Will Hill

Tactility and typographic space: Type as material form

This paper was delivered at the Typecon conference in New Orleans in 2011

Touch 1. To cause or permit a part of the body, especially the hand or fingers, to come in contact with so as to feel

In this paper I’ll be exploring the idea that our understanding of type and typography has a fundamental relationship to the sense of touch. This will consider the manner in which digital media have (quite literally) de-sensitised the experience of typographic design, and looking at the ways in which our relationship to the tactile may be reinstated.
I will be looking at the practice of typography in the light of both current debate on the re-appraisal of craft, and educational theory around haptic, kinesthetic and heuristic learning.
A wood engraving by Leo Wyatt exemplifies in visual form, the same heuristic principle which is expressed in its text:
I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.
(I’ve found this variously attributed to Lao Tsu and Confucius, so I will hedge my bets as Wyatt has done and go with ‘Chinese proverb’
As a text it serves to preface and encapsulate the main points I would like to explore in this paper; as a wood engraving it is a piece of ‘making’, which expresses a sophisticated physical understanding of process; of actions made and understood by the hand.
The argument I hope to develop is based upon a few fundamental ideas:
The first is that the origins of two-dimensional typographic form, are based in three-dimensional processes.
The second is that the practice of typographic design is above all the organisation of a physical space
The hand in type design
Touch is confirmed understanding; to apprehend is literally to grasp.
The production of type was traditionally based in a subtractive process; a sculptural removal of metal, introducing negative space into the face of the punch in order to create a recognisable form.
The active principle here is a reorganisation of space. The design of the letter is a design executed in the medium of subtracted negative space; it is defined and characterised by the space removed from face of the punch.
The norms and conventions of typographic form, within which we continue to work, have their origins in this sculptural medium. Both the form of the letter and its execution were originally integral, determined within the single activity of one person, up till the 18th century. Before the separation of ‘design’ from making which was characteristic of the industrial age, in type production as in many other media, punchcutting was an integrated practice. From Jenson and Griffo, through to Granjon and Fournier, punchcutters were not only artisans but form-givers.
The idea of a punchcutter working to external designs is a later development which marks the emergence of extrinsic design agendas – whether those of John Baskerville, William Morris, Jan van Krimpen or Stanley Morison – and by the early 20th century the punchcutter was seen as the secondary facilitator of a prefigured intention.
Designers and design commentators including Matthew Carter and Walter Tracy have noted the fallacy of attributing the characteristics of typographic form to the technology and materials that produced the type, and it is true that this can be easily sentimentalised. We can trace incremental developments that follow technical opportunity – harder papers, better presswork and better inks – creating tolerances that provide for higher stroke contrasts, but I’d agree with Matthew Carter that the arts and crafts precept of ‘truth to materials’ has little relevance when applied to the steel face of a punch. It would be tempting, and quite wrong, to retrospectively attribute the ‘craft values‘ of the twentieth century to the work of the sixteenth century artisan – however skilled and sensitive.
Walter Tracy rather loftily dismisses the idea that changes in type production technology influence the form of letters, but goes on to make the point that type production was a sophisticated design craft from its earliest stages. He describes it as ‘a combination of four hand crafts: the cutting of letter punches, the striking of matrices, the casting of the type, and the dressing of it ready for use by the printer’
The term ‘craft’ raises some complex issues I will consider later on, but the last three are ‘crafts’of a secondary order. Clearly they are skilled operations, but while each is essential, none will determine the visual form of the outcome (beyond ensuring its successful reproduction). The cutting of punches is a ‘craft’ of a wholly different order, in a more essential sense of ‘fashioning’; a making process in which the application of a specialised skill determines the form of the outcome; a craft based in a very high degree of tactile skill.
It is in this sense that Tracy observes:
‘It was the punch-cutter himself who, if he possessed artistic sense as well as manual skill, was capable of influencing the appearance of a type – indeed, of creating a new effect altogether’
This activity is by its nature tactile, rooted in haptic understanding and direct transmission of an idea from mind to hand.
When we consider the act of cutting a punch at a small size, we are looking at a highly refined coordination of visual intention and synaesthetic awareness, working at a scale which limits or negates the idea of following a mediating ‘plan’ or guide.
We can see these principles – formerly a practical necessity rather than a philosophical dictum – self-consciously revived in the 20th century in Rudolf Koch’s, description of the making of his Neuland.
‘The type is made as in olden times by the punch-cutter being his own designer. The forms have been fashioned directly out of the metal by the tool, without being previously drawn on paper. Their shapes are the result of the tool’
There is an element of projection in Koch’s interpretation of the history of punchcutting, imposing upon an artisan skill some 20th century notions of creative expression, retro-fitting an expedient craft with the idea of the expressive gesture. What is perhaps most significant here is the idea of form as outcome of manual impulse.
Sculptural-scriptal: writing and type
Typography is not writing, and the cutting of a subtractive letter is not driven by the dynamic of the stroke. Laying out type for printing is clearly not an autographic process. As an activity and as a sequence of actions it differs from the act of writing in most significant respects. The letters precede the act, and decisions on the manner in which they are organised do not follow the continuum of the text.
Following a brief period of direct mimicry of the manuscript hand in the early textura blackletter types, I’d suggest that the first Roman types are clearly a new project, a unique synthesis in which the behaviour and the practical constraints of punchcutting and casting were an integral and defining element.
The letters of Pannartz and Sweynheim, and those of Jenson and the Venetian typefounders, have only a conditional relationship either to the manuscript hand or the lettercutter’s chisel; they are (with respect to Mr Tracy) the products of the process. Limitations of process inform the defining features of early Roman types and reflect the engagement with touch which it provides.
This is quite different from the engagement of touch offered by the quill, the chisel or the engraving tool. Cutting the outside of a letter away is a different process entirely from cutting a stroke in; it enables some lines of stylistic development and constrains others.
Arguments for the primacy of the written hand as a basis for type design thus tend to ignore the fact that for over 500 years type has been created through a process which is essentially sculptural and subtractive, rather than inscriptional and autographic. From the late 18th century in particular, type’s autographic origins are subsumed in a view of rational type based in an engineered structure rather than autographic form.
Type design has of course during this time been stylistically invigorated by developments and influences from the written hand, notably the influence of renaissance writing upon the development of italic types and the influence of 18th century writing masters upon the script faces of the enlightenment. Only with Edward Johnston however, do we see a conscious philosophy of typeface design based in the written hand.
Gerrit Noordzij makes the point that writing, like type design, is a process of defining and containing space. I’d suggest though that while this may draw upon the unifying principle of the stroke, it may equally reflect other defining constraints, which bring consistency of form to a sequence of familiar constructions. The model of the hand and the action of a broad nib is just one such source of a governing constraint; its effectiveness as a model should not lead us to imagine that it is the only game in town.
Another aspect in which type differs significantly from writing is in the matter of scale, and this is an area where the tactile and haptic dimensions of the medium are particularly significant. Type is designed – and was originally created – at a range of sizes. Writing however has an optimum size based in its relationship to the size of the hand, the arc of the wrist, and the actions of a set of muscles all of which are finite.
The punchcutter, by contrast, crafted adjustments according to scale and adapted readily to the variations of contrast and angularity that distinguish sizes of punch from each other (a feature more recently reintroduced in digital form through comprehensive optical sizing)
Touch and space
The disposition of the resulting letters is also a design process which takes place in specific physical space. First upon the stone and subsequently upon the page, it is the physical record of spatial decisions. These decisions are informed by touch.
Typographic design, the willed and meaningful arrangement of type upon the page, is primarily an organisation of space: the spaces between letters, between lines, between columns and margins. It is in these relationships of space that typographic coherence is achieved.
Setting type by hand involves a series of decisions which take place in an actual space, and which impose upon that space actual physical consequences, reflecting physical intervals and ratios through leading and letterspacing. These decisions are physical choices, affirmed by touch.
The physical handling of metal type provides us with a haptic experience of scale; that a 72 point sort is not only ‘larger’ in the sense that we experience on the page or screen, but has mass, that its size can be experienced physically as weight in our hand. The use of quad spaces which conform to the size of our type, reinforces the idea of space as having a measured value corresponding to the letter, creating a relational interplay between space and letter. The nick at the lower side of the shank; provides not only a convenient channel for page-cord but a tactile prompt; it signal the lower edge of symmetrical characters: s, o or d/p, b/q
From the earliest systems of measurement we have used the body to quantify aspects of the physical world. How large is it? twice as large as me? as large as my head? as large as my foot or my stride?
The impulse to to discern natural laws and canons of proportion was applied to type and the proportions of letters by Geoffroy de Tory, Albrecht Durer and others. Their formulations of typographic measure were expressed in terms of the body, developing the Vitruvian model and thus proposing relationships between the forms of letters and the human experience of the material world.
For the first 500 or so of its 556 years, the printed word was dependent upon three-dimensional processes to generate a two-dimensional outcome. The page was built by hand compositors (some working in languages and scripts they did not read or understand) in a specific, finite three-dimensional space, which was then reflected (quite literally) in the form of a printed page of corresponding dimensions.
This also is an inherently tactile process.
Within this historical landscape, only the significant changes of photosetting about 60 years ago, followed by the pervasive effects of digital technology, have moved type out of its explicitly physical realm.
Towards virtual touch: simulacra and sentiment
As soon as the technology of print production moved out of the three dimensions of metal to the two dimensions of film and dry transfer and finally digital type, an answering impulse emerged: the appetite to re-imbue a type with physicality, a mimicry of tactile value.
Digital display faces of the 80s and 90s followed a trend which first emerges in photosetting and dry transfer lettering: the narrative of material characteristics and physical histories. Faces came furnished with distressed profiles and carefully manufactured nicks and blobs, evoking the physical histories of slightly damaged type, ink-squeeze and the imprecise presswork of past centuries.
Digital type designers developed this idea at several levels: the mimicry of types with a physical past, the actual degeneration of form which can occurs with long or careless use of wood types, the distressed ‘grunge’ types from the 1990s onwards.
In the transition from hot metal to cold composition, type design has addressed the ways in which visual appearance suggests tactile value.
Alongside these excesses and aberrations, this impulse has prompted some very sophisticated refinements of digital method that alluded to metal type: Jonathan Hoefler’s Hoefler Text draws upon the example of two mechanically cast metal types to produce a deliberate evocation of the ‘warmth’ of foundry type. It is composed of subtle curved and rounded corners as distinct from the sharp angles and straight lines which were then characteristic of much of digital type. production.
Hoefler says:
‘I wanted to create a typeface that didn’t feel like a digital font. at the time I felt that straight lines meant digital, and digital meant cold, which was a bit of an oversimplification’
His use of the terms ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ is significant and revealing; digital type is widely perceived as ‘clinical’ or ‘impersonal’ since it lacks the dimension of a physical production history; the accumulated variables and tactile values of imprint, evoke a quite different relationship between the printed word and the physical world. ‘Warm’ and ‘cold’ are not attributes of visual experience, and it may be that the ‘warm’ forms of Hoefler Text engage us more deeply because they imply a deeper connection with the physical world; the world we inhabit with our senses. The eye is after all not the organ with which we register warmth, a term used to describe qualities from the world of touch.
Harmonic-rhythmic
Typographers formulating overarching theories often make analogies to the vocabulary of music. In describing qualities in the disposition of type, typographers and commentators including Robert Bringhurst, John Hudson and Frank Blokland have used phraseology most commonly associated with sound, in describing attributes of typographic form and typographic space. Drawing upon rhythmic and harmonic principles is to view typography in relation to another form of engagement with the senses. We can look at type on the page in rhythmic terms, equating print to sound and un-inked paper to silence, and typographic space to the acoustic or auditory space it occupies.T he idea of typography as a discipline governed by harmonic principles, and of type design aspiring to rhythmic uniformity provides a satisfying parallel; a pattern of consistent intervals against which we read significant variations; the baseline grid as our staves and bar lines. Further, we can see type in terms of polyphony and musical verticality ; the underlying grid of horizontal intervals forming a stave, or the woven fabric’s warp and (we would say weft; I think the American english equivalent is woof?)
The analogy of music is thus another conceptual bridge which serves to relate the properties of type to the properties of the the physical and material world.These are further ways in which we understand typographic space through reference to the world of the senses.
Haptic learning and typographic space
As a teacher I try wherever possible to apply a heuristic approach, to create the conditions for learning through experience.
This is partly a matter of respect for the students’ intelligence, and partly because it has always seemed to me that knowledge acquired through practical application is more likely to be retained. To return to Leo Wyatt’s Confucian proverb: I do, and I understand
Despite a widespread view that typography is composed of ‘rules’, it seems to me that there is little typographic knowledge that needs to be conveyed by categorical assertions, if instead it can be demonstrated and experienced. Rather, I’d see typography as comprising many self-evident truths, and a typographic education as being composed of scenarios in which these truths become apparent through practice.
Tactility and the physical apprehension of typographic space, have an important role to play in this, and letterpress is a vital medium for relating a practice now primarily based in virtual digital space, to the conditions of the physical world.
The Codex Project at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, was set up to question how the computer had affected the teaching of graphic design and its subsequent practice in the industry.
Among their observations was that virtual media promoted a reliance upon prescribed routes conceived by the computer programme. This abdication of responsibility for the image meant that feedback was experienced either on the screen or as a printout and thus the understanding of scale and size is lost due to its lack of physicality.
It was also noted that:
‘The physicality involved in the setting of type allows students to acquire new insights, utilising different learning skills which have a more direct physical impact on the student’s imagination and memory. The metal type has the distinctive tactile qualities of weight, texture, and smell, and forms the basis of a multi-sensory learning experience.’
and:
‘The tactile sensation of setting type allows for a range of intuitive investigations leading to experiential learning.’
Appropriate vocabularies of description and measurement are increasingly crucial as we now work with students whose initial experience of type is virtual and dimensionless. Anyone who has taught typography to novice designers – typography one’ in American curricula – and has had access to letterpress, will have recognised the opportunities it provides for the heuristic understanding of typographic concepts such as body height and leading, explaining for instance in practical and haptic terms why the designation ’60 point’ is not actually a measurement of the height of that capital letter, but of the body it is set upon.
The idea of a common language of physical measurement applied to type sizes, leading, and the dimensions of negative space, prompts students to think in terms of a comprehensively designed matrix, in which both letter and space are typography
Erik Spiekermann has said:
‘One thing that only physical type can teach is the fact that the white stuff is just as important as the black marks. In metal type, you have to pick the spaces, touch them, learn the system to become efficient. What we now call a “baseline grid” is what you learn to work with in its physical shape.’
This observation was made in the course an interesting exchange on the ATypi discussion lists between Paulo Ramalho and Frank Blokland, which seemed to me to highlight some vital issues while also indicating a huge divergence of understanding.
Asking for advice on teaching typography to adolescents, Ramalho begins:
‘I know that the best (for teaching typography) would the be to put a bunch of students playing with type and printing them on a Vandercook press and see the true differences of typefaces.
Unfortunately those letterpress rooms aren’t portable and young students are used of which type they find on a computer, so I think that the solution will pass trough a use of digital type, either printed or in an interactive platform.
The question for which I still have no answer is how?’
Blokland responds:
‘Actually I always would start explaining to students that typography is purely relative to the applied grapheme systems and derived harmonic systems and that they are mostly conditioned in a by the lecturer defined way (hence typographers in many cases refer to the way they were educated as the best there is).
Typography is a molecular system. In the typographical microcosm the parts of the letters are the smallest elements and as building blocks directly responsible for the hierarchical system of spacing, which respectively consists out of counters, letter space, word space, line space and margins.
If a building block in one of the letters is changed, automatically all letters and subsequently the hierarchic system, i.e. the (rules for) typography will change. Everything in the typographical microcosm is interconnected and everything is interacting.’
There is in this dialogue an unacknowledged shift in ground from Ramalho’s original question about ‘how’ to teach, to an answer from Blokland which seems to me primarily concerned with ‘what’ to teach.
What seems to have been obscured here is a more practical question: not whether a particular way of looking at letters forms and typographic space is valid or indeed universally true, but in what way this truth might be most readily communicable.
To actually introduce typography to adolescents in the manner that Blokland suggests, could prove alienating – rather like introducing music through hours of classroom theory, before any practice with instruments has provided the heuristic experience to recognise its value and application.
So, while I think the term ‘play’ raises some more complex questions, the Vandercook may be the most effective medium for communicating the principles Blokland has indentified.
Design educators and students provide a range of vivid personal perspectives on this question.
Paul Shaw describes the role of calligraphy in a typography course as:
‘intended to familiarise students with the physical nature of letterforms and equally as important, with the physical aspect of space in lettering as counter, letterspace, word space and line space’
Laurie Szujeweska has commented that:
‘the most important thing a typographer must understand is how the visual and rhetorical relationships of type are changed by its location within a space’
David Jury observes that:
‘The physical effort of making even the simplest changes is a prospect just daunting enough to make the student ponder all the implications before they begin. Such changes take seconds with digital technology and are often made without thought or reason. This is not, in the end, a restriction. Rather, the physical interaction with the medium compels and drives creative and inventive thinking; the physicality of letterpress ensures that the act of designing is an intellectual activity.’
The search for a supporting rationale for the value of letterpress in design education, led me to the idea of haptic, tactile or kinesthetic learning, and particularly Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, which identifies seven main intelligences, including ‘spatial’ and ‘bodily-kinaesthetic’, and a corresponding set of ‘learning styles’ for which different individuals have the strongest affinity.
From her Masters thesis ‘Why Isn’t Letterpress Dead?’ Elizabeth Fraser makes the point that:
‘Gardner’s, multiple intelligences theory champions the use of haptic or kinaesthetic experiential learning as of equal importance as auditory and purely visual methods.This is borne out by the massive growth of Human Computer Interface (HCI) research into developing bridges from real hands on tactile experience to interactive virtual haptic learning.The link of physically real, old technology letterpress to virtual digital typography exactly relates to this. By touching and using real letters, a truer understanding of the nuts and bolts of playing with language, its meanings and possibilities as a creative material will be achieved.’
From a design educator’s point of view one of the strange features of Gardner’s argument is the educational psychologist’s tendency to identify learning styles with personalities – rather than with the kind of knowledge that is being absorbed. I would suggest that, regardless of individual inclination, the development of typographic awareness is a subject where haptic experience informs understanding
Pamela Bowman of Sheffield Hallam University in the UK has said:
‘We are finding that students are relishing the opportunity to be involved in a more tactile, form of graphic design and are exploiting facilities once perceived as ‘traditional’ such as screen printing and letterpress. The return of such skills has brought about a different perception of what graphic design can be in relation to the role of the analogue and digital. We would therefore like to look at the role of Craft and Typography within Graphic Design and how students have embraced the application of the analogue and digital. Both designers and consumers are demanding a return to the importance of the individual.’
Sentiment, bad history and the C-word; the reappraisal of craft
These observations bring us to the question of craft. Twentieth century graphic design has had an uneasy relationship with the idea of craft, a concept that has for a long time been as problematic to design thinking, as it is to critical theory in art. In both fields there are now signs of a reappraisal. The rhetoric of mid-century modernism increasingly rejected the concept of craft, to draw instead upon engineering as its dominant metaphor; a dynamic in which design concepts were perfected in ideological and functional terms, before being transferred into graphic form through largely inert media. This implies a separation between thinking (design) and making (production).
The idea of physical process as an arena for intervention and development, has been marginalised under the increasingly devalued heading of ‘craft’ a word which brings associations of folksiness, sentiment, and an unexamined enthusiasm for past practices.
In this context, there is the risk of projecting the self-conscious ‘craft’ values of present-day thinking onto practices that were in their time the efficient and un-problematized exercise of a specialised trade skill, much as Koch’s rather selective view of punchcutting projected twentieth-century ‘craft’ values onto artisan skills.
Applying the cultural values of ‘craft’ to old-fashioned ‘workmanship’ is a sentimental distortion, retrofitting a skilled manual trade with the conscious values of a post-Ruskin notion of ‘handicraft’ as authorship. It is here that the case for punch-cutting as a sculptural process can be misinterpreted or sentimentalised We can say however without much fear of contradiction that the punchcutter was a craftsman. My point is not that the punchcutter was an ‘artist’ but the he was a form-maker working in a subtractive three-dimensional medium.
Established craft deals in ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ ways, and may be wholly unselfconscious.
Design deals in ‘appropriate’ or ‘inappropriate’, and is necessarily self conscious and relativistic.
I’d suggest that while craft is often exploratory it is never speculative. Like Picasso, craft does not seek, it finds.
As Bowman’s paper confirms, recent years have seen an enthusiasm for the handmade, to the extent that we now see widespread use of terms like ’the new handmade graphics’. This serves to reflect further the public appetite for a sense of tactility absent from the wholly digital design artifact; for the ‘warmth’ that informed the conception of Hoefler Text, the idea that a graphic form has a material history, a back-story of cutting, casting and presswork.
Like many ‘fashions’ in design It is easy to dismiss some of this as rather subjective or sentimental, but it coincides with a significant reappraisal of the cultural values of craft activity, notably in the work of Glenn Adamson and Richard Sennett.
I’d suggest that contemporary letterpress is central to this debate. I’m not of course arguing for the revival of letterpress as a production technology, but for its relevance as an educational and perceptual tool. Few of my students will have the opportunity to use letterpress after they graduate, and many will not have the inclination. What letterpress will have done is to inform their typographic awareness by connecting it, through their sense of touch, to the physical world. Every decision they then make in Indesign or Quark may be informed by that experience and that sensibility.
Chris Wakeling of the Typographic Research Unit at the University of Northumbria, says:
‘Learning through doing also seems to aid understanding of planning, process and order. Students say they not only have a stronger understanding of how to use digital tools, such as InDesign, but also how to go about organising their own work’.
In particular, as I find students increasingly reluctant to print-out digital work until its ’finished’, letterpress helps to reinforce the idea of making as visual thinking, not as post-production.
Touch is significant both in the design process: as setting, proofing, printing, and also in the user experience: the debossed finish, the interaction of letterpress with paper, has become an increasingly valued aspect of contemporary graphic design
In his book The hand: a philosophical inquiry in human being, Raymond Tallis quotes Immanuel Kant as saying:
“The hand is the window on to the mind,”
Some conclusions
We can conclude that as typographic design is the articulation of space, (from counter and word-space, through leading and the relationships of space between margin, column and the dimensions of the page) and that space is only fully apprehended through the interaction of sight and touch,
I’d suggest the following:
Point and line can be apprehended by mind alone
The two dimensional plane needs the corroboration of sight
The three dimensional space needs the corroboration of touch
It is touch that gives experiential meaning to visual data. It is through the agency of touch that the abstraction of typographic measurement becomes an experienced reality. It is through touch that the design of type is directly apprehended, through weight, mass, sharp angles and rounded edges, through spurs and kerns.
This is important now more than ever, for two reasons:
One: changes in technology have shifted typography and type design from being ‘device-specific’ crafts based within the printing industry, to being ‘device-independent’ design practices. Present conditions require of the graphic designer an unprecedented level of typographic scrutiny and awareness, as we have taken on (or had forced upon us by default) many decisions that were previously the domain of compositor or typesetter.
Two: in looking at the disposition of type upon the page, we are dealing with measurement and space that bear a finite relationship to the body and the hand as well as the eye, yet the technology we now use is relative and virtual rather than spatial. We do not compose at the stone, in a physical space, handling metal type in a forme that corresponds in its dimensions to the actual size of our page.
Rather, we, and our students, work on a digital desktop where space is relative and notional. Our scope for the apprehension of scale and mass is diminished.
The designer’s engagement with type has been quite literally ‘de-sensitised’. It no longer occupies, or operates within, the full range of our senses.
The digital world has had an uneasy relationship to the tactile. I recall an interview with Neville Brody in the early years of digital media, where he expressed frustration that you could not ‘reach inside’ the computer and manipulate elements with your hands. I also remember a speaker at a technology conference saying:
‘What bastard decided that a personal computer should be a typewriter bolted on to a television?’
It may be that the haptic technologies now being developed for instruction in medicine and engineering, will eventually come to permeate digital design media.
We might then hope to see the tools for a ‘haptic’ virtual typography..
Why is this important? For me, it’s important because I believe that type is matter, not code, and the physical properties of type are a key element of its cultural identity. Its material legacy is a vital aspect of its ‘voice’, while its mechanical principles, crude as they may seem, offer us a physical experience of typographic principles unavailable through any other medium. Our shared cultural apprehension (literally, our grasp) of typographic structure, the sense of the ‘form principal’ through which we recognise and read, has its origins firmly based in 500 years of three-dimensional metal type. As a consequence, the tactile experience of that type is an essential haptic learning process, fundamental to a complete and integrated understanding of typographic form in typographic space.

©Will Hill 2011