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The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere.
T
ypography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual sense and historical sense. The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its visual form are many and widespread. The history of letter- forms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions and old books, but from others it is largely hid- den. This book has therefore grown into some-thing more than a short manual of typo-graphic etiquette. It is the fruit of a lot of long walks in the wilderness of letters: in part a pocket ďŹ eld guide to the living wonders that are found there, and in part a meditation on the ecological principles, survival techniques, and ethics that apply. The principles of typography as I understand them are not a set of dead conventions but the tribal customs of the magic forest, where ancient voices speak from all directions and new ones move to unremembered forms.
country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well- travelled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose - if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead.That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown. If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is pre- cisely the use of a road: to reach individu- ally chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.
One question, nevertheless, has been often in my mind. When all right-thinking human beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, 6 and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exist for these commandments, suggestions, and instructions? Surely typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose. Typography thrives as a shared concern - and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions. A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travellers, through uninhabited
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Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first books were printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens on papyrus in 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made.
Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize, whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdom typographers set for themselves than with the mutable or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous anatomy of the human mind. I don’t like to call these principles universals, because they
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are largely unique to our species. Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads. Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of It is true that typographer’s tools are presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium. I suppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.
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A Day in the Mind o f
c a n d a c e
p e o p l e s
Meaning: to be. To live. To maintain or support oneself. To remain in being, force or effect.
These are fast passes from my favorite attractions at DisneyLand and a DisneyLand ticket. I went to DisneyLand for the very first time when I moved here and it furthered my obesseion with Disney “everything�.
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This clipping is something I pulled from my journal. I don’t write everyday but I write as often as I can. I love to read and write so the rest of the pages are filled with quotes that I enjoy.
This is a little abstract sketch I did of a dancer. It’s important to me because for 10 years I was a dancer and althouh I don’t dance anymore the transparency, and grace and weightlessness of a dancer still lives in me. The shape of her resembles the feel of being free. I included the quote, “Enjoy it because it is happening” as a reminder to myself and because it was from one of my favorite books, Perks of Being a Wallflower.
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The snap pages assignment was very helpful to me. It grew very tedious at times but it helped me understand that there is a multitude of ways to manipulate type. It was really interesting to see all of the different ways type can be shown on a picture plane whether to demonstrate creative expression or particular context.
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yo ko ro on la o n jo d se y ou ph st ev ng c e am no jo am bs pbe ll ch om sk y
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joseph campbell steve jobs noam chomsky
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ono
roland young
joseph campbell steve jobs
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C
entury Gothic is a geometric sansserif typeface designed for Monotype Imaging in 1991. It is a digital typeface that has never been made into actual foundry type. Century Gothic takes inspiration from Sol Hess’s Twentieth Century, which was drawn between 1937 and 1947 for the Lanston Monotype Company as a version of the successful Futura typeface, but with a larger x-height and more even stroke width. The Century Gothic face is distinct for its single-storey lowercase a and g.
Century Gothic is more closely related to Avant Garde Gothic, designed by Herb Lubalin, and released by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1970. Century Gothic is similar to ITC Avant Garde in its pure geometry, and does not possess the subtle variation in stroke width found in either Futura or Twentieth Century. However, it differs from ITC Avant Garde in that Century Gothic does not have a descender on lowercase u (making it appear like a Greek upsilon), whereas Avant Garde does. Century Gothic also has larger, rounder tittles on the letters i and j, whereas Avant Garde keeps the tittles square and the same width as the letter strokes.
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