Note: This essay was originally published in 1989 in Fine Print: The Review for the Arts of the Book. In the intervening quarter-century, vast terrains of typography have shifted from print to screen, and many “books” are now read on digital displays, not in print. We can no longer limit typography discussions to the art of the book; we have to consider the art of typography in both analog and digital, print and screen. For that reason, in 2012, I organized a symposium at Rochester Institute of Technology on "Reading Digital", to review the science, technology, art, and design of reading and typography in the digital realm.
But, this essay was written 23 years earlier. Looking back on it, I see that some of my views have changed over time because of new media, new knowledge, or new interpretations of old knowledge, but the basic distinctions are, I believe, still the same; the shift to digital typography has not changed them.
The parts about vision science could and certainly should be updated because research on vision and reading has made considerable progress since the 1980s. Reading scientists have found out more about the visual processes underlying reading, and some recent findings are intriguing as well as relevant to typography.
I think it is safe to say, however, that we don't understand much more about the art of typography than we did 25 years ago, or 80 years ago, or, come to think of it, 500 years ago. Jan Tschichold, who created brilliant typography as a modernist and followed it with brilliant typography as a classicist, showed us that.
To rewrite this out-of-print essay to include newer technological and scientific developments would probably require a book length disquisition, so I am making it available as-it-was but in digital form for reading on screen instead of in print. This blog version contains the original text, footnotes, and references, but, for now, lacks the illustrations, although the image captions are present. The original composition for print was in Lucida Bright, a new type at the time, but here the text is composed in Lucida Grande (or whatever font one's browser substitutes). The original footnotes are marked by numbers in parentheses, e.g. (1), in the main body of text, and listed by number at the end of the essay.
FORM, PATTERN & TEXTURE IN THE TYPOGRAPHIC IMAGE
by Charles Bigelow
IN HER FAMOUS ESSAY, "The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible," Beatrice Warde argues that typography is not an art.
"Type well used is invisible as type . . . . That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. . . . . printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor." (1)
In a less-known but no less important essay, "Clay in the Potter's Hand," Jan Tschichold argues that typography is an art:
“Decisions on matters of higher typography, such as in a title page, need a really highly developed taste, related to what is needed in creative art. They may produce forms which are quite as perfect as good painting or sculpture. From the experts they should receive even more respect since the typographer is more strictly bound than any other artist by the unchangeable wording of the material before him. None but a master can call the dead leaden letters to true life.
Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Out of stiff, unconnected little parts a whole must be shaped which is alive and convincing as a whole. Sculpture in stone alone comes near in its obstinacy to perfect typography. For most people it offers no special aesthetic charm as it is as difficult of access as the highest music . . . .” (2)
Warde bases her argument on pragmatics: because typography is useful, because it conveys ideas, it cannot be art, for art is, by implication, aesthetic and sensual rather than utilitarian and rational. Tschichold bases his argument on sophistication, in the sense of complexity or refinement: because typography can be as developed, perfect, difficult, and elusive as the fine arts, it must be an art itself.
In claiming that the typographic whole is constructed from elementary parts, that it is greater than the sum of its parts, and that it can be alive, Tschichold is espousing "holism," a philosophy which asserts that complex systems exhibit emergent characteristics that cannot be predicted from knowledge of their components - simply put, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts - and "vitalism," a relative of holism, which says that a certain kind of complex system possesses a vital, living essence that does not exist in its constituent parts.
Typography is a complex system which comprises type faces, which in turn comprise alphabets, which in turn comprise letters, all of which may be selected, combined, and arranged according to many different principles in a vast number of ways. The perceptual effect of a typographic work cannot, according to a holistic view, be deduced from simple knowledge of the individual letterforms.
What Warde and Tschichold both are trying to do in these apparently contradictory essays is to define and understand the aesthetic principles of typography. They both observe that most readers do not notice good typography. Nevertheless, because printed text is a dominant visual experience of modern civilization, those readers will spend hours a day and years in a lifetime viewing printed pages.
Therefore the principles that govern the typographic image are potentially important to everyone who works with printed texts - writers, editors, publishers, teachers, librarians, and bibliophiles - as well as to the printing historians and typographic designers who scrutinize type pages with professional eyes.
In this essay we examine two fundamental typographic principles, size and combination, and show that out of their interaction emerge three qualitative levels of the typographic image: form, pattern, and texture.
SIZE
VARIATION OF SIZE within a text is one of typography's signal contributions to the art of literacy. Size variation was not unknown before typography - it can be found in Latin and Greek alphabetic manuscripts, Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions, and Chinese logographic brush writing and block printing, but it has developed in typography to a greater degree than in those chirographic, epigraphic, or xylographic traditions.
Multiple sizes of type in a text are not strictly necessary, either for sense - typewritten texts composed in a single size of type have served authors, editors, teachers and students well for over a century - or for beauty - certain incunabula composed only in one size of type are still regarded as paragons of typography. Yet, variation of type size makes text clearer, more dynamic, and more engaging. Size variation is a mainstay of typographic design. Without it, the modern book would be dull, and the modern newspaper impossible.
Size is so important to typography that the creation of a spectrum of different sizes of type occupied the careers of the greatest punchcutters of the golden age of typography. After Claude Garamond cut his first definitive romans, like the St. Augustin size (approximately 14 point) in Jacques DuBois' In Linguam Gallicam Isagoge printed by Robert Estienne in 1531, three generations of punchcutters labored to create additional sizes in Garamond's idiom. The Konrad Berner Foundry type specimen of 1592 shows the Garamond style of roman face available in a series of sizes from Canon (approximately 48 point) to Nonpareil (approximately 6 point), cut variously by Garamond himself, Robert Granjon, Pierre Haultin, and Jacques Sabon. Christopher Plantin's folio type specimen of 1585 shows a similar range by most of the same hands, with yet larger sizes of roman by Hendrik van den Keere (though in a style noticeably different from Garamond's). Toward the end of the sixteenth century, Guillaume Le Be I and Jacques de Sanlecque also cut sizes of roman in the Garamond style. Moreover, Granjon in his long and prolific career cut many sizes of italic faces in his own distinctive styles, examples of which are also shown in the Berner and Plantin specimens. (3)
IMAGE The Konrad Berner type specimen, Frankfurt, 1592.
Why is size so useful? Tschichold's comparison of typography to music suggests analogies that may illuminate the role of size in typography. Large letters are used for emphasis in text, as loud notes are used for emphasis in music or loud voices in conversation. Hence, size in type is somewhat like loudness or dynamics in music. Just as different parts of a musical composition are loud or soft (in musician's terms, forte or piano) different parts of a text are large or small.
Type size is more closely analogous to musical pitch, but in a spatial rather than a temporal dimension. (f) In typography, spatial frequency is the number of black and white alternations per unit of distance, just as musical frequency is the number of acoustic vibrations per unit of time. In a given length of line, a small size of type fits more letters, and hence more alternations of black stems with white counters and spaces, than does a large size; hence, smaller type has a higher spatial frequency.
IMAGE minimum chains at different sizes
A typeface that is available in a range of sizes is like a musical instrument which can produce a scale of notes of different pitch. A typographic composition that includes different type sizes thus comprises "notes" of different visual pitch, just as a musical composition comprises notes of different audible pitch. When a reader views a whole page, different type sizes are perceived simultaneously, thus constituting a kind of spatial harmony; when one reads a linear text, the types are perceived sequentially, thus constituting a kind of spatial melody.
An analogy can also be drawn between the visual qualities of the typographic notes produced by a typeface, and musical "timbre." Typographic timbre is a complex visual sensation resulting from the interaction of the proportions, details, and spacing of the typeforms, just as musical timbre is a complex acoustic sensation that results from the sum of the harmonics (partials or overtones) produced by the shape and design of an instrument. A typeface family that includes related variations, such as roman, italic, and bold (and perhaps sans-serif as well) permits the typographer to adjust visual timbre somewhat independently of spatial frequency or size. (4)
A concept related to size is "scale." A scale is a fixed series of measures, and hence to scale type is to enlarge or reduce it. When scaling leaves letter proportions unchanged, it is termed "linear." Linear scaling is standard in photographic and digital typography. Opposed to linear scale is non-linear or optical scale, adapted to the eye rather than the machine. Harry Carter, in "The Optical Scale in Typefounding," demonstrates that the traditional proportions of typeforms differ according to whether type is large, medium, or small. In particular, he shows that type designed for a small scale tends to be wider, have a larger x height, thicker hairlines, and more exaggerated serifs, joins, and terminals than type for a large scale. (5)
IMAGE Times Roman fonts of different design sizes, scaled to
same x-height to show proportional changes according to scale.
Similarly, Daniel Berkeley Updike observes that, "A design for a type alphabet that may be entirely successful for the size for which it is drawn, cannot be successfully applied to all other sizes of the same series. Each size is a law unto itself . . ." (6)
Traditional punchcutters and scribes made such proportional changes in order to optimize legibility. Recent research in visual perception suggests that such proportional changes are necessary because the human visual system has non-linear sensitivity to visual features of different spatial frequencies. (7)
Today, photographic and computer techniques can render almost any size of type with ease and precision. Type size has become a continuum instead of a sparse series of fixed sizes and proportions. Because innumerable fine gradations of size are now possible, the typographer must strive to understand the principles that govern the appearance of types at all sizes.
The range of sizes in text is commonly divided into three main scales: large, medium, and small. (8) These refer to apparent size more than physical size. Apparently small type may be physically small, e.g., 6 point type in a newspaper classified advertisement read at a distance of twelve inches, or physically large, e.g., two-foot high type on a billboard read at a distance of ninety-six yards, but both appear to be the same size because they subtend the same degree of visual angle at the retina of the eye. {0.3 degrees of visual angle} (type size = 1/144 of distance)
In general, large scale type is used for the display of particular words or phrases, as in titles; medium scale for the main or body text, and small scale for reference text, like footnotes in books or classified advertising in newspapers. However, the actual sizes depend on context. In a book, the medium scale text may be composed in 12 point and small scale footnotes in 9 point, whereas in a newspaper, the medium scale text may be in 9 point and the small scale classified advertising in 6 point. (8)
The textual significance of a given size of type is based on relative scale - the relationship of a given size of type to the other sizes of type on the page. For example, a small amount of large type positioned above a large amount of smaller type usually marks the former as a title or heading for the latter, whatever their actual sizes may be. Relative scale has meaning, whereas absolute size is merely a physical fact.
COMBINATION
IN TEXT COMPOSITION, size is always associated with another fundamental typographic principle, combination, as a direct consequence of the nature of language.
As a medium of communication, typography is twice removed from its content. At the first remove, writing is a visual representation of language, and at the second, typography is an industrialized representation of writing. To the reader, the letters that compose a text are recognized in passing but are not themselves objects of contemplation; rather, the words, and behind them, the ideas expressed by the text are of primary interest. As if to acknowledge these two aspects, the word "text" has dual meanings. First it is the printed artifact - the perceptual object, and second it is the linguistic construction - the conceptual object. Although text is used mainly in the latter sense today, its etymology suggests the former, as the modern word is derived from Latin textus, a weaving, referring to the woven pattern created by written letters arrayed on a page. (9)
IMAGE Text composed in type based on the Textura script, so named because of its woven appearance. From the Gutenberg Bible, c. 1455, the first European book printed from movable type.
Because the art of weaving involves the creation of a two dimensional fabric from a one-dimensional thread, an obvious analogy with typography can be drawn, for speech is a one-dimensional string in time woven by typography into a two-dimensional plane in space. As the revolutionary Russian typographer El Lissitzky observed, "We have two dimensions for the word. As a sound it is a function of time, and as a representation it is a function of space." (10)
Typographic weaving is composition, the repetition and recombination of a small number of letterforms into strings and the assembly of those strings into masses of text. It reflects what the French linguist André Martinet has called the "double articulation" of language. ("Articulation" here being itself a double entendre, meaning both segmentation into components and pronunciation.) Though apparently of infinite variety, the utterances of a language are constructed from a finite set of meaningful segments - words or "morphemes" - which constitute the first articulation. The words themselves are constructed from a much smaller set of sound units - "phonemes" - which constitute the second articulation. A language may contain myriads of words but will have fewer than a hundred distinct sounds (English, for example, has some forty-five phonemes {and some 250,000 words}. Since there are so few individual phonemes in relation to the large number of words, each phoneme is repeated many times in many combinations. (11)
To represent language in a graphic medium, typography likewise utilizes the repetition and recombination of elements. In alphabetic typography, the graphic signs or "graphemes" are letters. In logographic typography (used for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in varying degrees) the graphemes are characters. Individual letters signify sounds or phonemes, the second articulation, and combinations of letters (or single characters in a logographic script) signify words or morphemes, the first articulation. As is true for the phoneme, the single letter generally has no meaning by itself; its significance lies in its differentiation from the other letters, and its combinations with them to produce higher-level meaningful segments.
THE TYPOGRAPHIC IMAGE
THE INTERACTION of size and combination creates three levels of the typographic image: form, pattern, and texture. Each level contains a range of sizes in varying degrees of combinatory complexity. Although size is a quantitative aspect of type, the emergent levels of the typographic image are qualitative.
Form
The design of a letter is a study in form. The letterform is a dualistic rendering: black and white, intaglio and relief, figure and ground, on and off. The contour that separates and defines the polarities of the letter image creates the interaction between letterform and counterform, interior and exterior, positive and negative space. The resultant perception includes lines, such as fair curves, straight edges, smooth joins, and sharp corners, as well as shapes, such as solid regions, empty hollows, delicate taperings, and abrupt terminations.
IMAGE: Lucida Bright lower-case a
At the level of form, the letter is viewed at a large scale. In the large letter, interior area dominates contour line because of a geometrical relationship known to the Greeks: the area of a form increases in proportion to the square of the size, whereas the length of the contour that defines the form increases in direct proportion to the size. When a letter is large, the area of the interior is large in proportion to the line of the contour, and much of that region is relatively far from the contour. Hence, the mass (or void) tends to dominate the image. However, this tendency is partly counteracted by mechanisms in the human visual system, such as lateral inhibition, that extract edges from images and de-emphasize monotonous surfaces. (12)
At its largest perceptual size, the letterform is isolated. Extracted from the context of the alphabetic system, the isolated letter becomes an object of contemplation, not mean ing. It is pure form, its semiological role vacated because alone the letter has no significance. It is an abstraction. As Eric Gill wrote, "Letters are not pictures or representations. They are more or less abstract forms." (13)
Form invites abstract analysis. Renaissance humanists and artists analyzed the shapes of letterforms with the compass and straightedge of Euclidean geometry.
IMAGE Capital Q letter construction by Sigismondo Fanti Theorica et practica ... de modo scribendi fabricandique omnes literarum species, Venice, 1514.
Enlightenment academicians used the grids of Cartesian geometry. Today's computer scientists use the mathematical formulae of splines and conic curves.
Because letterforms can easily be scaled to any size by modern typographic technology, the finest details of the forms, formerly examined only by experts, can now be appreciated by everyone. The letter under the lens of photographic and digital typography is like the work of art under the lens of the camera, as discussed by Andre Malraux in The Voices of Silence:
“In an album or art book the illustrations tend to be of much the same size. Thus works of art lose their relative proportions; a miniature bulks as large as a full-size picture, a tapestry or a stained-glass window . . . In this way reproduction frees a style from the limitations which made it appear to be a minor art.”
“Indeed, reproduction (like the art of fiction, which subdues reality to the imagination) has created what might be called "fictitious" arts, by systematically falsifying the scale of objects; by presenting oriental seals the same size as the decorative reliefs on pillars and amulets like statues . . . Sometimes the reproductions of minor works suggest to us great styles which have passed away - or which "might have been." “ (14)
At a large scale, the letterform ceases to be a minor art, and takes its place with the forms of painting, sculpture, and even architecture as objects of study and contemplation. The letter as form is displayed, as Beatrice Warde said above, "as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses."
The effect that the forms of letters will produce when combined into text is often impossible to predict because many of the characteristics of an alphabet design emerge only en masse. The next level of the typographic image, the level of forms in combination, is the level of pattern.
Pattern
Combined into words and lines of text, the forms and counterforms of individual letters become elements of a periodic structure. The shapes of stems, bowls, serifs, and other features of a letter relate to similar features of other letters, as the forms of counters inside a letter relate to the counters of other letters and to the spaces between letters. Because there are only a few different letterforms in an alphabet, each form is repeated many times in many combinations, and the relationships between forms and counterforms extend beyond near neighbors to entire lines and columns. The sum of these relationships is a pattern.
The level of pattern occurs at a medium scale, where the interior area of a form no longer dominates the contour line. Instead, these two different aspects of a geometric figure tend toward equilibrium. Because much of the interior area of a form lies close to the contour, the interaction of contours with areas, edges with surfaces, gives the text image an active quality.
A text pattern is complex because it results not only from the repetition of whole letters, but also of letter parts. Letters are constructed from more primitive graphic elements. In handwriting, these elements are kinesthetic movements - gestures and strokes - which leave graphic traces; in type design, they are graphic features which can be consistently combined, such as stems, bowls, diagonals, cross bars, hairlines, joins , serifs, and terminals. Because the letters share a small number of elemental features, the structure of the text pattern is derived from symmetries and transformations of repeating letter parts as well as from repetitions of fully formed letters.
This constructive, systematic nature of typefaces is a result of the formal interactions of the letters during a long, common history. The development of the alphabet shows a transformation of originally iconic or pictorial signs, linked by relationships of resemblance to the objects signified, into abstract, symbolic shapes which have stronger formal linkages to each other than to the things they signify. The alphabet represents a system of sounds, not a collection of isolated entities, and thus no letter exists in isolation. Graphically, each letter must be unique in order to carry its particular significance, but it must also be fashionable by the same means as the others, writable by the same hands and tools, constructible from the same elements.
Pattern begins with the word and comes to full flower in the line and column. The line of type is a one-dimensional pattern, like a frieze, based on the repetition of geometric figures in a line. For efficient packing, the continuous line of type is cut into segments which are arrayed in columns, creating a two-dimensional type page which, like wallpapers, tilings, and fabrics, is based on repetition in a plane. This structural relationship of type to pattern has been familiar to typographers for centuries. Robert Granjon in the sixteenth century and Pierre Simon Fournier in the eighteenth excelled in the creation of floral forms or fleurons that could be combined into ornamental patterns to accompany their typeforms combined into text. (15)
IMAGE Page of prospectus designed by Jan Tschichold, 1947. The individual forms of the large capitals are evident, and the beginnings of pat terns are seen in the word combinations. The lines of smaller capitals exhibit stronger patterns, while the individual forms are less evident.
The patterns that emerge from text are nevertheless different from those of ornamental friezes and tilings because the latter, though often beautiful and intricate, convey relatively little information despite multiplicity of forms. The mathematical principles that govern the tiling of the plane make it possible to predict exactly when and where a given geometric element will occur in a pattern. Hence, there is little new information derived from each repetition of the pattern. (16)
IMAGE Granjon arabesque.
A third dimension of pattern is found in the codex form of book, which, like a crystal, is composed of parallel text planes in space. The codex book is, however, a cognitive more than a visual structure, since it relies on the reader's memory of the patterns on successive pages rather than on simultaneous perception of them. The third dimension of book structure is often emphasized in modern books created as art objects or experiments.
So-called "hyper-texts," used for reading and accessing complex computer data bases, have structures that rely on the computer's memory to keep track of page sequence, which can be arbitrarily complex and convoluted, and seldom follows the regular, linear sequencing of the codex. Yet, so far, the basic designs of the typographic pages of hyper-texts remain repetitive and book-like.
Typographic tilings are only partially predictable. The periodicity of a typographic pattern is approximate rather than exact, flexible rather than rigid, surprising rather than predictable, because the text constantly changes. The occurrence of a given letter or word space in a particular position is determined not by rules of geometry but by rules of language and the idiosyncratic choices of an author. (17)
The pattern made by a typeface is greatly influenced by the amount and distribution of space between lines and between letters. The typical text column makes a striped pattern which the typographer can augment or diminish by using more or less leading - interline spacing. Within the line, visually even letterspacing is often held to be ideal. A regular spatial frequency of alternating dark stems and white spaces creates a smooth rhythm with a look of stability and repose. Techniques for the regular spacing of capitals have been described by Tschichold and for the even fitting of lower case by Walter Tracy. (18)
Perfectly even spacing is difficult to achieve in practice because the arbitrary shapes of letters inevitably cause some degree of irregularity of fitting in standard typographic technology. Not all letter combinations seem equally spaced. But some degree of irregularity in letterforms and spacing may be preferable to monotonous regularity, just as in music, slight inharmonicity of partials, or overtones, creates the complex, wavering quality that makes a piano tone "warm," whereas precisely harmonic partials produce bland sounds. (19)
In contemporary advertising typography, the unstable, restless patterns of tight letterspacing are preferred. The busy, frenetic effect of so-called "sexy" spacing, in which the letters tend to rub up against each other, are common in the typography of mass market persuasion, where arresting, staccato patterns draw the reader's attention to texts that might otherwise be ignored.
Tight packing of letters also magnifies the logographic aspect of typography. Reduction of space between letters within a word emphasizes by contrast the space between words, thus articulating the text into an archipelago of word islands, rather than continuous strings of letters. The semi-crystalline lattice of letters on the page is thus interrupted by holes, but holes that have a purpose and meaning. In typography, the word space has developed as a representation of a psychological rather than an acoustic reality, since there are rarely gaps or pauses between words in continuous speech. (20) The importance of the blank space as a logographic mark in English text is indicated by its frequency, greater than e, the most frequent letter.
Further, close letterspacing creates characteristic word images by emphasizing the irregularity of a given sequence of features in a word, thus distinguishing its shape from that of other words. By subdividing the letter pattern into characteristic chunks and gaps instead of a continuous flow, alphabetic typography takes on some of the qualities of logographic Chinese writing.
Texture
The realm of texture is the habitat par excellence of the serious reader, where the text reaches its greatest mass and density and the ultimate visual qualities of the literate image emerge. At the level of texture, line dominates area; forms are obscured; patterns become aggregates. Small, the letters are seen as though at a distance, through an intervening atmosphere, resembling more the attenuated figures sculpted by Alberto Giacometti than the forms and volumes shaped by Henry Moore.
When letters are seen at a small size, it is difficult if not impossible to discern the exact forms of fine features such as serifs, joins, and terminals, though these are obvious at a large size. Linearity replaces interiority. The area of the interior of the small letter is small compared to the length of the contour, and most of the interior area lies along the contour. At the level of texture, the letter is mainly line, an aspect intensified by the edge-detection mechanisms of the human visual system. Textures are complexes of edges.
Patterns evident at a medium scale become so dense at the small scale that statistical qualities emerge; the density or "color" of the text, its granularity, and its weave can be seen directly. Out of the myriad interactions of features and spaces, texture emerges. That a basic quality of the text emerges from multiplicity was known both to traditional and to modern typefounders. Pierre Simon Fournier observes in his Manuel Typographique:
One letter measured singly may seem neither appreciably too big nor too small, but ten thousand composed into printed matter repeat the error ten thousand times over, and, be this never so small, the effect will be the opposite of what was intended. The same trouble also occurs when a stroke is made either too thick or too thin relative to its length, which makes a letter look clumsy and faulty, with out the reason for it being always easy to find out. (21)
Chauncey Griffith, designer of twentieth-century news faces, found the ready analogy between textiles and text typography:
“But the individual piece of type is like a thread. A single thread might be dyed crimson, scarlet, or pink and the human eye would find the difference hard or impossible to detect. But once that thread is woven into cloth, the color is very apparent. So type must be judged after it is woven into the texture of a paragraph or a page.” (22)
Although the level of texture is where most reading takes place, the vocabulary of texture is the least developed of the three levels of the typographic image. At the level of form, terms like line, space, and mass, commonly applied to draw ing, painting, and sculpture, can equally apply to type. At the level of pattern, notions of symmetry, homology, and periodicity, commonly applied to tessellations and mosaics, can also apply to type. But at the level of texture, few standard terms are available. Typographers use , "color" for achromatic density - the darkness or lightness - of printed text, or a few ad hoc expressions like "spikey," "wormy," or "stolid," depending on one's feeling for metaphor. In the realm of texture, poets may need to come to the aid of printers by providing words to describe the images of the "black art."
One memorable observation on typographic texture was made by Heinz Peyer, a Swiss poet, who said that reading a text composed in Helvetica was like walking through a field of stones, whereas reading a text in Syntax was like walking through a field of flowers. (23)
Form is often susceptible to logical analysis, and pattern somewhat so, but texture evades precise description because its repetitions are so numerous, its features so small, and its interactions so refined, that the multifarious complexity of the emergent image resists orderly analysis. Texture requires a holistic more than an analytic under standing. This is an aspect of a deeper and larger philosophical difficulty stated by Pascal in his famous comparison of the intuitive mind to the geometrical mind:
These (principles) can be seen only with difficulty, they are sensed more than seen, and it is infinitely difficult to make them known to those who do not sense them for themselves. These things are so delicate and so numerous that a sense of great delicacy and precision is necessary to perceive them and to judge correctly and accurately from the perception, and in most cases it is not possible to prove the judgment logically as in geometry, because not all the necessary principles are available and it would be an infinite undertaking to gather them. It is necessary to see the whole thing all at once, in a single glance, and not by progressive reasoning . . . (24)
As a consequence of the complexity and refinement of texture, psycho-physical and mathematical studies of its perception have used statistical analyses and formalized notions of clustering, orientation, and brightness. However, the visual elements and arrangements used in such perceptual studies are simple compared to the complexity of letterforms in actual text, and hence such studies, though suggestive, have so far been minimally relevant to typography. (25)
For various purposes, typefounders, telegraphers, cryptographers, and information theorists have made statistical measures of the frequencies of letters and letter combinations in various languages. (26)
When coupled with knowledge of the forms of the letters, such statistics can partially indicate texture. For example, Updike notes that differences in letter frequencies change the appearance of a type page. He favorably compares Latin text, with its frequent u's, m's, and n's, infrequent diagonally stroked y's, and infrequent descenders, to English text, with its greater frequency of diagonals and descenders. (27)
Updike's personal preference for the texture of Latin was, however, a matter of taste more than objective judgment. The letter frequencies of Latin and English actually seem rather similar when compared to those of non-Indo-European languages. Had Updike broadened his literary horizons beyond Europe and New England to native American texts published by his contemporary Franz Boas, he might have noticed, for example, that literary texts in the Chinookan languages of the Pacific Northwest have a plenitude of diagonals and descenders that the texture of English seems staid, and Latin dull in comparison. (28)
IMAGE Texts in Latin (from Cicero's first oration against Catiline), English (from D. B. Updike's Printing Types), and Clackamas Chinook (from Jacobs' and Howard's Clackamas-Chinook Texts) show different textures resulting from different letter frequencies. Composed in Syntax-Antiqua.
[Below, the same texts are repeated, but in the default text of this blog, usually Lucida Grande. The default renders more clearly than the reduced scan of the original.]
Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? quern ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? Nihilne te nocturnum praesidium Palati, nihil urbis vigiliae, nihil timor populi, nihil
Typography is closely allied to the fine arts, and types have always reflected the taste or feeling of their time. The charm of the early Italian types has perhaps never been equalled; and the like is true of the Renaissance manuscripts
nugwagimx lga dayaxbt, aga danmax wilxba diqalpxix. luxwan dawax wakayim, luxwan agunax alatxwida, la::niwa ilkalakiya ldimamt. galakim, «adi::! kinikstx nayka. nagalgat adalutk. idmilxam a: :nga wakadacu ikdudina.»
When the typographic image is understood to comprise distinct levels of different aesthetic and functional qualities, the opposing arguments of Warde and Tschichold can both be seen to be true. At the level of form, typography is a fine art. Its works are accessible to the aesthetic sensibility of the viewer as well as to the intellectual analyses of the art historian, and its shapes are susceptible, at least to some degree, to the logical analyses of the mathematician and scientist. At the level of texture, typography is a utilitarian craft. Its forms are aesthetically transparent to the reader, and its emergent visual qualities, though obvious to the beholder as a holistic image, are resistant to articulate analysis, as its perceptual workings remain for the most part mysterious to the scientist. Typography as pattern articulates form with texture, presenting a bivalent image - formal yet functional, ornamental yet informational - leading on the one hand toward the isolated shape and on the other toward the emergent image. As a whole, then, typography can be seen both as a tool for thought and as an object of contemplation, a conveyor of sense and a delight to the senses.
NOTES
(1) Beatrice Warde, ''The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should be Invisible," in The Crystal Goblet. Cleveland and New York The World Publishing Co., 1956.
(2) Jan Tschichold, "Ton in des Töpfers Hand," in Ausgewählte Aufsätze uber Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie. Basel: Birkhauser, 1975. New English translation by Hajo Hadler, as “Clay in a Potter’s Hand”, in The Form of the Book, Hajo Hadler tr., Robert Bringhurst, ed. Hartley & Marks Publishers, Vancouver, CA and Point Roberts, WA: 1991. (Hadler’s translation differs somewhat from the one in this essay.)
(3) John Dreyfus, ed., "Specimen no. 2: Konrad Berner, Frankfurt 1592," in Type Specimen Facsimiles. London: Bowes & Bowes, 1963.
(4) Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, "The Design of Lucida," in Text Processing and Document Manipulation, J. C. van Vliet, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
(5) Harry Carter, "The Optical Scale in Typefounding," in Typography 4. London: The Shenval Press, 1937.
(6) Daniel Berkeley Updike, Printing Types: Their History, Forms, and Use, A Study in Survivals. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1937.
(7) Charles Bigelow, "On Type: Optical Letter Spacing for New Printing Systems," Fine Print 3, October, 1977;
[Also]
Charles Bigelow and Donald Day, "Digital Typography," Scientific American, August, 1983;
[Also]
Robert Morris, "Image Processing Aspects of Type," in Document Manipulation and Typography, J.C. van Vliet, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988; and
Robert Morris, “Spectral Font Signatures," Technical Report of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Boston: University of Massachusetts, 1989;
Richard Rubinstein and Robert Ulichney (unpublished studies of the spatial frequency spectra of typefaces).
(9) Latin text- and Greek tex- (the "tech-" of "technology" and "technique", and the "-tect-" of "architect" and "tectonic") can both be traced back to a reconstructed Proto-Indo-European root, *teks-, meaning weaving and fabrication. The use of computer technology to weave text reunites aspects of an ancient craft.
(10) El (Lazar Markovich) Lissitzky, "Our Book," in Gutenberg Jahrbuch 1926/ 7. Mainz; English Translation by Helene Aldwinkel, in El Lissitzky, Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, ed. London: Thames and Hudson, 1980.
(11) Andre Martinet, Éléments de Linguistique Generale. Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1967. Martinet follows an observation made by Ferdinand de Saussure in Cours de linguistique generale, Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye eds., 1916; English edition: Course in General Linguistics. Wade Baskin, trans. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1959.
Articulation into words is a notion familiar to typographic literates because words are separated by blank spaces in typography (though they were not so in classical Greek and Latin manuscripts). "Morpheme " denotes an elementary meaningful unit of language, which may be a word or a significant part of a word. An English noun such as "bird" is a morpheme, as is the plural suffix represent ed by the letter "-s" in the plural noun "birds." Written morphemes may or may not be separated by word spaces, depending on the orthography of a language. ***
"Phoneme" denotes a psychologically distinguishable sound of speech. Unlike a word, a phoneme generally has no meaning in itself; its role is to be different from other phonemes and to make meaning through its interactions and combinations with them. Articulation into phonemes is familiar to readers of alphabetic scripts because many, though not all, phonemes are uniquely represented by a single letter. In English orthography , for example, the letters b, d, p, and t, among others, represent consonantal phonemes. Most orthographies are not, however, perfectly phonemic. English vowel phonemes, as a notorious example, do not have simple, one-to-one correspondences with the letters of written English. {Few languages have more than 100 phonemes, except some of the Africa Khoisan languages which have a rich repertoire of click phonemes.)
Floyd Ratliff , "Contour and Contrast." Scientific American, June, 1972; David H. Hubel, Eye, Brain, and Vision. New York: Scientific American Library, 1988.
(13) Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography. London: Sheed & Ward, 1936. (Reprinted, Boston: David R. Godine, 1988.
(14) Andre Malraux, "Museum Without Walls," in The Voices of Silence. Stuart Gilbert, trans. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
(15) John Dreyfus, French Eighteenth Century Typography. Cambridge: The Roxburghe Club, 1982.
[Also]
A. V. Shubnikov and V. A. Koptsik, Symmetry in Science and Art.
G. D. Archard, trans. New York: Plenum Press, 1974; Branko Grünbaum and G. C. Shephard, Tilings and Patterns. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1986; Hermann Wey!, Symmetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.
(17) John R. Pierce, An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. New York: Dover Publications, 1980.
(18) Jan Tschichold, A Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering. New York: Reinhold, 1966; Walter Tracy, Letters of Credit. Boston: David R. Godine, 1986.
(19) John R. Pierce, The Science of Musical Sound. New York: Scientific American Library, 1983.
(20) Andre Martinet, "The Word." Diogenes 51, 1965.
(21) Pierre Simon Fournier, Manuel Typographique. Paris: Fournier (and Barbou), 1764-66; Harry Carter, trans. Fournier on Typefounding. New York: Burt Franklin, 1973.
(22) Chauncey Griffith, quoted by Edmund C. Arnold in Functional Newspaper Design. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956.
(23) Related by Hans Ed. Meier, in a personal communication. Helvetica, designed by Max Miedinger, is a sans-serif typeface in the grotesque style of the nineteenth-century, and Syntax, designed by Hans Ed. Meier, is a sans-serif based on proportions of Renaissance humanist minuscule and classical Roman inscriptional letterforms.
(24) Blaise Pascal, Serie XXII, 512, in Pensées. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.
(25) Bela Julesz, "Texture and Visual Perception," Scientific American, February, 1965; and "Experiments in the Visual Perception of Texture," Scientific American, April, 1975; Persi Diaconis and David Freedman, "On the Statistics of Vision: The Julesz Conjecture," Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. 24, No. 2 , 1981.
(26) Pierce (1980).
(27) Updike, op. cit.
(28) Franz Boas and Charles Cultee (narrator), Chinook Texts. Washington : Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of Ethnology, 1894. Melville Jacobs and Victoria Howard (narrator), Clackamas-Chinook Texts. Bloomington : Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics, 1958; Dell Hymes, "Victoria Howard's 'Gitskux and his Older Brother': A Clackamas Chinook Myth," in Smoothing the Ground: Essays on Native American Oral Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This essay is based of "The Literate Image: Form, Pattern, and Texture in Typeface Design," a talk given to the Stanford University Lectures in Art, November 20, 1985, and On "New Technology of Type," a talk given to the Monotype Typographic Seminar, University College, University of London, September 27, 1984.
I am grateful to Jack Stauffacher for bringing Jan Tschichold's essay to my attention, to William Bright for discussions of the relation of typography to language, and especially to Kris Holmes for collaboration on the Lucida family of typefaces, which provided the opportunity to consider these matters in practice as well as theory.
Postscript: I am also forever grateful to the late Sandra Kirshenbaum, founder, editor, and publisher of Fine Print, who made this and many other essays by bibliophiles, book artists, designers, and scholars possible and enjoyable to a wide and appreciative readership. It was my great pleasure to contribute to her journal as an associate editor and writer over many years.