What is typography?

A survey of books on my shelves suggests a variety of answers, each of which has seduced me at one point or another in the course of my career. One is that typography consists of a set of rules of good style or taste to follow, which are to be employed mainly in books of continuous, and in particular literary, text. Another is that typography has to do with letterforms and their creative arrangement on title-pages or in specimens full of self-referential quotations. Graphic-design annuals and books of posters also elevate letterforms and their arrangement, but on a larger scale and often purposely in violation of supposed rules or the notion thereof, in service of commerce or, decreasingly, of civil society. Sources on ‘fine printing’, printing history, history of letterforms, the manuscript tradition, and the like supply a canonical lore the mastery of which can feel like, but is not, an understanding of the practice of the art. And Modernist authors often imply that their understanding of typography involves cultivating a particular look. There is some shockingly bad typography, however defined, to be found in all of these streams.

Of course typography is, or can be, deployed in both fancy books and showy publicity work. Bruno Pfäffli usefully distinguished ‘readable typography’ from ‘visible typography’, implicitly placing them side by side. On the other hand, Robin Kinross elevated the quotidian: ‘printing and typography are in service of the ordinary and the everyday. The pamphlet, the invoice form, the trade catalogue, the flimsily-made novel: these are the staples of printing’ ( Modern Typography ). Amen to that. Fernand Baudin, looking at the role of the written word in culture as a whole, pointed to a spectrum between the extrema of the literary and the ephemeral, including ‘the legal, commercial, religious, and scientific documents that contribute to the rational structure of our society’ ( ‘Typography: evolution + revolution’, Journal of Typographic Research 1.4 ); in so doing he was reminding us of the milieux in and for which writing was developed in the first place ( and of course, corollarily, of the power structures attached to these spheres.) Stanley Morison’s 1960s postscripts to ‘First principles of typography’ also point to the role of typography in civilization ( and to much else that is perhaps surprisingly concordant with the approach outlined in this article ).

Useful answers to the question ‘what is typography?’, however, are both simpler and more profound.

A range of designers including such figures as Anthony Froshaug, Helmut Schmid, and Massimo Vignelli state repeatedly that typography is, or begins with, analysis of the text. This now seems obvious, but was not a thing I learned from either a degree program in ‘graphic communications’ that included no instruction in typography, or, say, Zapf’s Manuale Typographicum that I found in the library.

Froshaug:

First, we must ask how we look at, perceive, then analyse, what the text says, what we have to communicate...
     ‘Design is an exercise in analogy’

Contemporary typography holds beauty to be the organic solution to a problem in requiredness: the typographical form must be required by the function and meaning of the text...Typography is a problem in semantics, not in decoration...
     ‘Towards the codification of a standard for business letterheadings’

The first stage in any design job is to get & understand the brief... it is your initial responsibility as a designer to disentangle the threads of thought and fact which you are given and to configure them into a self-consistent coherent form. In itself, this is design: you cannot proceed to any valid expression of the purpose of the job in any design form unless this work is first done.
     from a first-year typewriter typography assignment
     at the Central School, 1977

Schmid:

[ As with Michelangelo and sculpture,] in typography, the demands of the visual presentation, so to speak, already embodied in the content, are embodied in the nature of the job... Typography derived from content asks for preparatory work. Only when a job is comprehended, when a structure is worked out, only then can the content of the message be effectively organized and interpreted.
‘Typography derived from content’

To me, typography means the act ( art? ) of exposing that design which is already inherent in the problem.

Vignelli:

Good design is a matter of discipline. It starts by looking at the problem and collecting all the available information about it. If you understand the problem, you have the solution. It’s really more about logic than imagination.

What does this analysis reveal? Froshaug points to ‘function and meaning of the text’; Schmid mentions the ‘structure’; Vignelli looks at context. Each of these could be unpacked at some length. In more or less literary text, elements to analyze and understand include – as with oral presentation of such a text – grammar, prosody, meaning and form at every scale of the work. With other kinds of work the typographer must understand, and perhaps be able to shape, the import and argument of a presentation of data, or the ways in which an instructional or informational document will be used, or how identifying material fits into a range of applications. I would add style or voice as another object of study. Without this kind of analysis and understanding, there is and can be no design, and any resulting visual artefact will be meaningless.

After analysis of the text or ‘brief’ or ‘problem’, typography is concerned to re-present the text, to translate thought or discourse or information of whatever genre into analogous visual–spatial terms.

Froshaug:

... And then find ways to translate our ( probably imperfect ) understanding.
     ‘Design is an exercise in analogy’

Design consists...fourth, in translating all the problem, set of problems, into another language, another sign system, with love.
     ‘Cybernetics’

For each text to be translated into typographic terms, determine not just how the text appears, but what it means to say. Discover if there be an existing typographic language which allows this fullest meaning to be set out...To find the text, to stipulate the ways in which it gets manipulated, to cohere all the mutually-destructive ( as they may, at first, seem ) requirements into a still centre of quiet meaning: this needs a knowledge and a recognition of typography.
     ‘Typography is a grid’

What is the system, what are the materials, by which typography represents language? Froshaug and Peter Burnhill argued, as I discussed in a previous article, that typography depends fundamentally upon a set of standardized, repeatable units, space(s) foremost among them, for making analogues to the characteristics of the text. Froshaug did go on to lay out some of the other means by which this is done, which many consider the ( only ) stuff of typography: measure, type size, leading... Student exercises shown in Peter Burnhill’s article ‘Outside the whale’ and published on ‘The optimism of modernity’ – a series of comparative showings of texts with different word spacing, line spacing, measure, and size; or the interactions of the line spacing and type style of headings – bear out his concern with these parameters.

Notably absent from this approach is any discussion of typefaces or letterforms. As Paul Stiff ’s introductory comments to these documents on the web page note, ‘Most “type specimens” [ before the advent of desktop publishing ] were just that, designed to exhibit the shapes of letters and other characters, and so perhaps fostering typographers’ continuing obsession with surface features.’ I suggest Stiff was really criticizing a view of type as lettering; in any case, the design and choice of type(s) can be important factors in many different kinds of jobs. ( We might even be permitted to enjoy letterforms or a particularly inspired choice of face! ) But my own experience has finally taught me that remarkably few faces really settle down, compose well, and get out of the way. Froshaug, Schmid ( who made the point that it takes time, effort, and sympathy to learn to ‘play’ a typeface well ), and multiple generations of Swiss modernists – not to mention the Doves Press or Jenson – habitually used a single face; others including Vignelli, Derek Birdsall, and Experimental Jetset have spent entire careers fruitfully using no more than a handful.

Absent too is a concern for ‘originality’ or ‘creativity’ or ‘concept’. Froshaug instructs his readers to ‘determine if there be an existing typographic language which allows this fullest meaning to be set out’, elsewhere suggesting that often there is and one need not reinvent it. Wim Crouwel, in a famous debate, admitted that ‘When you work on a company’s or organization’s identity, the package of demands you analyze proves to be the same in most cases. ... the communication of many businesses and organizations tend to be quite similar, and it is not necessary to disguise this fact or to put a gloss on it.’ Paul Stiff, responding to Kinross’s request for a Dogme-95-like manifesto, declared that ‘Looking good is better than looking different. Looking good is worthless without making sense.’ Bernd Kuchenbeiser has spoken of the need to struggle for simplicity, to let go of the ‘exaggerated will to form’, to ‘remove the obstacles standing between the assignment and a good design’. Style, perhaps even a recognizable personal style, develops, but it arises from one’s approach and must serve the text.

For Peter Burnhill and perhaps others, typography is concerned not so much with letterforms, let alone ‘creativity’, but with understanding the structure and use of both language and the machines used to reproduce it, and presumably marrying the two. What does this mean? Burnhill did not elaborate in the letter to the editor of Visible Language in which he suggested this idea. Perhaps he would say that the business of typography lies in the interface between text and tool.

Kinross takes this more or less literally, though what precisely constitutes the ‘link’ he mentions is left unspecified:

The juxtaposition that one finds happening in typography is easy to grasp. It is the link between a keyboard and a monitor; between manuscript copy and a laser-printed proof; between information on a disc and on sheets of text on film; and finally, and differently, between the page and the reader. The links between these pairs are, we try to ensure, anything but arbitrary.
‘Fellow readers’

For Paul Stiff, this link or interface ultimately consists – or did so until fairly recently – in the typographer’s specification to the compositor ( ‘Instructing the printer’, Typography Papers 1 ), though this still also required the interpretive skill of the comp, who, often unlike the designer, fully understood the ‘structure and use of machines’. This points up the twofold nature of ‘translation’: finding ways to represent speech or thought in terms of space, the variables of type, and relationships among elements on a field; and translating the results into technical specifications for their production and reproduction. Today this link might take the form of the designer’s template or style sheets in or for a page-layout application, or the code serving to format text on a screen. ( It has been said that the best way to understand something is to undertake to instruct a computer to do it, for this requires minute analysis, understanding of structure and process, and clarity of thought and expression: the same things required in writing a typographical specification.)

What, then, is required of the typographer, or perhaps one should say, for typography to exist or occur? Both Baudin and Burnhill ( himself perhaps following Baudin ) point to ‘literacy’, though literacy particularly defined.

For Burnhill, literacy, which was both requirement and goal of his course at the Stafford College of Art and Design, was to be ‘extend[ed] through the study and practice of typographic designing’ as well as drawing, photography, and three-dimensional work such as exhibition displays. This suggests that ‘literacy’ for him had to do not only with writing, reading, and analyzing a text clearly, but also with coordinating mind, eye, and hand: learning to think, to see, and to do in harmony and good order.

For Baudin, literacy involved, or should involve, skill not only in writing but also in the visual organization of the text; writing at the dawn of desktop publishing and with the experience of previous shifts in the technology and therefore the culture of written communication, he could see the importance of training everyone in both the abstract and concrete parts of writing, in clarifying thought and its visual representation. This is a demotic version of Kinross’s ideal that there be no discrete boundary between typographical and editorial work ( ‘For a typography of details’ ), a notion also espoused by Max Bruinsma and no doubt others. It is how I have approached and understood my work at its truest, even though the extent and complexity of this kind of contribution is rarely noticed.

This almost total ignorance among teachers and practitioners, employers and patrons, let alone the public, of what actually constitutes typography makes it difficult enough to flourish in the field and underscores Baudin’s plea. A political movement opposed to intellectual tools, social acts, public service – all of which good typography is – makes it even harder, but also even more critical, to cultivate this discipline today.