1986 Print 40 No 6
apples are apples,” they retorted. “They depend on the sun and the rain and the rich soil. All that comes from the Good Lord.” I was unconvinced. My problem was that I had no fences or any other protection around my property. The International Typeface Corporation in New York, founded in 1970 by Aaron Burns, licenses alphabets. Since I began to work for this firm, I have gained support and ITC fence around my property, my ITC alphabets. ITC sells type — both mine and those of other designers — to their customers around the world. And everyone receives his fair share of the profits for his specialty.
“I do not intend to have anyone steal my apples ever again.”
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The Obscene Typography Machine Philip B. Meggs
A
t a recent Washington AIGA meeting, editors from four major design publications held a panel discussion. One of the shills in the audience asked, “Do the design magazines establish design trends, or do you merely follow and report about them?” After all of the editors replied that they weren’t too interested in stylistic trends or the latest fashion, one editor commented that the one real trend that everyone in the room should watch closely is the increasing importance of computers in graphic design. Most designers who have overcome their computer phobia and learned computerassisted design have become mesmerized by its possibilities. Text can be poured into columns, PMS match-color backgrounds can be changed at will. For thousands of organizations with publication budgets too small to afford design and typesetting services, desktop publishing allows a significant upgrade of routine printed material ranging from internal company publications to publicschool study guides and church
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bulletins. But this wonderful new tool that is revolutionizing graphic design has its dark side. Unfortunately, the ease of computer use puts potent capabilities into the hands of people who are devoid of any esthetic sense about typography and have little to no understanding of the most basic principles of design. Powerful new software programs including Aldus Freehand and Illustrator 88 give the designer (or moron, as the case may be) the power to flip, rotate, stretch, or bend typography with the click of the mouse button. This permits some of the most obscene type-forms ever devised or imagined. Certainly, distortion can be a useful and innovative design tool when handled with sensitivity and intelligence, but we are seeing type distorted in violation of everything that has been learned over the past 500 years about making functional and beautiful letterforms. Newspaper advertisements are a major source of grotesque typographic distortion, as headlines are stretched or condensed to fit with about as much grace as a fat lady squeezing into a too-small girdle.
A principle from perceptual psychology is that when identical rectangles are placed on the page with one in a horizontal position and the other in a vertical position, the horizontal rectangle will appear heavier, even though it is identical to the vertical form. A typeface designer spends hours refining his strokes, shaving horizontal forms until they appear to have the same thickness as the vertical form. Everyone who takes an introductory typography class learns that if a letter composed of curved strokes such as an O is the same height as a letter of vertical strokes such as an E, the O will appear too small. Typeface designers optically adjust circular forms, which must extend slightly above the capline and slightly below the baseline to appear correct. One reason a typeface is considered a masterpiece is because the designer achieved optical harmony in adjusting the size and proportion of the parts — not mathematically, but esthetically and perceptually.
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Frederic W. Goudy’s Goudy Old Style, Adrian Frutiger’s Univers, and John Baskerville’s Baskerville: these typefaces are honored as great tools of communication and works of art because a virtuoso designer poured heart, soul, and countless hours of work into creating harmonious relationships between letterforms. Suddenly in 1988, anyone with a Macintosh or other computer and a $495 software program could wreak havoc on these beautifully crafted forms. Consider the four versions of Helvetica Medium, executed on a computer and outputted from Linotron 100 at 1270 dots per inch. The top setting is normal type, reasonably close to the original font created by Max Miedinger and Edouard Hoffman thirty years ago, allowing for some alteration when converted to a specific digital output device. The second version was produced by grabbing the corner of the type with the mouse and stretching it into taller, condensed versions. The computer is a dumb robot,
totally ignorant of the principles of perception mentioned earlier. In the lower versions, the horizontal strokes were stretched wider, while the vertical strokes maintained their original width. The result is grossly misproportioned letterforms. The optical adjustment of the O and S is exaggerated, making them seem too tall for the other letters. We are seeing typography approach this level of obscenity as students, neophytes, and even experienced designers, berserk over the new toy, violate welldrawn letterforms without bringing compensating values of expression or form to their work. Goudy and Baskerville must be spinning in their graves, and Frutiger and Miedinger must be quite depressed to see their artful letters, created as an act of love, destroyed by those who either cannot see or simply do not care. One impact of this new graphic software relates to what is becoming known as Deconstructivist typography, whose integrated whole is take apart. While some of the practitioners of this new typographic movement exhibit great sensitivity and originality, others are merely flitting through the collection of graphic procedures available with the new software….
Operations that formally required painstaking cut-and-paste work, such as setting type in an oval or along a curved baseline, can now be performed instantly by drawing an oval, a circle or a meandering line, typing in the text, then clicking the mouse on the word “Join” in the menu. The oval, circle, or line instantly becomes the baseline of the type. These graphic devices provide a vocabulary of instant clichés, executed as simply as snapping one’s fingers. Often, these techniques are used, not for thoughtful communicative or
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expressive reason, but simply because they are there. The problem for designers exploring the elastic typography and / or Deconstructivist sensibility on a computer is, “What do you do for an encore?” As with most specialized tools, a computergraphics program permits one to do a limited number of things very efficiently, but only operates within a fixed range of possibilities. Its innovative graphic techniques will become old and tired very rapidly as more and more people hop on the bandwagon, transforming graphics that originally appeared fresh and innovative into hack work.
Sept × Oct 1989 Print 43 No 5
Another problem with all this graphic power is that tremendous capability is put into the hands of people who don’t know an ampersand from a hole in the ground. A newsletter recently crossed my desk with each column of type linespaced differently, because the novice desktop publisher discovered that the page-layout program would
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permit automatic leading to fit the column depth. Columns in 10-point Times Roman with no leading were adjacent to other columns set in 10-point Times Roman with about 25 points of leading between the lines. Text columns were justified, producing gaping holes in each line of type due to poor wordspacing. He or she was too naïve about typography to realize how the inconsistent wordspacing destroyed legibility and the tonal quality of the page. Although equipment manufacturers and software developers have made modest efforts to educate their users about the rudiments of design through little booklets explaining effective page layout or newsletter design, complete with case studies of redesigned publications with notable improvements, a new generation of unschooled graphic designers— editors, public-relations agents, secretaries, and other do-it-yourself desktop publishers — are totally ignorant of the rudiments of publication design and typography. Adobe, the company that developed PostScript software that transforms crude bitmapped type on the computer screen into refined high-resolution output, publishes excellent materials. Some software tutorials address
design issues, but do it poorly. More must be done. There should be an ethical responsibility on the part of companies that put powerful tools into the hands of uninformed people without educating them about the proper use of these tools. The obscene typography machine can also be the sublime typography machine. Professional designers can explore new creative possibilities and spend more time developing concepts and designing and less time laboriously executing their work. As this technology becomes available in third-world nations, their efforts toward education and development can take quantum leaps forward as a result of the economy of desktop publishing. Thecomputer-graphics force is now with us, but its dark side must be controlled; otherwise, the obscene typography machine is going to inflict unimagined graphic atrocities upon the public.
Type Is Dead: Long Live Type
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Mathew Butterick
T
ype designers tend to be a nervous lot, with reason. Especially in the U.S., type design in the last ten years has been increasingly an undertaking for the brave, the masochistic, or the independently wealthy. Lack of the copyright protection for type designs has resulted in unscrupulous companies profiting from cheap imitations, while the proliferation of desktop publishers has made fonts even more popular to pirate than QuarkXPress.
Now that we are witnessing the emergence of a purely digital visual culture: users are taking their doses of typography on screen as well as on paper. Type and graphic designers alike are viewing this development with the proverbial cautious optimism. Typography is inexorably moving into the digital realm, going from design to output without pausing to rest on a sheet of paper. Should designers be excited or alarmed? The ATypI conference is the largest annual gathering of type designers; the theme of last year’s conference in Barcelona was “Into
the Type Net.” When I received the flyer in the mail, I was slightly bemused (“type net”?) but curious, so I pressed on: “The analog and linear alphabet is dead — long live digital text and type in space and time!…[The 1995 conference] will cast an eye on the present and future of interactive type and its relationship with the image in an expanding virtual-visual environment… ATypI welcomes people…who are interested to support communicative design aspects within the information society.” I still have no idea what this means. Even disregarding the linguistic kinks that may have cropped up in the translation from the original Spanish, phrases like “interactive type” and “virtalvisual environment” are vapid techno-portmanteaus. But ATypI can’t be blamed; these kinds of terms are endemic to the current discourse on digital design. Something big is definitely happening, but most prognosticators about the digital future seem to be uncomfortable saying that life will be anything but bigger, better, and faster for everyone. It’s clear that type designers and those who design with type will not be so fortunate. Ironically,
current technology has made text more important than ever, but the same technology has conspired to further erode the value of quality typography. The sole bit of good news is that text rules the digital frontier, because it is compact to load, easy to create, familiar to use, and compatible with all computing platforms. The popularity of the World Wide Web has shown that text is still a vital medium, and though it’s less flashy than pictures, sound, and video, it offers the best bang for the bandwidth. And if text is alive and well, so should typography be: after all, there can be no visual representation of text without type, and the proliferation of text in a new medium would imply the necessity of new design solutions. More work for type designers, more work for typographers — the birth of a type renaissance! Right? No. The jubilance that type makers should rightly feel has been cut by the grim realization of the workings of the software industry. Once, those who made
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type also controlled the means of production — in the days of hot metal, the choice of a Monotype verses a Linotype caster was similar to the choice of Macintosh versus Windows. Each platform had its strengths and foibles, but if you needed type, you chose one and stuck with it. A hot metal caster was a sort of operating system for type, and the matrices were the software that worked with it. This continued through the ages of phototypesetting and early digital typography, where proprietary systems meant proprietary fonts, and proprietary fonts meant type makers could still maintain control over font production and access. But when type technology became commingled with personal computing technology, things changed. At that point, the ability to make and use type became available to anyone with a computer, along with the newfound ability to make speedy, accurate, and untraceable pirate copies. This was better for users of type, but much worse for type
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designers. Type has had to relinquish the power of its own proprietary barricades. Many of the improvements in type functionality introduced on computers have caused a decline in type designers’ quality of life. Moreover, the goals of interoperability and data exchange will continue to be antithetical to type’s long-term aesthetic and economic viability. For example, one brass ring for which Apple, Adobe, and others have groped recently is the portable digital document— a document that can be viewed and printed with its formatting intact, without needing the software that created it. These schemes have typically been riddled with unstable engineering and other difficulties. But let’s take apart the problem: consider a page-layout document containing images and formatted text. Text is certainly portable, and formatting can be made into a series of tags; images can be converted to a variety of platform-independent bitmap formats. All that’s left are the fonts! The handiest thing would be to encapsulate the fonts into the document, but this would be tantamount to saving users the trouble of pirating the fonts themselves. Adobe’s scheme
at one point was to retain metric files of hundreds of typefaces in the software so that a reasonable facsimile could be built when the document was opened. Uncountable programmer-hours have doubtless been spent to preserve the type designer’s livelihood, but the result is products that can’t quite do what they claim. Surely more than one software company has thought, why can’t the fonts just be free so we can copy them? Microsoft, with typical bravado, was the only company willing to act on that principle. Several years ago, Microsoft began to create its own type library. At first there were special font packs; then fonts showed in other products. Now, it’s rare that a box goes out the door without new typefaces in it. Microsoft is probably one of the largest publishers of typefaces in the world, and it has also built font embedding into its operating system, for use in any sort of document. Nevertheless, users who are receiving dozens of free fonts may not see much point in paying for more.
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“But the best consolation may be that print will never die.” Typographers who are wincing should stop reading now — that’s nothing compared to the culture of the Internet. On the surface, Internet users look like the most fertile new group of type consumers: a giant new demographic suffering from an acute case of dreadful typography (Times and Courier are used almost exclusively). However, the language of Internet typography (HTML) allows for no explicit typeface choices, and only a handful of different sizes. Worse, much of the software that can be used for browsing the Internet is free. If users don’t have to pay for an industrial-strength Web browser, why will they pay for a font, of all things? (As this issue goes to press, Microsoft has just released Matthew Carter’s Verdana, a type family commissioned expressly for use in Web browsers — and it’s available from their site for free.) Then there’s the taste issue: I’m sure most graphic designers have had a client who insisted on a job being set only in Times, Palatino, or Courier. Now you have 15 million clients who feel the same way.
The undeterred typographer might still bravely withstand these slings and arrows and elect to create the consummate on-screen text typeface. Sadly, one’s design choices at the level of the 12-point bitmap are limited to determining how to render the curve of the lower case s. It seems safe to speculate that there are no more than eight mutually distinguishable 12-point text faces, all of which had been discovered by 1985. It’s a field with limited growth potential at best (Matthew Carter notwithstanding). Some of the blame for the current dismal situation can be put with Apple, Adobe, Microsoft, and Quark, and their ilk. All have had the opportunity to improve typography by enhancing software or hardware, but they have pursued it with little vigor. Certain developments (antialiased type) have been slow in coming, others (QuickDraw GX) have been overhyped, and others still (high-resolution displays) don’t seem to be on anyone’s task list. These improvements wouldn’t just make typophiles happy; then would benefit anyone who has to experience type on a screen — i.e., anyone who owns a computer. Given the continuing importance of text to computers, it’s surprising type technology has been stagnating.
Part of the current anxiety seems to stem from the idea that print will disappear in the face of the putatively superior onscreen technology. It’s not true. The experience of reading off an illuminated phosphor will never compare to thumbing through the Sunday Times. This isn’t romantic atavism, it’s a simple matter of screen not being able to provide the density of information that the eye can efficiently comprehend. A printed text is also easier for us to navigate because we can manipulate it in a direct, physical, and familiar way.
AIGA Journal of Graphic Design 14 1996 No 3
Type, typography, and the printed word have been a phenomenal success for 500 years and there’s no reason for that to change. Though the situation for on-screen type will improve, it will never evolve to such an extent that readers will stop wanting to read printed type. Sadly the goal of preserving quality typography in the digital sphere is at odds with many trends in personal computing and the Internet. But the printed word is, and will remain, as irreplaceable to readers as it is to typographers.
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3
Anatomy
understanding
typefaces