A typographic approach that is developed entirely from its conditioning factors— or in other words, that works with the basic units of typography in an elemental way—this we term ‘elemental typography.’ And if at the same time this approach is intent on designing a text-image so that it becomes a living text-organism, without decorative extras and without being laboured, then we may call it ‘funktionelle(functional)’ or ‘organische (organic)’ typograe (typography). This means, indeed, that all factors—technical, economic, functional and aesthetic requirements—should be fullled equally, and combine together to determine the textimage.
That mechanization is ‘modern’ does not mean that it is also valuable or even good; more likely it is not good. But since we cannot go on without it, we must simply accept it as a condition and not worship it because of its origin! An ugly telephone bothers an aesthetically oriented person like Bill or myself, but we should not then think that a properly designed telephone is a work of art, or a symbol of it.
ld 1946 icho sch nT Ja
46 ill 19 xB Ma
We saw aesthetic models in industrial products and, believing the sanserif to be the simplest typeface (wrongly, as it turned out), we declared it to be the modern face. (…) The tragedy was that this truly ascetic simplicity soon reached a point where no further development was possible. It was a recruiting camp for newer developments, needed at the time, but to which no one wanted to return.
ld 1945 icho sch nT Ja
What indeed would one say of an electrician who began to explain that an oilburning lamp is more homely, more convenient and sweeter-smelling than an electric light? We would certainly resist if someone wanted to turn back technical development by 100 or 200 years, to take us back to the style of living of that time. Such an antiquarian craze would not last long; one would come to see the advantages of technical possibilities, of the forms that issue logically from these possibilities, and their artistic expression too.
For it has been shown that the apparently simple rules of functional typography are not common knowledge, because they spring from a special, in effect fanatical, attitude of conspirators into whose group one must first be ‘initiated.’ Traditional typography is quite different: it is far from being unorganic, it can easily be understood by everybody, its finer points are not difficult to appreciate, it presumes no sectarianism and its application in the hands of a beginner does not produce nearly so many blunders as the New Typography in the hands of the uninitiated.
It is the same argument that is made against every artistic innovation, either by former practitioners of the movement that is by then under attack, or by fashionable fellow- travellers, when their own vigour and belief in progress are in decline, and as they look back to the ‘tried and tested.
What bothers me most is that he seems to deny me the right to work in the way I find best. As an artist he must know that a creative person can only work in the way he believes right. He who calls for the suppression of freedom of thought and artistic expression carries on the gloomy business of those whom we thought were defeated. He commits the worst crime, for he buries our highest good, the sign of man’s worthfreedom.
Machine composition imitates hand composition, the nearer the better; if it had other than optical aims, such as mere technical expediency, it would come close to the unusable, optically inadequate compromise of a typewriter type. (…) It is less flexible and not at all easier to handle than hand composition. It is more efficient but in no way able to change materially the appearance of typography by means of some sort of ‘mechanical’ law of its own.
Not only is the argument that books must be produced in the style of the time in which they were written (thus Schiller and Goethe in the style of the last century) often unusable (for example, Plato, Confucius, and so on), but it betrays a denite fear of the problems and solutions that issue from a functional typography. It is a ight into the traditional, an expression of a backward-looking historicism.