Letter, craft and ornament

This paper was delivered at the Face Forward conference at Dublin Institute of Technology in 2015

This paper considers the practices of type design in the context of the resurgence of interest in ‘craft’, and examines the arguments for viewing contemporary type design as the application of ‘craft knowledge’.
Using the concept of ‘craft’ to explore aspects of type design, while also using type design to explore the idea of craft, I will be suggesting that whereas the machine age enforced the separation between origination and production, the design and the production processes of type and printed matter in the digital era are so closely integrated as to be indivisible.
This will lead to the proposal that an emerging digital craft aesthetic might in turn support a reappraisal of ornament and decoration as contemporary ‘post-digital’ design phenomena.
Long consigned to the margins of cultural regard and design thinking, the idea of ‘craft’ seems to have regained cultural legitimacy in the 21st century. The 2015 V&A online article ‘What is Craft’ gathered the following responses:

‘There’s a strong element of tacit knowledge – as distinct from formal knowledge – in all craft activity. Making close contact with materials, technical skills plus imagination, tangible results in the form of things, sometimes pushing at the outer limits of function, taking the material for a walk.’
Christopher Frayling

‘It should have nothing to do with aesthetics, and less to do with negative approaches to technology.’
Paul Greenhalgh

‘It is time to move beyond the limitations of terminologies that fragment and separate our appreciation of creative actions, and consider the “behaviours of making” that practitioners share.’
David Revere McFadden

‘An expression of human endeavour creatively realised on the borders of utility, design, architecture, sculpture and art.’
Simon Olding

Paul Greenhalgh notes that since the later 19th century, craft has continually been defined as being anti-technological, and anti-urban. He describes ‘A wave of Utopian activity across the industrialised nations hoping to save the world by marching backwards into an invented perfect past’. Craft is a revaluing of making, and has often simply meant what society needed it to mean.
I was interested to see the type designer Ben Kiel apply the term ‘digital craft’ to the development of digital type, in the VCU Objects + Methods Lecture Series a couple of years ago.
In a lecture delivered in 2012, I quoted David Levy’s Slouching toward Cyberspace in which he questioned whether the lettering arts should:
“settle for an uneasy co-existence with these technologies, like partners in an unhappy marriage”
Further, I noted that in the twelve years since those words were written, our view of these matters has changed. Not only have we assimilated digital media into so many aspects of our lives that its language no longer seems so alien and counterintuitive, but the first decade of the century has seen a profound and enthusiastic reappraisal of the concept of craft.
The argument has shifted away from an oppositional relationship between digital media and craft, toward a growing realisation that the idea of ‘digital craft’ is no longer a bizarre oxymoron but a significant reality. Type and calligraphic lettering are no longer divided by adherence to distinct and unrelated technologies, but swimming in the same digital stream.
In the preface to Abstracting Craft: The Practiced Digital Hand, Malcolm McCulloch made two important observations. He states first that:
‘Virtual craft still seems like an oxymoron; any fool can tell you that a craftsman needs to touch his or her work’.
He then introduces a very useful qualifier:
‘This touch can be indirect – indeed no glassblower lays a hand on molten material’
before moving on to identify a more fundamental concept:
‘…but it must be physical and continual, and it must provide control of whole processes’
In this paper, I will focus on this last condition as the essential characteristic of craft and ‘crafting’: the control of whole process.
In this respect, digital type design tools offer the designer the facility to integrate thinking and making that is without precedent, both in the design of typefaces and in the application of design to the printed page or the digital screen.
While the first phase of digital design conformed to pre-existing industry distinctions between the design process and the technologies of production, the following period, identified by Katherine McCoy as ‘the second digital revolution’, integrated digital media as simultaneously the tools of production and the media of distribution, dissemination and publication.
However, in the supposed craft revival of the 21st century we continue to see ‘craft’ associated with materiality and the tactile, and set up in distinction against the cold alienation of digital methods. The risk of ‘touchy-feely’ sentiment is seldom far away. McCulloch continues:
‘…it’s not always easy to dismiss the popular connotations of the crafts. We have to live with them: the crafts as folksy, alternative, rural occupations associated with a homecoming vision of the future, and also with a nostalgia masquerading as history’
The hand-cutter of type punches was by any useful definition a craftsman, though he would not have recognised our contemporary use of the term. The object he was making was fashioned, that is to say its form was developed in the act of making, and reviewed through the iterative testing of smoke proofs, and having been completed the punch created identical impressions without any further mediation.
At smaller type sizes any ‘pre-drawing’ onto the face of the punch would have been approximate, so while the punchcutter may have been using reference drawings of a general nature (or the example of existing printed types) it can be argued that the essential form of the letter was generated within the process of making.
The effect of machine composition and pantographic punch- or matrix- cutting upon typographic craft was twofold; at once embracing craft input and compromising the integrity of the craft process.
On the one hand, the systems implemented by Linotype and Monotype made it possible to utilise designs from a variety of sources and disciplines. A process through which it was possibly to derive type more directly from drawing, opened up a previously arcane trade to input from a wider range of graphic artists, calligraphers, architects, many of them consciously aligned with craft ideologies.
At the same time however the nature of mechanised punch cutting introduced several levels of mediation between the design and the manufacture; between the letter drawing and the matrix, distancing the origination process from the artefact.
Gill or Goudy or van Krimpen were ‘type designers’ in a very different sense from their predecessors, and ironically enjoyed much less of the integrated quality of craft (McCulloch’s ‘control of the whole process’); they were not as a rule crafting the final letters in the materials of their production, so much as making drawings from which letters were to be crafted. In this, they were more like architects, less like artisan builders. (and indeed accounts of bickering between designer and manufacturer’s drawing office often reflect the assumptions of cultural status found in the working relationship between architect and tradesman).
In the photosetting era, designers cut letters direct into frisket, but this was still a mediated drawing process, adapted to the constraints of a production medium that was device-specific and materially remote from the design process; turning the frisket image into light and light into typographic form.
By contrast to this, the digital type designer is actually working with – and within – the environment of type production. The medium in which the type is created is the medium by which it is to be disseminated and used. This exemplifies McCulloch’s concern for the ‘whole process’ as a defining criterion for craft production.
The glyph and metrics windows are the digital designer’s smoke-proofs, allowing a process of fashioning, and modeling; a kind of ‘whittling’ of both letter and space, which leads, without any mediating process, to the finalised digital glyph: a form identical to the end product, created in the same ‘material’ of digital code.
A typeface design is a proposal – that letters might look like this – and the craft of making is the means by which that proposal is articulated and tested. This proposal may make reference to a variety of sources, from the literal reconstruction of a historic example, to the post-modern synthesis that Charles Jencks called ‘radical eclecticism’.
The concept of craft brings with it the concept of craft knowledge; a resource of tacit understanding that directly informs the work of hand and eye; an empirical understanding that is seldom documented or developed into any specific formulation.
Frayling quotes an observation on craftsmanship from the 1890s International Moulders Journal:
‘the really essential element in it is not manual craft and dexterity but something stored up in the mind of the worker.’
This definition is closely related to qualities Nigel Cross identified as characteristics of design knowledge in his Designerly Ways of Knowing:
‘Some of it is knowledge inherent in the activity of designing, gained through engaging in and reflecting on that activity. Some of it is knowledge inherent in the processes of manufacturing artefacts, gained through making and reflecting upon the making of those artefacts.’
Kees Dorst quotes the architect Richard MacCormac:
‘I don’t think you can design anything just by absorbing information and then hoping to synthesize it into a solution. What you need to know about the problem only becomes apparent as you’re trying to solve it’.
This is an argument for design as craft; for craft knowledge and craft thinking as things that occur within the act of making. All of these seem particularly true of the process of type design.
Long before digital technology entered the realms of design, David Pye described craftsmanship in ways that remain refreshingly lucid:
‘If I must ascribe a meaning to the word craftsmanship it means simply workmanship using any kind of technique or apparatus, in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends on the judgement, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works.’
‘The essential idea is that the quality of the result is continuously at risk during the process of making; and so I shall call this kind of workmanship ‘the workmanship of risk’ – an uncouth phrase, but at least descriptive.’
By comparison, in machine-composed letterpress we can find Pye’s counterpart to this, the ‘workmanship of certainty’, in the role of the drawing office, essentially a manufacturing chain. Leaving aside the complex questions about the cultural values we place upon craft and craftsmanship, we might conclude that craft is best defined as verb rather than noun, by the fact that something is crafted: that is to say, it is made in such a way that its form develops within the act of making, and that each stage is implemented under those conditions that Pye would call ‘the workmanship of risk’. This applies more completely to the work of the digital type designer than it did to the work of the punch-cutter; development from digital letter to digital print is a more direct progression than punch–matrix–sort–print.
So, as the c-word is allowed out of the closet, what does it signify in the digital age? I’d take type design as a particularly useful case for countering the sentiment of materiality with an argument for ‘digital craft’.
The act of ‘crafting’ a letter shape, whether in autographic or digital media, also creates the conditions for elaboration and ornamentation. As in preceding manuscript traditions, ornamentation of a letter occurs as an extension of the writing process. The machine-age separation of ‘designing’ from ‘making’ on the other hand, constrains this and introduces a distinction between the ‘essential’ design and an ‘additional’ or ‘extraneous’ ornamentation. The separation of type production into distinct phases of ‘design’ and ‘fabrication’ has also historically had the effect of divorcing letter from ornament.
During the 20th century the twin forces of modernist thinking and machine composition inhibited or marginalised the impulse to decorate. The integrated nature of digital type design re-integrates ornament with essential form, repairing a schism invented by modernism and machine technology.
A shape created in a manual action – such as the stroke of a pen or brush or chisel – prompts elaboration, but if a letterform has been refined through an engineered design cycle, such an addition is artificial, separate and contrived. Adding a flourish or curlicue is a natural and intuitive extension in an integrated process of design and production such as writing, but a profoundly intrusive one in those cases where design precedes making.
The designer-maker’s impulse to ornamentation is however as profound and recurrent as the viewers’ appetite for complexity and richness of form.
I’d suggest therefore that far from alienating us, digital media repair a historic rift of the machine age; form and ornament are now able to coexist as part of an integral process.
It is useful to consider the status of ornament and decoration as a significant aspect of design. In the nineteenth century, this would have been seen as too self-evident to even merit comment. By the mid twentieth century it would consign you to the distant margins of critical thought and banish you from the high table of modernism.
By the 1990s we can see ornament being tentatively re-appraised, but without a clear philosophical base, echoing a more inclusive perspective on design history. Like other manifestations of postmodernism, ornament and decoration re-enter the arena of critical respectability by way of architecture, alongside a reappraisal of historical references, often used in ironic and irreverent ways.
Paul Greenhalgh has said:
‘History became a key element in the revitalisation of narrative and symbolism. Irony became an important weapon. As one has to be ironic about something, the use of a wide range of historical imagery, became a necessary feature of much new work’
The first manifestations of digital ornament occurred in extended revivals of historic examples, or the transposition of autographic traditions. Particularly since the introduction of Open Type, type designers first reinstated variant forms that had been subsumed by preceding technologies, then expanded upon them.
The principle of conceptual alternates allowed designers to embed in a typeface the kind of variability integral to calligraphy and other autographic traditions – a ‘fluid typography’.
This fluidity was initially largely imitative in that it referenced decorative variations originating in other media and tools.
The media a craftsman uses, determine the nature of elaborations and ornamentation; relationships between a medium and a substrate determine the nature of extrapolation whether in pen on ink or chisel into stone. The affordances and constraints of the medium determine the elaboration of form.
One problem with vector drawing as a medium for designing type, is that it seems to possess few behavioural properties and no material constraints; it is not resistant or directional, it has no ‘tooth’ or ‘grain’. As a consequence it still requires an effort to determine how this seemingly inert medium might prompt its own language of ornament and elaboration, as occurs with the brush, pen, chisel of graver. Like any tool or process however, with use it reveals an internal logic, which characterises the more interpretative digital type revivals.
Examples of digital ornamentation began to emerge from the wilder reaches of post-modern design from the 1990s. The quirks and fault-lines of digital error, unexpected and unpredictable behaviour of vectors, emerged as a recurrent idiom. The ‘spiky’ vector, seen in Lucas de Groot’s Jesus Loves You, and the Women’s Design Research Unit’s Pussy Galore, is a form in which the properties of a digital programme are tested and abused, to generate extrapolations that are as peculiar to the digital form as those properties of pen or chisel. These possibilities also informed Abbott Miller’s book Three-dimensional Typography: Words in Space (1997).
The idea of digital ornament was explored further in the rotational fleuron experiments of Zuzana Licko in the Hypnopaedia fonts, and in Marian Bantjes’s Restraint font created in collaboration with Ross Mills of Tiro.
A couple of years ago, experimenting with building custom designed vector brushes, I developed a kind of ‘generative method’ by which I developed a font of fleurons.
Created by first designing a vector brush and then wrapping it around a series of different shapes, the interaction was initially unpredictable and the results unexpected; they were than edited, refined and collected as a working font.
Reflecting on this experiment I considered whether or not this work could usefully be measured against possible definitions of ‘digital craft’.
If so, it would present an extreme example, and one which might therefore serve to define some of the boundaries of the term.
Arguments against including the project as ‘craft’, would include the fact that no direct touch was involved (a quality it shares with McCulloch’s glassblower). We still can’t reach into the virtual space of the computer desktop. The processes involved are not ‘physical’ or materially-based, and do not involve specialist hand skills.
McCulloch’s assertion that craft ‘must be physical and continual, and it must provide control of whole processes’ raises interesting questions.
On the one hand the design of the fleuron font answers McCulloch’s criteria for ‘whole process’ through a continuum of design and production in a single medium, but it also raises new questions about the nature of ‘control’ and the idea that this must be ‘physical’.
Control takes different forms. Any craft activity involves interaction with materials; a sophisticated level of control that involves not simply imposing predetermined intention upon inert material, but working with the material’s characteristics (its grain or resistant property, its constraints and affordances). Such control encompasses the idea of working with the material, and relinquishing control to it. The random or generative aspects of the stochastic fleuron are equivalent to this: a conscious decision to let the material and tools inform process and outcome, familiar to any woodcarver or lettercutter.
The form was not predetermined, but evolved within the process; demonstrably a ‘workmanship of risk’. A recognisable ‘craft knowledge’ was present, as the design evolved in a knowledge of the ‘behavioural qualities’ of the vector programme. It seemed also to vividly illustrate Frayling’s notion of ‘taking the material for a walk’.
We could conclude the following:
That craft and craftsmanship are best defined by integral and temporal characteristics, rather than tactile or material ones, and that foremost among these would be the continuity of ‘risk’ and modification throughout a whole process.
That ornament is inhibited by the alienation of design from manufacture, and facilitated by integrated practice.
And that digital craft type-craft generates digital ornament.

Bibliography
Adamson, Glenn (2013) The Invention of Craft Bloomsbury Academic
Cross, Nigel (2001). ‘Designerly ways of knowing: design discipline versus design science.’ Design Issues, 17(3), pp. 49–55.
Dorst, Kees (2003) Understanding Design Bis
Frayling, Christopher (2011) On Craftsmanship Oberon
Greenhalgh (2002) The Persistence of Craft A.C. Black
Korn, Peter (2015) Why we make things and why it matters Square Peg
Levy, David (1995)’Slouching toward cyberspace: the place of the lettering arts in a digital era’, in Clayton, Ewan, ed. Codes and Messages Crafts Council
McCoy, Katherine, (1998 )’Introduction: Digital communications design in the second computer revolution’ in Redman, Stephanie, ed. New Media Northlight Books
McCulloch, Malcolm (1996) Abstracting Craft: the practiced digital hand MIT
Pye, David (1968) The Nature and Art of Workmanship Cambridge University Press
Sennett, Richard (2008) The Craftsman Penguin
Victoria and Albert Museum What is craft?
http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/w/what-is-craft/ accessed October 2015