Friday 29 April

Typography

Since the advent of desktop publishing, it seems
everyone’s a closet typographer. If only it were
true.

Armed with a swag of fonts and folders full of
formatting devices, simple documents have
become complex typographic forms. Well,
sometimes. Mostly they’re just more evidence of
the growing visual pandemonium of contemporary
life.

As with most empowering tools of communication
that are increasingly available to many of us, we
tend to forget about the immediate pre-history of
these devices — and the skills that went with them.
Who really cares why Max Miedinger and Edouard
Hoffman invented the ubiquitous clear-cut
Helvetica typeface in 1957? Should it really
concern us that the ever-popular Times Roman
typeface was commissioned exclusively for The
Times of London in 1931, before being released to
the world at large in 1933? Probably not.

However, in the absence of such background
history, we could well be in danger of losing a
specialised knowledge about the precise ways
that type conveys powerful and subtle meanings.
This might sound a bit stuffy, but it’s true to say
that at a time when the availability and variety of
type is on the rise, our general knowledge of their
history, form, and associated meanings is on the
decline.

Selecting and specifying the right kind of type for
the job used to be a skilled task performed by
trained typographers, typesetters and graphic
designers. It still is. It’s just that nowadays many of
us think we’re experts.

Typography is essentially a matter of visual
communication, of using letterforms to add non-
verbal impact to words. A good knowledge of the
range of types available, their constructive
principles, legibility and emotional associations
makes typography more than just a matter of
squeezing words into columns.
It’s about the creation of an image. Whether it’s a
poster, handbill, book, magazine spread, a record
cover or a three-dimensional application, the point
is to communicate an appropriate message.

Signage can take an almost abstract sculptural
form. Tokyo-based Takenobu Igarashi’s brushed
steel street address for the offices of Nike looks
like a perfectly engineered bank vault door.
Except it’s not. Designers like Pentagram’s Alan
Fletcher have even stretched and squeezed
letters into tall metal gates. Others, such as New
York’s Fred Woodward, are happy filling an entire
book cover with letters that become the
illustration. In such instances we get the non-
verbal meaning of the typographic arrangement
before we even read their literal meaning. This
century is full of examples of text that makes
sense as image first and language second.

This is exactly what Brody Neuenschwander
argues in his recent book “Letterwork: Creative
Letterforms in Graphic Design” (London, Phaidon,
1993). Neuenschwander is a calligrapher and
graphic designer who is probably best known for
is collaboration with Peter Greenaway on
“Prospero’s Books”. You might remember the
quill-like letters that sweep the screen have a
distinctively Shakespearian appearance (the style
is purportedly derived from what little is known of
the Bard’s own hand). But they were created using
a combination of hand-lettering and sophisticated
computer technologies.

Neuenschwander is not afraid of computers, let’s
get that straight. His book is full of examples of
lettering and typography created using digital
machines. His main complaint is therefore not
about the “desktop revolution”. It’s about what he
sees as the increasing marginalisation of
calligraphy and typography as a consequence.
Experimentation has continued no doubt, “but
often without the formal background that could
guide it and give it purpose.”

The book is filled with examples of what he
considers to be the best in the current spate of
type-based work. Not all the designers included
may have had the kind of formal training that
Neuenschwander advocates, but their work is
nonetheless exemplary. From the austere yet
playful compositions of Berlin’s Ott + Stein to the
“deconstructionist” artwork of Michigan’s Joan
Dobkin, we are led through the wide variety
typographic approaches available in the nineties.
Unlike the Moderns, we have no problem
appropriating and combining styles from any
moment in history. The combinations just have to
be legible (whatever that is).

Dobkin’s recent posters and leaflets for Amnesty
International are a great example of how our
understanding of legibility is being transformed.
The viewer of these works must reconstruct the
fragmented messages, overlaid texts, and scribbled
letters according to their own experience. The
frustration we might have at the “illegibility” of
such posters is actually appropriate to its subject
– conveying the political terror, repression and
anxiety experienced in many countries.

Whether the same holds true for current (almost
universal) trend to splatter all manner of different
sized and shaped type across the page without
thought of context and meaning is another matter
altogether. It’s enough to bring the retiring
typographers back out of the closet.

Ross Harley