Mixing Messages — Typography as Discourse by Rui Miguel

MIXING MESSAGES

r Typography as Discourse

<Ficha Técnica> Rui Miguel Oliveira Rodrigues // 5866 Faculdade de Belas-Artes da Universidade de Lisboa Design de Comunicação O1//R4 - ‘Mixing Messages’

< Índice >

Contextualização das Referências Typography as Discourse // Katherine McCoy with David Frej

02 - 07 02, 05 - 06, 08, 12, 16, 18

What is New in American Typography // Herb Lubalin

04, 14

American Graphic Design Expression // Katherine McCoy

05, 10

No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism // Rick Poynor Towards a Universal Type // Herbert Bayer The Philosophy of Modernism in Typography // Douglas C. McMurtrier The New Typography // Láslo Moholy-Nagy The Typography of Order // Emil Ruder How can one make Swiss Typography // Wolfgang Weingart Style is not a four letter word // Jeffery Keedy

05, 07, 09, 13, 1503, 08, 17 04, 17 04, 13, 19 04, 11, 16, 19 17 09, 11

The New typography´s expanding Future // Ladislav Sutnar

Bibliografia

Contextualização das Referências

02_

“The recent history of graphic design in the United States reveals a series of actions and reactions.”

Os anos 80 marcam a passagem da era industrial para a era do digital e da informação, e neste período de mudanças sociais e politicas existem valores que ainda se conservam e permutam de uma era para a outra, como servem de exemplo os valores modernistas. A difusão do digital, transporta consigo novas teorias e necessidades face à forma como a sociedade comunica, mas tem de se adaptar aos princípios modernistas herdados da era anterior. É neste contexto, e com o início do desconstrutivismo , por influência do pós estruturalismo, que surge a designação que intitula o ensaio de Katherine McCoy “Typography as Discourse”, expressão que acompanhará, lado a lado, a sua atividade como diretora do departamento de Design na Cranbrook Academy of Arts, academia que ainda hoje é referenciada pelo seu sucesso no método de ensino e aprendizagem. O estilo internacional, baseado nos princípios da Bauhaus, nas experiências tipográficas de Jan Tschichold e Ernst Keller e as escolas suíças de Basileia e Zurich, desenvolveu uma tipografia universalmente funcional e compreensível, através de fontes sem serifas, simples e harmoniosas, como são exemplos a Helvetica e a Univers, que se alinhavam à esquerda contrariando o justificado da Bauhaus. Um outro exemplo desta busca pela universalidade tipográfica é o alfabeto construído por Herbert Bayer, que apenas recorre às formas geométricas básicas – círculo e retângulo.

MCCOY, Katherine with FREJ, David (1988); Typography as Discourse

“we need a one-letter type alphabet. it gives us exactly the same result as the mixed type of capitals and lowercase letters, anda t the same time is less of a burder to school children, students, professional and business men.” Katherin Mc Coy nega este estilo e assume uma postura animada pelo ativismo social e cultural do seu tempo. Esta postura é adoptada, não só por Mc Coy, mas também por April Greiman, Michael Vanderbyl, Rudy Vanderlans e Zuzana Licko, estes dois últimos, são os criadores da revista Emigre que também correspondia a estes ideais pós-modernistas. A Emigre magazine surge no ano 1984 e estende-se ao longo de 69 números até ao ano 2005. Esta revista tipográfica vanguardista, é um marco importante no conceito gráfico, pela experimentação tipográfica de Zuzana Licko, recorrendo ao digital, e pela composição gráfica da informação de Rudy Vanderlands, uma presença clara da desconstrução e negação da grelha da escola Suíça. “Typography as Discourse”, é um texto crítico baseado na história do século XX, e resume de forma lógica as alterações da natureza do design gráfico nos últimos anos e as constantes mudanças de metodologias e identidade de trabalho, que são consequências da realidade sóciocultural agitada da época. É também evidenciada no texto de Mc Coy a evolução e a utilização da tipografia, como esta é encarada pelo designer mediante todas estas alterações, e como a própria tipografia pode constituir em si mesma um discurso, declarando, através da sua expressão, uma identidade, uma sensibilidade, ou estado de espírito.

_03

BAYER, Herbert (1935); Towards a Universal Type

04_

Herb Lubalin refere-se a este discurso autónomo da tipografia , no seu ensaio “What is New in American Typography?”. Neste ensaio Lubalin começa por referir o carácter subjetivo que a tipografia universal pode ter. “Typography means different things to different people. This art of creating impressions on paper through the use of symbols is universally acceptable as a way of communicating, but its acceptability as a creative tool to evoke an emotional response through the physical appearance of word is far from widespread.”

LUBALIN, Herb (1959); What is New in American Typography

Emil Ruder, Douglas C. McMurtrier e Moholy-Nagy, em artigos diferentes, também dão o seu parecer do que é para cada um deles a tipografia. Um vão ao encontro e completam pensamento de Lubalin, outros opõem-se aos seus ideais tipográficos. “Typography is regarded primarily as a means of ordering the various constituents of a layout.”

RUDER , Emil (1959); The Typography of

“Typography has become a médium of communication for the people as a whole and not solely for some select group. Therefore, not until the new spirit of modernismo has quite deeply penetrated the popular consciousness, does printing begin to reflect it.”

MC MURTRIER , Douglas C. (1929); The

“Typography is a tool of communication. It must be communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity since this distinguishes the character of our own writing from that of ancient pictographic forms.”

MOHOLY-NAGY, Láslo(1923) The New

Order

Philosophy of in Typography

Typography

_05

Com base nos ideais do Cubismo e do Dadaísmo, o Pós-Modernismo busca uma nova abordagem na comunicação visual, através de uma nova relação entre texto e imagem, contrariando as estruturas e regras pré estabelecidas. “These revolutionaries explored new approaches to structuring language and imagery that were radical rejections the classical text tradition. Their highly visual poetry used typographic forms and composition to interpret and extend the words’ meaning. One does not have to read Italian to gain an appreciation of the Futurists’ energetic celebrations of industry and political confrontation. Typography finally became an expressive visual language as well as a verbal one.”

MCCOY, Katherine (2001); American Graphic Design Expression: The evolution of American typography

Mas McCoy refere que esta liberalização deixou alguns designers gráficos insatisfeitos, por possibilitar que qualquer pessoa pudesse exercer este tipo de trabalho, sendo de certa forma negligenciado. Rick Poynor, refere, do seu livro “No More Rules” que esta nova realidade já se torna abusiva, intolerável e cada vez mais duvidosa. “As a result, long-neglected design elements, such as expression in form, text, and imagery, are beginning to resurface. Much of this recent work steps outside the lineage of Bauhaus/Basel/New Wave, and, not surprisingly, some of its practitioners come from fine art, photographic, or literary backgrounds rather than graphic design training.”

“The dissolution of authoritative standards creates fluid conditions which all appeals to universality, expertise, set ways of doing things and unbreakable rules look increasingly dubious and untenable”

MCCOY, Katherine with FREJ, David(1988); Typography as Discourse

POYNOR, Rick (2003); No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism

06_

Este conflito de ideologias tipográficas tinham por base as teorias linguísticas, alguns designers consideravam a distorção da tipografia imoral, grosseira, associada à desumanização e à destruição imposta pelo panorama industrial cada vez mais presente. Julgavam não ser correto subestimar o diálogo e a legibilidade em favor da forma e da estética, o que era defendido pela New Wave como nova possibilidade e não como sequer alternativa. Na sequência desta “guerra”, surge uma nova onda de pensamento, que se manifesta contra esta liberdade exacerbada da expressão tipográfica, com princípios Pós-Estruturalistas com base nos textos de Barthes, Foucault, Baudrillard e Derrida, oponentes a todo o ideal Pós-Modernista. “Sources for much current experimentation can be traced to recent fine art and photography, and to literary and art criticism. Influenced by French poststructuralism, critics and artists deconstruct verbal language as a filter or bias that inescapably manipulates the reader’s response. When this approach is applied to art and photography, form is treated as a visual language to be read as well as seen. Both the texts and the images are to be read in detail, their meanings decoded. Clearly, this intellectualized communication asks a lot of its audience; this is harder work than the formal pleasures of New Wave.”

MCCOY, Katherine with FREJ, David(1988); Typography as Discourse

Como afirma Katherine McCoy, este foco pós–estruturalista é uma expressão por meios e conteúdos semânticos, com uma linguagem visual muito séria, e esta seriedade é muito assumida e rígida onde a elegância e o requinte são características de último grau. Estas opções e buscas pelo que , out¬rora já foram princípios fundamentais do design são defendidos por David Jury quando afirma no seu livro About Face: the Rules of Typography “ Rules can be broken but never ignored”.

_07

Apesar de todos estes conflitos entre grelha tipográfica e desconstrução, é neste período que o papel do tipógrafo e do designer sofre uma radical alteração, em que lhes é dada uma responsabilidade acrescida, tornandoos participante ativos no processo de comunicação com os leitores. A nova tipografia defende que ela própria se tem de envolver com os leitores, dando-lhes o espaço necessário para as suas próprias interpretações das mensagens. A forma não tem de sacrificar o conteúdo, mas é um excelente meio para esta relação “íntima” com o leitor. “Postmodern graphic designers are deeply implicated in a consumer culture that makes ever more ingenious use of design as a beacon of identity and a tool of seduction. At the same time, they are freer that ever to question, oppose and perhaps begin to reframe design’s future role.”

POYNOR, Rick (2003); No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism

Mixing Messages

08_

‘Typography as Discourse’(1988) The recent history of graphic design in the United States reveals a series of actions and reactions. The fifties saw the flowering of U.S. graphic design in the New York School. This copy-concept and image-oriented direction was challenged in the sixties by the importation of Swiss minimalism, a structural and typographic system that forced a split between graphic design and advertising. Predictably, designers in the next decade rebelled against Helvetica and the grid system that had become the official American corporate style. In the early seventies, Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture emerged alongside the study of graphic design history as influences on American graphic design students. Simultaneously, Switzerland’s Basel school was transformed by Wolfgang Weingart’s syntactical experimentation, an enthusiasm that quickly spread to U.S. schools. Academia’s rediscovery of early-twentiethcentury Modernism, the appearance of historicized and vernacular architectural postmodernism, and the spread of Weingartian structural expressionism all came together in the graphic explosion labeled as .

Helvetica

New Wave

< Katherine McCoy with David Frej >

‘Towards a Universal Type’(1935) 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.

(...) 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.”

< Herbert Bayer >

‘No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism’(2003)

_09

So why write a critical survey of postmodernism and graphic design at this point? First, because no matter how awkward, problematic and uncertain the concept of postmodernism might appear to be, i tis now so well established as a way of thinking about our time and our ‘condition’ that it cannot be simply ignored. Second, because despite a certain amount of discussion in a few books, there has,

surprisingly, never been a book devoted to the topic. I say surprisingly because it could be argued that graphic design, as currently practised, is a prime exemple of a popular accessible médium exhibiting symptoms of postmodernism. In the last 15 years, graphic designers have created some of the most challenging exemples of postmodernism in the visual arts. For the most challenging exemples of postmodernism in the visual arts. For the most part, though, despire their cheerful em brace of ‘low’ popular culture, cultural studies commentors have overlooked these communications and products. Critical introductions to POSTMODERNISM

and the arts routinely deal with literature, architecture, fine art, photography, pop music, fashion, film and television, but they show little signo of even noticing, still less attempting to ‘theorize’, any form of design, despite its obviously central role as a shaper of comtemporary life.

< Rick Poynor >

‘Style is not a four letter word’(2004) ” By using the cliché of “rule

breaking”,Poynor effectively restricts post-

modernism in design to its reactionary emergence and validates the popular mis-

conception that postmodernism ended once its initial shock was absorbed. This reflects the current feeling in design that since there are no more rules, we have arrived at a post-postmodern, post-taste, poststyle, and postdesign free-for-all.

< Jeffery Keedy >

10_ ‘ American Graphic Design Expression: The evolution of American typography’(2001) It was not until the early twentieth century that meaning was embedded in visual typographic form. The early Modern revolutionary artists of Futurism, Dada, Constructivism, and De Stijl turned their attention to text and visual communications as well as the more traditional areas of fine art, rejecting the traditional divisions between the fine arts, applied arts, and crafts. Functional expression was embraced as well as the “purer” self-expressive goals of high art-function was not viewed as the enemy of art. In particular, the Russian Constructivists retained their artists’ identities even as they took on the role of public communicators in the Russian Revolution. The Bauhaus unified art, craft and design in a coherent philosophy and sense of identity. Several early Modernists went on to execwute some of the first serious “professional” graphic design, applying their early experiments to

pragmatic communications needs

the

of manufacturing clients.

These revolutionaries explored new approaches to structuring language and imagery that were radical rejections the classical text tradition. Their highly visual poetry used typographic forms and composition to interpret and extend the words’ meaning. One does not have to read Italian to gain an appreciation of the Futurists’ energetic celebrations of industry and political confrontation.

Typography finally became an expressive visual language as well as a verbal one.

This visual/verbal dichotomy can be understood through a simple diagram that charts the process (in the Western humanist tradition) of the acquisition of meaning. Seeing and reading are two modes through which we traditionally think of receiving messages. Image and text are two carriers of those messages. Typically we think of seeing as a visual process connected with images - we see the landscape, we see a painting. This process is intuitive, emotional and simultaneous, experienced almost involuntarily. Upon encountering a vivid color photograph of a fire, a viewer might immediately sense fear and heat with little need to conceptualize. Or an image of a nude figure might stimulate sexual feelings instantly and involuntarily. Although associations gained through life experience influence this process, it is predominantly a direct experiential one, related to the philosophical theories of phenomenology.

< Katherine McCoy >

‘The Typography of Order’(1959)

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Writing and printing are two fundamentally different techniques which should always be clearly distinguished

The written character is personal, spontaneous and unique. The printed character, cast in large numbers from the same mould, repeat itself indefinitely in exactly identical form and is therefore universal and impersonal. Its neutral and reserved nature permits the typographer or designer to use it in many new forms of composition. Any attempt to attain the spontaneity of handwriting with printed characters (more particulary with script types) is doomed to failure, for the two are incompatible.

< Emil Ruder >

‘Style is not a four letter word’(2004) In a somewhat nostalgic-sounding tone of resignation, Poynor says, “If

fundamental systemic change feels

r unlikely, then this tends to suggest that the postmodern condition will be our reality for the foreseeable future, imposing operational constraints or ‘rules’ of its own, whether we like it or not.” But the ideas that designers started exploring in the eighties and nineties, like deconstruction, appropriation, technology, authorship, and opposition, which Poynor skillfully outlines in his book, seem more like an attempt to establish new rules, practices, and disciplinarity in place of the “received wisdom” of modernism.

< Jeffery Keedy >

12_

‘Typography as Discourse’(1988) Shattering the constraints of minimalism was exhilarating and far more fun than the antiseptic discipline of the classical Swiss school. After a brief flurry of diatribes in the graphic design press, this permissive new approach quickly moved into the professional mainstream. Today, however, the maverick has been tamed, codified into a formalistic style that fills our design annuals with endlessly sophisticated renditions. What was originally a revolution is now an institution, as predictable as Beaux Arts architecture. It is the new status quo—the New Academy, as Phil Meggs calls it. Determining whether New Wave is postmodernism or just late Modernism is important in understanding new work today. New Wave extends the classical Swiss interest in structure to dissections and recombinations of graphic design’s grammar. Layered images and textures continue the collage aesthetic begun by Cubism, Constructivism, and Dada. But the addition of vernacular imagery and colors reflects postmodern architecture’s discovery of popular culture, and the reintroduction of the classic serif typefaces draws on pre-twentieth-century history. Taken as a whole, however, New Wave’s complex arrangements are largely syntactical, abstracting type and images into baroquely Modern compositions. The New Academy’s knowing, often slick iterations have left some graphic designers dissatisfied. As a result, long-neglected design elements, such as semantic expression in form, text, and imagery, are beginning to resurface. Much of this recent work steps outside the lineage of Bauhaus/Basel/New Wave, and, not surprisingly, some of its practitioners come from fine art, photographic, or literary backgrounds rather than graphic design training. When one looks for experimental typography today, what one finds is not so much new typography as new relationships between text and image. In fact, the typography so celebrated over the past ten years of structuralist dissection is disappearing. The look and structure of the letter

is underplayed, and verbal signification, interacting with imagery and symbols, is instead relied upon. The best new work is often aformal and sometimes decidedly anti-formal, despite the presence of some New Wave elements. Reacting to the technical perfection of mainstream graphic design, refinement and mastery are frequently rejected in favor of the directness of unmannered, hand-drawn, or vernacular forms—after all, technical expertise is hardly a revelation anymore. These designers value expression over style.

< Katherine McCoy with David Frej >

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‘No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism’(2003)

Postmodernism cannot be understood without reference to modernism. While the ‘post’ prefix might seem to suggest that postmodernism comes after modernism, or that it replaces or rejects it, many commentators point out that postmodernism is a kind of parasite, dependent on its modernist host and displaying many of the same features – except that the meaning has changed. Where postmodernism differs, above all, is in its loss of faith in the progressive ideals that sustained the modernists, who inherited the eighteenth-century Enlightenment’s belief in the possibility of continuous human progress through reason and science.

< Rick Poynor > ‘The New Typography’(1923)

We use all We typefaces, use all r

type sizes,

typefaces, type sizes,

geometric geometric forms, colors, etc.

forms, colors, etc.

We want to create a new language of typography whose elasticity, variability, and freshness of typographical composition exclusively dictated by the inner law of expression and the optical effect.

< Láslo Moholy-Nagy >

14_

‘The New Typography´s expanding Future’(1959) The “new typography” has taken root: anyone visiting this country for the first time cannot avoid being surprised by the multitude of printed matter and by the diversity of attitudes toward graphic design and typography. Here, now, is an internationally recognized “L’ÉCOLE

DE NEW YORK” in pioneering abstract

art. It rivals the older “l’école de Paris” by the unquestionable

merit of its achievements. Here, also, is a rapidly growing school of “new typography- U.S.A.”, inspired by Europe’s example and representing a wealth of new finding in visual communications. Solutions not found in history: it is difficult today to visualize any effect that da Vinci’s vision of a flying man can have on modern research in aviation. It is equally difficult to see how the “traditional” or “liberal conservative” should be allowed to influence further development of the new typography in the U.S.

< Ladislav Sutnar >

‘What is New in American Typography’(1959) Here in the United States typography has, in the past few years, assumed an increasingly importante role in the creation of advertissing. In the past, most advertising consisted of an idea translated in terms of copy (transferred to the printed page by mechanical typographic means) plus an illustration (photography or art) which interpreted the copy message. The typography was user solely as a caption for a picture or the picture was used as graphic means to create a visual image that emphasized the copymessage. (...) These influences have createda need for experimentation with new graphic forms in advertising. One of the importante results of this experimentations is wath I like to refer to as the typographic image. Many

designers

have found that

when the usual means of stimulating the reader into a buying attitude becomes

cliché, the use of typography as a world-picture gives them greater scope. (...) Through typographic means, the designer now presents, in one image, both the message and the pictorial idea. Sometimes, this “playing” with type has resulted in the loss of a certain amount of legibility. Researchers consider this a deplorable state of affairs but, on the other hand, the excitement created by a novel image sometimes more than compensates for the slight difficulty in readability.

< Herb Lubalin >

_15 ‘No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism’(2003)

[

much of this relatively new concept in typography depends on impact

The dissolution of authoritative standards creates fluid conditions in which all appeals to universality, expertise, set ways of doing things and unbreakable rules look increasingly dubious and untenable, at least in the cultural sphere. As many cultural critics have noted, the products of postmodern culture tend to be distinguished by such characteristics as fragmentation, impurity of form, depthlessness, indeterminacy, intertextuality, pluralism, eclecticism and a return to the vernacular. Originality, in the imperative modernist sense of ‘making it new’, ceases to be the goal; parody, pastiche and the ironic recycling of earlier forms proliferate. The postmodern object ‘problematizes’ meaning, offers multiple points of access and makes itself as open as possible to interpretation. (...) Graphic designers have continued to invoque the need first to absord, but then to resist and transcend the rules of professional

‘Rules are good. Break

tibor Kalman urged colleagues , as recently as 1998.

’,

design.

< Rick Poynor >

‘Typography as Discourse’(1988)

16_

Here on the edges of graphic design, the presence of the designer is sometimes so oblique that certain pieces would seem to spring directly from our popular culture. Reflecting current linguistic theory, the notion of “authorship” as a personal, formal vocabulary is less important than the dialogue between the graphic object and its audience; no longer are there one-way statements from designers. The layering of content, as opposed to New Wave’s formal layering of collage elements, is the key to this exchange. Objective communication is enhanced by deferred meanings, hidden stories, and alternative interpretations.

< Katherine McCoy with David Frej >

‘No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism’(2003) Graphic design without any rules would cease to be graphic design and this is even more the case with typography. As this introductions was written, signs of a growing backlash against rule-less design were starting to emerge from the typographic establishment. A look titled About Face: Rviving the Rules of Typography, published in 2002, contends that

‘Rules can be Broken but never ignored’... < Rick Poynor >

‘The Typography of Order’(1959) In printed matter with frequent variations of text, captions and illustrations of differing sizes, the design can be based on the division of a grid. Uncompromising acceptance of the sizes dictated

by this grid results in a correct and consisted overall design. The small and more numerous the divisions of the grid, the greater are the possibilities it offers.(...)

< Emil Ruder >

‘How can one make Swiss Typography?’(1972)

In my opinion one cannot make really good typography without exact knowledge and precise understanding of a text. Occasionally, you have probably thought that this is harmful to

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the readability of a text. But I think that the relatively high stimulus of such a text is adequate compensation for low readability. What good is readability when nothing in the text attracts one to even read it? Naturally this attitude leads to continued attempts to break away from trusted design patterns. We attempt to test experimentally the semantic and syntactic possibilities of typography, and to break through its ideological borders by consciously ignoring the traditional limits and recipes for typographic design.

< Wolfgang Weingart >

‘Towards a Universal Type’(1935)

we need a one-letter type alphabet. it gives us exactly the same result as the mixed type of C A P I T A L S and lower-case letters, and at the same time is less of a burden to school children, students, professional and business men.

< Herbert Bayer >

‘The Philosophy of Modernism in Typography’(1929) Typography has become a medium of communication for the people as a whole and not solely for some select group. Therefore, not until the new spirit of modernism has quite deeply penetrated the popular consciousness, does printing begin to reflect it.(...) “Form follow function.” The primary function of typography is to convey a message to be comprehension of the readers to whom it is addressed. (...) Clarity is the essencial feature of modern typography. Any form which does not first express the function of legibility is not in the true spirit of modern typography, no matter how striking or “modernistic” it may otherwise be.(...) For like reasons, ornamentation in the usual sense is excluded from the modern

The only purpose of ornament is to make of the layout an attractive picture, which is not a proper aim, as the sole typography.

object should be to get the printed story comprehended by the reader. Anything standing in the way of this objective must be sacrificed.

< Douglas C. McMurtrier >

18_ ‘Typography as Discourse’(1988) Sources for much current experimentation can be traced to recent fine art and photography, and to literary and art criticism. Influenced by French poststructuralism, critics and artists deconstruct verbal language as a filter or bias that inescapably manipulates the reader’s response. When this approach is applied to art and photography, form is treated as a visual language to be read as well as seen. Both the texts and the images are to be read in detail, their meanings decoded. Clearly, this intellectualized communication asks a lot of its audience; this is harder work than the formal pleasures of New Wave. Much new typography is very quiet. Some of the most interesting, in fact, is impossible to show here because of its radically modest scale or its subtle development through a sequence of pages. Some is bold in scale but so matterof-fact that it makes little in the way of a visual statement. (One designer calls these strictly linguistic intentions “nonallusive” typography.)Typefaces now range from the classics to banal, often industrial sans serifs. Copy is often treated as just that—undifferentiated blocks of words— without the mannered manipulations of New Wave, where sentences and words are playfully exploded to express their parts. Text is no longer the syntactic playground of Weingart’s descendants. These cryptic, poker-faced juxtapositions of text and image do not always strive for elegance or refinement, although they may achieve it inadvertently.The focus now is on expression through semantic content, utilizing the intellectual software of visual language as well as the structural hardware and graphic grammar of Modernism. It is an interactive process that—as art always anticipates social evolution—heralds our emerging information economy, in which meanings are as important as materials.

< Katherine McCoy with David Frej >

‘The Typography of Order’(1959) Typography is regarded primarily as a means of ordering the

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various constituents of a layout. Exacting artistic postulates or creations are no longer involved; the endeavor is simply to find a formally and functionally satisfactory answer to daily requirements. The rules that a text should be easily readable is an uncon-

The amount of text set on any one page should not be more than the reader can readily cope with; lines that are over sixty letters are considered difficult to read; word and line spacing are closely interraleted and have a most important influence on effortless reading. ditional one.

< Emil Ruder >

[

‘The New Typography’(1923)

[

The new typography is a simultaneous experience of vision and communication.

< Láslo Moholy-Nagy >

< Bibliogafia > 20_

MCCOY, K. with FREJ, D. (1988); Typography as Discourse, in H. Armstrong & E. Lupton, (2009), Graphic design theory : readings from the field (pp. 81 - 83).New York : Pinceton Architectural Press.

LUBALIN, H. (1959); What is New in American Typography?, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 123 - 125).New York: Allworth Press. MCCOY, Katherine (1990); American Graphic Design Expression: The Evolution of American Typography, Design Quarterly 149(pp. 3 - 22). Cambridge, The MIT Press. POYNOR, Rick (2003); No More Rules: Graphic design and postmodernism. London : Laurence King BAYER, H. (1935); Toward a Universal Type, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 60 - 62).New York : Allworth Press.

MC MURTRIER, D. (1929); The Philosophy of Modernism in Typography, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 40 - 42).New York : Allworth Press. MOHOLY-NAGY, L. (1923); The New Typography, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 21 - 22).New York : Allworth Press. RUDER, E. (1959); The Typography of Order, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 35 - 39).New York : Allworth Press. WEINGART, W. (1972); Lay In - Lay Out, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 260 - 266).New York : Allworth Press. KEEDY, J. (2004); Style is not a four letter word, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (2006), Looking Closer 5: Critical writings on graphic design (pp. 94 - 103).New York : Allworth Press. SUTNAR, L. (1959); The New Typographyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s explanding Future, in M. Bierut, W. Drenttel & S. Heller, (1999), Looking Closer 3: Classic writings on graphic design (pp. 126 - 129).New York : Allworth Press.