The Typographer as Reader

This paper was originally delivered at Typecon, Atlanta July 2009 and subsequently published in the Linotype Newsletter by kind invitation of Otmar Hofer

Despite the title, this is not a paper about legibility.
It is only very incidentally about readability.
It is rather concerned with the macro-typography of the page and the publication – rather than the micro-typography of the letterform.
Fernand Baudin coined the term typotropic to describe a tendency to look at type rather than the space it occupies, and while I don’t intend this paper to be typophobic it is less concerned with letter structure or the relative legibility of individual typefaces. I’m looking at the relationship between typography and language, and the implications this has for typography within design education.
I remember ten years ago at the 1999 ATypI in Boston, a comment by Phil Baines, when he compared type conference delegates to brick-makers talking about the properties of bricks, while he was more interested in talking about architecture.
The architectural basis of typography is language, and it is the typographer’s understanding of the architecture of language, which I want to consider today.
As designers, and design educators, we tend to generate fairly informal bodies of practical theory. Sometimes we get to test them on others, often on our students, sometimes on colleagues at conferences. Sometimes we find exhaustive bodies of systematic research that confirms things that we have known for years, through empirical reflection on our work, to the point where they have become self-evident, even banal.
Occasionally we have the opportunity to develop this practical, experiential theory into more formal academic research, but not often.
The dimensions of graphic design – as a profession and as a field of study – are endlessly debatable, its boundaries notoriously fuzzy, and the position of typography within graphic design education is even more fluid, subject to a wide range of preconceptions, orthodoxies and multiple interpretations.
Typography has in the last 20 years developed, socially and culturally, from being a very specialised body of knowledge to a democratised, public and domestic medium. Patterns of technological change support the view that rather than being a sub-genre within graphic design, typography is the larger and more far-reaching discipline, graphic design the specialism. Much typography exists outside of graphic design, but there is very little graphic design that is independent of typography.
Typography is increasingly being practiced by non-designers, and decisions we would in the past have seen as the province of specialists are being applied by a whole spectrum of visual artists – as well as by administrators, secretarial staff, and schoolchildren.
It follows from these changes that we should ask new questions about typography in education, and question whether the precepts which have served in the past are still applicable.
What pedagogical model do we apply to the study of typography?
What methods are best suited to developing awareness as well as skill?
In order to answer these questions, we need first to look at the range of perceptions brought to the subject in the past.
In the mid sixties Emil Ruder said:
‘Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty’
In 1972, Wolfgang Weingart listed these three elements as comprising the correct typography education:
1 The value of typography within the most diversified communications processes, and its efficiency as a means of communication, must be redefined. Such a redefinition would be an attempt to expand the meaning and range of the concept ‘typography’
2 In the future, new information and changing forms of communication will obviously require additional new typographic standards in relation to the syntactic and semantic. The substance of typography must change, along with the information it has to convey, and the general cultural scene in which it must function
3 Finally, although it may be a subjective and perhaps provocative statement to make, I feel strongly that this new typography must also – and I emphasize also– be the result of a very personal thought process in design. By that, I mean those efforts based upon individuality, imagination and artistic qualities.
So: in the altered conditions of the twenty-first century, we may need to step back from some of the assumptions we grew up with and ask again the question: what is typography? And how do we teach it?
Is it an expressive medium, situated within the educational context of art and design, defined by abstract values: rhythm, tonality, form, dots and lines?
‘Writing is purely a means of communication built up from linear geometrical signs…’
Armin Hoffman
Is it a pragmatic functional tool, to which one might apply the criteria and methodologies of engineering or industrial design?
‘Designing means: to pick out determining elements, and combine them. Seen in these terms, designing calls for method’.
Karl Gerstner
‘Typographic design exists to reduce the complexity of visual communication into accessibility, by way of simplicity, to eliminate confusion and visual ‘noise’ from the focused clarity of intent.’
Alan Robertson
Or a medium of cultural interpretation, situated within the humanities?
‘Graphic design is an act of cultural interpretation; it is a form of reading, writing and editing using words, pictures, symbols, materials and technologies’.
Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller
Of course, it is all these things and more.
I’d suggest that the most useful insight into its current condition, and the contradictions which surround its relationship to the wider context of ‘Design’, may be found in the fact that graphic design is unique among art and design disciplines in its relationship to written language. Laurie Haycock Makela has said that ‘Reading separates graphic design from other visual arts’
I’d identify this ‘separation’ as a defining characteristic, fundamental to defining the way forward for typography within design education.
I’d suggest that in order to look forward, we need first to question some unexamined assumptions about the relationship between typography and graphic design. In order to understand where we are, it may be necessary to revisit or revise some popular assumptions about how we got here.
Most typography teaching takes place within the context of graphic design, which in almost all cases is situated within the larger context of art and design departments and schools. This brings its own tensions and contradictions.
It is significant that the Bauhaus was formed from the merger of an academy of art and a technical college. I’d suggest that it is in this uneasy marriage that we can trace some continuing contradictions and ambiguities in typographic education.
The Bauhaus promoted a concept of ‘design’ which steadily gained cultural currency over a period of thirty years, providing the template for design thinking in the postwar reconstruction years and into the early 60s.
This assumes that there is a process or definition common to both the design of functional artefacts – fabrics, furniture – and the processes of graphic communication. The historical authority of the Bauhaus ideal has become so dominant that this unusual assumption remained largely unquestioned in design education through the late twentieth century.
In presuming to encompass typography within a broad ‘design’ agenda, while working at some remove from the printing trade, the Bauhaus also contributed to a developing bias toward viewing type as abstract form.
This idea embodies some very complex contradictions, which run deep into design pedagogy. The abstraction of letters, and their reduction to the status of formal elements, is a recurrent feature in graphic design education and has become a synonym for ‘creativity’ and dynamism.
I’d suggest that in this phase of design history, which still forms a foundation for many of the underlying precepts of design education, the formal, abstract values of type were promoted and given cultural value, promoting the notion of a commonality of ‘design’ with other design disciplines – while obscuring the differences between communication and manufacture, between saying things and making things, by focusing instead upon those aspects of graphic communication which it has in common with other kinds of ‘design’. To view typography as form and pattern, shape and composition, foregrounds the affinities type might have with, for instance textile design, while negating the typographer’s duty to language – or at least denying that duty any real creative status.
The metaphor of ‘engineering’ was central to the rhetoric of the Bauhaus, as was the unifying concept of architecture.
Jan Tschichold wrote:
‘The engineer shapes our age. Distinguishing marks of his work: economy, precision, use of pure constructional forms that correspond to the functions of the object. Nothing could be more characteristic of our age than these witnesses to the inventive genius of the engineer’
We might see here a worrying parallel to Stalin’s description of writers as ‘engineers of human souls’
But product design is not analogous to graphic communication.
Making things is not the same as saying things.
And when communication is measured by the aesthetics of the object, a dissonance occurs.
It’s widely recognised that typography is only secondarily a medium of aesthetic form and visual expression. Even Weingart places this third in his agenda, and hedges it with qualifiers. Before him, Stanley Morison said:
‘Typography may be defined as the art of rightly disposing printed material in accordance with specific purpose; of so arranging the letters, distributing the space and controlling the type as to aid to the maximum the reader’s comprehension of the text’.
‘Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only incidentally aesthetic end’
Yet the abstraction of language – for formal rather than linguistic purpose – is given disproportionate cultural value in design education.
Armin Hofmann, in his seminal Graphic Design Manual of 1965, described writing as ‘linear geometrical signs’ – and proceeded to address typography through a series of exercises which break type down to its geometric elements rather than its linguistic ones.
Even as ‘design’ gathered cultural cachet in the postwar years, the typographic scope of what was to be known as ‘graphic design’ occupied an uneasy middle ground between compositor skills historically associated with the printing trade – in design for the printed page and related media – and the graphic skills of the commercial artist – associated with posters, book jackets and advertising design. While the rhetoric of the Bauhaus gave the appearance of dissolving these boundaries, it was not until letterpress was succeeded by photosetting and offset litho that this merger took concrete form in the workplace.
This development marks a social change in the implementation of design – from shop-floor to studio, blue collar to white collar, trade apprenticeship to diploma and degree.
David Jury, writing on developments in British design education of the 1950s, notes that:
‘Design for print, now called graphic design, was to be taught as a subject quite separate from the printing process’
In the interim report of the working party on typographic teaching, instituted by the Society of Industrial Artists and Designers in 1966, Michael Twyman observed that:
‘The view of art and design held by teachers and pupils in secondary education is still largely based on the concept of the designer as an artist, and design courses as means of refining the ‘artistic ability’ of students’
Twyman made the further point:
‘the most effectively developed methods we have seen have been those that rejected the use of typography as a form of applied art and concentrated on the functional, technical and economic factors’
In a 1996 conference paper, under the provocative title ‘Typography is too important to be taught to designers’, Cal Swann, reflecting on the development of in art school programmes to full degree status, notes that:
‘remarkably little has changed to the typographic instruction which is based on form over function’
However, as a subject perceived to lie inside the larger subject of graphic design, within the culture of the art school, typography has had to accommodate itself to a broader pedagogical ethos, rooted in visual values rather than linguistic ones.
And so, it may be that in order to better understand the current status of typography, we need first to unlearn the dominant assumptions of the previous century.
Written language in the 21st century occurs less within a linear structure or ‘complete’ language system than as a component of a ‘mixed system’ closely integrated with images and icons.
Ten to fifteen years ago graphic designers were celebrating this dissolution of the boundaries between image and word. We could see a shift from the dominance of the linear; from the 500 year legacy of set baselines, towards the ‘mixed language’ or purposely incomplete system of the screen – combining text, icon and image, moving away from the linear structure of the bound book towards the more radial or nodal structures proposed by interactive media.
Now I’m beginning to worry about it. Teaching a generation of students who have grown up in this culture of mixed language systems, and consequently spent their whole literate lives in a very fluid, relativist relationship to reading, I find that we can no longer assume the kind of attention to language that we’d previously expected of an aspiring professional dealing with type.
In a sense the task has become more complex. Rather than a single set of accepted conventions, we expect a student to manage an extended range of levels of formality: from the abbreviations of texting and emoticons, through the subtle gradations of accepted usage in emails, through to written letters and print.
I realised a while back, in drawing students attention to some fairly embarrassing error of usage, that the surprising thing was not that the error had been made, but the lack of concern. The response ’yeah, ok, I’ll fix it’ (to the kind of solecism that would have had me waking up screaming…) was not just the familiar ‘cool’ nonchalance of the art student, but an indicator that it just didn’t seem that important anymore. I’ve also seen a decline in students’ affinity for the analysis and construction of typographic hierarchies. At this point, it is commonplace to blame the education the student has received prior to University. However, it seems to me that the problem is not so much qualitative as structural.
Intelligent typography depends upon intelligent reading, but this exposes a faultline that runs through our education system and indeed across our culture: the contradistinction of ‘academic’ language-based study against ‘creative’ visual study.
Educational convention places the linguistic and the visual in opposition. The pupil with a developed linguistic awareness is likely to be encouraged towards ‘academic’ studies, and may indeed meet some resistance in seeking to pursue the study of visual communication; a field still thought to provide for the ‘creative’ individual who characteristically ‘isn’t good with words’. For the typographer, ‘not being good with words’ is a pretty serious impediment, and is an area in which graphic design degree courses often have to address the limitations of the education their students have received at secondary level.
The complaint that students don’t read enough, is a cliché of academic life, but for the student of typography it has particular implications.
In ‘Students who don’t read’, Don Roum makes the point that:
‘..there are many young people, intelligent, visually aware and completely literate, who find reading and writing a boring chore to be undertaken only when necessary. Such people may might make excellent pottery designers, illustrators or sculptors, but they can never be typographic designers’
Part of the problem seems simply that so few design students read for pleasure, or for the exploration of ideas, or indeed read at all unless required to.
William Drenntel has said:
‘with all the discussion about literacy in America, the truth is that much of our country is losing its taste – perhaps even its appetite – for the printed word. The issue is not what you read so much as whether you read’.
Most conspicuous in its absence is the idea of reading as an exploratory or recreational activity. I sometimes think that I care less about what students read so long as they find something to read that matters to them. I’ve been tempted to add to the reading list for any typography module, the final instruction: ‘Read something that isn’t on the reading list.’
Even for the diligent and high-achieving student, there is a widespread perception of reading as a pragmatic, acquisitive activity. What can I read that will give me the information I need to fulfil this task? (To answer this essay question, master this programme, understand this project?). Current conceptions of ‘study skills’ stress efficiency in this process. The ready availability of data from online sources makes of study and research largely a matter of editorial and evaluative sifting.
This is understandable, but bypasses a dynamic that is crucial to the kind of fulfilling intellectual life one would wish for one’s students. – the speculative, random or non-linear pursuit of further knowledge for the sheer interest it brings. An open-ended process – creative noodling, free-associative research, the opening-up to unexpected connections and possibilities. While we recognise this creative dynamic in visual work, we neglect or marginalise its equivalent in reading and research. It might be described as ‘creative reading’.
Picasso said: ‘I do not seek, I find’. ‘Finding’ is how we furnish our inner lives, find the inspirations which inform our work. It is how we develop a personal culture, an intellectual hinterland, and a set of critical standards.
At a practical level, the designer’s functional literacy is more important than ever before. Typographic designers are increasingly responsible for the origination and structuring of copy, on the page and on the screen. The mediation of the ‘editor’ is less widespread; publishing hierarchies are dissolving, and with the convergence of communications media a wide range of self-publishing activities have become key aspects of the designers practice.
Twyman, in the report of the working party on typographic teaching, comments that:
‘Any designer needs to be capable of writing and speaking clearly and objectively on various aspects of design.. …furthermore the typographer is closely involved with editorial decisions and must have a clear understanding of the meaning of his copy before he can begin to order it…
..for these reasons, we recommend that all courses in typography include provision for students to develop fluency and clarity of expression in written and spoken English.’
And yet, the role of the understanding of language – as a subject of analytical study and creative experience – still has an uneasy and ill-defined position within design education.
As we have seen, the design philosophies which have helped define graphic design and design education, have had only a fragmentary, tenuous or troubled relationship to the linguistic purposes of typography. Despite the rhetoric of functionalism, the design ‘fundamentals’ identified by many modernist teachers are characterised by a fondness for abstraction; applying a reductive language of compositional dynamics rather than semantic values. These are fundamentals of visual form, which leave little space for the consideration of the fundamentals of linguistic structure.
Ellen Lupton said in Visual Syntax:
‘The dominant task of modern design theory has been to uncover the syntax of the language of vision, that is, ways to organize geometric and typographic elements in relation to such formal oppositions as orthogonal/diagonal, static/dynamic, figure/ground, linear/planar and regular/irregular.’
‘The language of vision’ is a resonant and appealing phrase. But as Lupton’s explanation confirms, this is something quite distinct from language itself, and I’d suggest that in our pursuit of this ‘language of vision’ we may have diminished our vision of language.
The ‘formal oppositions’ Lupton describes are abstract in nature, and I’d suggest that organizing typographic elements according to abstract formal criteria is a strange and even perverse thing to do. Grouping ‘geometric and typographic elements’ as interchangeable or subject to a common set of processes or decisions, reduces type to geometry, or at least promotes its abstract qualities over its linguistic ones.
By comparison the ideal of type in the service of language – the fundamental duty identified by Ruder and before him by Morison – has long been perceived as innately conservative; the obverse of ‘creative’ expression, while visual development and innovation in typography has been characterised by a focus upon type as an abstract formal medium.
It may be time for typography to wake from the dream it has inhabited through much of the twentieth century, of formal essences shared with abstract art. The present conditions indicate the need for a shift from ‘painting with type’ to typography as reading. In response to the changing challenges of typography in the current century, we may need to redress the balance in favour of deeper and more inventive attention to semantic values.
I’d suggest that the way that we address Weingart’s agenda and ‘..expand the meaning and range of the concept typography’– is neither through the imposition or the destruction of formal structures, but through language: to develop a typography built upon the semantic properties of typographic space, and find a new perspective on the creative possibilities of type as a structural carrier of language
I would describe as semantic properties the manner in which the macro-
typography of the page reflects and advances the conceptual structure of the text. Gerard Unger has written:
‘…our convention of reading consists not only of types but also of the larger whole of a text ie the complete system of our reading habits: by reading line for line from left to right, reading column or page from top to bottom and so on. This is more than simply the overall structure of a page in a book or newspaper; it also includes, for example, the way in which new paragraphs are indicated, how parts of a text are made to stand out, how tables of contents, indexes and other tabular matter can best be employed, or how footnotes are handled. Ease of reading and the extent to which we find a particular text irritating both depend on both microtypography and macrotypography’
Swann concludes ‘Typography is too important’ with these observations:
‘My appeal is for a marriage of the two camps, or at least for a de facto cohabitation that could bring together visual creativity and the information science that enriches both domains. It’s time for a revised Bauhausian concept of art and technology to be entwined, because technology has suddenly outstripped the graphic designer we have nurtured for the past 40 years’
As Swann suggests, technology has provided some useful stimuli for revising our view of the fundamentals or ‘basics’ of typography.
In particular I have noted the emergence of debate on semantic issues in web design. Prompted by practical concerns and the need to explain and define ‘semantic markup’, this emergent discipline has re-identified an area I would view as key to the future development of typography within graphic design as a whole.
In an exceptionally lucid post by Mark Boulton in 2005 titled Semantic Typography: Bridging the XHTML gap, he states:
‘In the Web Standards community we hear the words ‘Semantic Markup’ thrown around a lot as a concept — the right thing to do — but I know a lot of designers who are trying to learn this stuff are being confused by the whole ‘semantic thing’. It’s a difficult task for a designer, who primarily thinks very visually, to relate to a concept like semantics in a document when all they want to do is create something.’
He goes on to say: ‘I’ve begun to notice links and patterns between typographic theory and Web Standards.’and sets out a very objective practical outline of typographic structure, breaking up language into semantically functional elements, leading to the well-argued point that:
Documents have a conceptual structure
Graphic structures can be made that reflect conceptual structures
This is perhaps the key to successful typographic design. Making sure the graphical representation of the content matches the mental model of the reader, or conceptual structure stipulated by the author (or preferably both).’
What struck me as unusual about this was the way in which the practical demands of a new design medium had prompted a revisiting of key typographic fundamentals; ideas that would have been self-evident to Ruder or Gerstner, but are ill-accommodated by the conception of ‘designers’ as these free spirits who ‘primarily think very visually’ and want to ‘create something’. What Boulton has described as ‘a difficult task for the designer’, prompted by the demands of XHTML, is actually a fundamental, continuous and largely unexamined theme which runs through graphic design, but is seldom accorded the creative scope or critical support it deserves. We may need to start looking into different theoretical disciplines to inform our sense of the fundamentals. Swann has said:
‘The new communications graduate must have a broad knowledge of communication theory, linguistics, semiotics and information theory, and have writing skills at the same level as the ‘graphic form’ we assume to be the knowledge/abilities base for graphic design graduates
Twyman observed that:
‘Typography can legitimately be seen as visual linguistics and should be studied in relation to the wider use of language’.
(It’s worth noting here that by ‘visual linguistics’, Twyman is referring to linguistics made visible – not a metaphorical linguistics of the visual like Lupton’s ‘language of vision’)
In a paper given at Reading University in 1997 David Crystal proposed a development ‘towards a typographical linguistics’
‘…it seems to me that the explication of printed language needs the expertise of both typographers and linguists, in order to provide a complete description of its forms and structures and a satisfactory explanation of its functions and effects’
If we accept this statement, it argues very strongly for the incorporation of linguistics into curriculum design and the pedagogical frameworks by which typography is taught.
‘If our two subjects are to come together, there seem to be only two ways of doing so. One is for linguists to become more interested in the properties of graphic substance… …the other is for typographers to become more interested in the linguistic properties of printed language’
Christopher Candlin, in the introduction to Sue Walker’s Typography and Language in Everyday Life, says:
‘Why then is Typography such a natural partner for applied linguistics and the study of language… …principally, because it is that discipline and professional practice which , in literate societies, mediates between the propositions and forces of the message and its producing and receiving participants.’
Seen as such, it becomes natural, almost an obvious commonplace that the understanding of language and its meaning potential must engage us with and entail a knowledge and understanding of typography’
Walker makes the point that:
‘…applied linguists and typographers have much to learn from each other. Linguists can benefit from noting some of the graphic aspects in their consideration of the characteristic features of particular varieties of written language, and typographers can learn from linguists about descriptive methods.’
‘the graphic presentation of written language can have a considerable effect on how it is read, interpreted and understood by readers, and it is important that designers and resders find out what kinds of graphic presentation may help readers to get the message’
These concerns are crucial in redefining the relationships between typography and graphic design, and to meeting the semantic challenges the subject faces in the fields of kinetic typography and the interactive text.
I would suggest therefore that we need to reinstate language as a key focus of study for the typographer, and that both reading and writing be seen as integral to the activity of typographic design.
This might sound obvious – we’re teaching at undergraduate level after all – but this assumption cannot be made lightly.
I’ve already identified those factors which dissuade the linguistically-engaged from the visual fields of design, and promote those fields for the less verbal student.
Within practice-based design programmes, writing and reading are frequently perceived as a side-track or a bolt-on; revealingly described as ‘complementary’ or ‘contextual’ study – a distinction which deepens the rift between language and visual practice.
We may need in fact to dissociate reading and writing from their links to the ‘academic’ aspects of the student’s studies, and institute a new role for them within the creative practice of design.
Much as we would expect a narrative illustrator to maintain a practice of observational drawing, we should expect intelligent analytical reading to be a key element of a typographer’s learning; a ‘basic’, to be studied and understood alongside understanding of the point system and the grid.
The illustration student’s sketchbook is a recording medium, not primarily concerned with output or product but with process and the record of observation. As such, it responds to, and absorbs, a wide spectrum of experience – from the sublime to the banal. Crucially, the best sketchbooks are not displays of skill – and I have found the greatest self-made obstacle of the non-writing designer to be the perception that writing is a ‘skill’, an innate attribute of fluency. Some of the clumsiest draftsmen are the most profound (I’d take the clumsiness of Cezanne over the fluency of John Singer Sargent)
I’d suggest that the typography student needs an equivalent practice of circumstantial reading and writing.
Familiarity with accurate and effective writing creates a developed linguistic sensibility, and that this in turn develops a typographer’s sensitivity to the nuances and structure of language. In an era where editorial/structural decisions increasingly take place within the design process, (and where the mediating presence of the sub-editor can no longer be assumed) it is particularly important that students learn to treat language with as much care, reverence and attention to detail as they bring to typographic form and composition.
The capacity for thoughtful and objective analysis of textual material, is the only substantial basis for meaningful decisions on typographic structure and differentiation.
This will not develop so long as reading is seen as a functional and acquisitive chore, but only when reading and the engagement with language is seen as a source of pleasure.
As a basis for deepening parallel and linkage between reading processes and creative visual processes, we need to prompt a non-linear, intuitive relationship to language and reading; to reinstate Picasso’s ‘finding’ alongside the objective and linear ‘seeking’ which so many students associate with reading.
We need to remind our students and ourselves that the intellect is a pleasure centre.
Of the many orthodoxies and misconceptions stand in the way of this, the most pervasive may be our view of ‘understanding’.
I think that in the digital age we’ve moved towards an increasingly binary notion of ‘understanding’ – either we do or we don’t, either it’s present or absent. And we see the absence of immediate understanding as an obstacle – as though ‘not understanding’ was a brick wall that we turn away from.
I’d suggest that the ‘not-understood’ should be a stimulus, not an obstruction.
We live in a culture of efficiency, which characterises the ‘difficult’ in negative terms, as a problem to be addressed through the most direct and incisive route available.
And yet: as a designer I tend to find useful parallels in music; to use the metaphor of music to describe and measure strategies and decisions, to review relationships of structure and idiom. These parallels work for me in cases where direct reference to visual examples would intrude upon the design process.
And at one time or other, we all encounter music that doesn’t make sense to us; that we don’t ‘understand’, that doesn’t conform to our expectations and definitions for what music is, and how it works.
There are two possible reactions to this:
“This makes no sense to me”; turn it off, walk away, change channel – applying a binary approach to understanding: flip-flop, yes-no – I don’t understand, so the engagement stops here.
Or:
“This is weird
–But this makes sense to someone.
–And therefore: A different definition of music must exist which makes sense of this.
–There is a sound-world, and a critical world, in which this music operates.
–I’d like to visit that place. Knowledge of that place would make my world larger.”
We may come to look back on the late 20th century as the time when typography went through an interesting kind of mid-life crisis. 400 years in, it started dressing unusually and keeping unlikely company. Following that metaphor, it may be that it is now time for typography to renew its vows with language.
It is in design’s responsibility to language that we find objective criteria and a basis for order and critical awareness, and the order found in this way is independent of modernist or post-modernist ideology, so long as we’re prepared to read.
We might stop thinking about making things less difficult and start to think about making the difficult more attractive. If we respond positively, creatively, to the lure of the difficult, our world becomes larger. And the larger our world, the better we are equipped to respond and communicate to others – which is the typographic designer’s highest aim and purpose.