Articles on Basic Design Theory

The aim of the following analysis is Detail in Typography Paris France B42 “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible ” Jacob H ed The Crystal Goblet Sixteen Essays on Typography London Sylvan Press pp The Making of Books rd edn London Faber & Fabertwofold. Firstly, it aims to examine themechanics of typography and provide a Hochuli J Warde B Jennett Sbetter understanding of its techniquesand subtleties. Qualitative researchfrom The Crystal Goblet, or PrintingShould be Invisible (1955) by Warde ² andThe Making of Books (1964) by Jennet, ³are written in the classic era of type,this means that the information waseasily accessible for the authors, at thetime of their writing, and thus theyshould provide more accurate informa-tion than a reflective paper written incontemporary times. Moreover, thesebooks and others were written duringan age when this information waslearned and practised. These writers aremuch more valuable when searching fora traditional view of type than anymodern writer as they likely practisedthe methods they write of. 97

Is a Traditional Typographical The other purpose of this paper Proficiency Still Essential: holds equal standing, being that it aims Designing the book to examine how type has developed and whether aspects of the profession have been lost or gained. The qualitative research gathered from examining the mechanics and history of type greatly underpin this second purpose. Taking the collected information further by comparing past and present, use of Detail in Typography (2015) by Hochuli ¹ and The Elements of Typographic Style (2013) by Bringhurst, ² provide further qualitative research pertaining to modern develop- ments in typography and technology. The collective information was examined cumulatively so as to determine how well the modern typographer should under- stand the legacy left before them. So as to provide the most up to date information on how contemporary designers relate to type, quantitative98

























glamour and significance—then the layout “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible ” in Jacob H ed The Crystal Goblet Sixteen Essays on Typography London Sylvan Press pp “The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible ” in Jacob H ed The Crystal Goblet Sixteen Essays on Typography London Sylvan Press pp see Deconstruction & Structuralism Writing as a Lesser Form of Speech or The Elements of Typographic Style: Version: 4.0: 20th Anniversary Edition th edn Seattle Hartlet and Marks Publisherswould have been a failure’. (p. 15) This is apoint of view that was explored thor- Warde B Cleland T M n d in Warde B Poynor Symbiotic Coexistence? on pages Bringhurst Roughly at Cranbrook Academy of Art (c.1990). They were firmly against conform-ity and attested that the complexity intheir designs highlighted ‘…aspects ofcommunication that uniform, modernisttreatments sometimes obscure’. ³ It is thiscalibre of expressive typography that canonly be captured by a living mind, and itis here that OpenType falls short. ‘When all right-thinking human beingsare struggling to remember that other menand women are free to be different and freeto become more different still, how can onehonestly write a rulebook? What reason andauthority exist for these commandments,suggestions and instructions? Surely typog-raphers, like others, ought to be at liberty tofollow or to blaze the trails they choose.’ ⁴ 111

Is a Traditional Typographical 5.3.4 Relief for the designer Proficiency Still Essential: Classical typesetting A further, important factor to take into consideration is how the digitisation of typesetting has affected the profession of designers. Working professional Sylvain Michaelis ¹ has been working since the age of mechanical typesetting and believes that the industry was killed by modern developments into digital typesetting. ‘There was an art to typeset- ting that is now under the purview of the graphic designer. That industry was killed by the computer/digital world.’ Simultane- ously, though, Toni Serofin, ¹ another working professional, is pleased with the age of digital typography. ‘…your com- ment reminded me of the bad old days of copy fitting. I never really got the knack of it. Thank goodness things are so much easier now!’ Serofin’s seems to be a popular opinion as, out of a group of112

forty-six designers * (of various fields), * While this sample is93% prefer digital typesetting to wood- too small to beblock and hot metal, and 46% consider it conclusive it indicatessuperior. It appears that the designer an interesting trend.will always be needed, in the future, thismay be to a lesser extent but there arestill areas of typography that needintuition over standardisation, so in-stead of being replaced the typographerhas embraced the digital font.5.4 Have recent developments helped Reply to a LinkedIn post on Book The Making of Books rd edn London Faber & Faberor hindered the medium? Michaelis S Serofin T Landers R and Johnson W Jennett S5.4.1 Classical typesetting Design group to Simon Hope NovemberSince type was in its infancy, untilrelatively recently, the act of assemblingthe components of the page was knownas composing, and those who performedsuch operations were compositors.Jennet ² describes the necessary qualities 113

Is a Traditional Typographical of said compositors; nimble fingers and Proficiency Still Essential: strong hands were essential, but the Classical typesetting ability to read was imperative. To have the capacity to read practically made one a scholar in the early years of printing, and not only did a compositor have to comprehend the letters they set, they had to do so quickly and accurately. While reading had become common- place by the time of mechanical typeset- ting, there had been little change in the rest of the process. ‘The costume is different, the tools and materials are infinitely improved, but the compositor of to-day [1964] is doing the same kind of work, in recognisably the same way, as his fifteenth-century predecessors’. ¹ (p. 44) In historical typesetting, the com- positor’s role was to set the separate characters of type in line with a manu- script provided by an author. The glyphs a compositor used were stored in cases.114

Each font was made up of two cases; an The Making of Books rd edn London Faber & Faberupper case for capital letters and lessfrequently used characters and a lower Jennett Scase for “lowercase” letters and moreroutine glyphs. Often, not all of the fontwas kept in the two cases due to thesheer amount of space that would beneeded to store that many sorts (letterpieces), and the cases were alreadyrather large. The lay of the case wasfairly standard throughout the Eng-lish-speaking world, specifically orderedso that the most common letter (e) hadthe largest box, and was most central-ised. This meant that the box could bothhold a large number of sorts and waseasiest to access (the modern computerkeyboard layout was designed for funda-mentally the same reasons). Due to this,moving between printers was madeinfinitely easier for the compositor, therewas no need to worry about learning a 115

Is a Traditional Typographical new lay at each new job. ‘This is impor- Proficiency Still Essential: tant because the act of composing becomes Classical typesetting ingrained as a habit, and habits are notori- ously difficult to alter’. ¹ (p. 48) It was the compositor’s job to pick out type from the two cases and arrange it in a com- posing stick, line by line. Upon comple- tion, justification and any reading and correction, the line is transferred to a galley and made ready for proofing. Several proofs are gathered together and sent to the reading room for checking, and any errors that are found are noted and amended by the compositor. This entire process, Steinberg ² explains, was made obsolete by the Linotype, and eventually, the Monotype, which allowed an operator to compose up to 6,000 words an hour, opposed to the standard 2,000 of a skilled compositor. The added speed came from the machine’s ability to set type as fast as a compositor could116

push the buttons. On top of this, the The Making of Books rd edn London Faber & Faber Five Hundred Years of Printing Edited by John Trevitt rd edn London The British Library Publishing Divisioncompositor no longer had to manuallyre-distribute the sorts into the cases, Jennett S Steinberg S Hthis was done automatically by themachine. This reduced what was once anarmy of compositors to a handful ofmachines. As with the human composi-tor, once the type had been verified bypublisher and author, and re-composedwith any corrections, it was sent topress. Oftentimes, especially in newspa-per printing, all the combined lines oftype were re-cast as a single form. Thismeant that a form did not have to be setmultiple times, significantly improvingthe efficiency of printing and allowingnewspapers to “boom”. Although larger companies hadaccess to printing and composing, it wasnot so easy for others. Metal type oftenhad to be printed by a separate companyrather than in-house, and the choice of 117

























FurtherReading

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Further Reading Benjamin, A. ed. (2005) Walter Benjamin and Art. London and New York: Continuum. Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated from Greman by Zohn, H. Proofed and Corrected edn. Online. [Accessed: 24/04/2015] Bierut, M. (1996) Print’s Finale Has Been Postponed. Internet. Vol. 5, No. 20 Eye, Eye Magazine. [Accessed: 18/10/14] Blackwell, L. (2000) The End Of Print: The Grafik Design Of David Carson. 2nd edn. Laurence King Publishing. Brewer, A. (2009) A Guide to Marx’s Capital. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bringhurst, R. (2013) The Elements of Typographic Style: Version 4.0: 20th Anniversary Edition. 4th edn. Seattle: Hartley and Marks Publishers. Callinicos, A. (1983) Marxism and Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cheng, K. (2006) Designing Type. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chomsky, N. & Naiman, A. ed. (2012) How the World Works. Hamish Hamilton. Chomsky, N. (1993) The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many. Chomsky, N. (2004) Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Domination. Penguin Books.132

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Further Reading Derrida, J. (1987) The Truth In Painting. Translated from French by Bennington, G. & McLeod, I. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1997) Of Grammatology. Translated French by Spivak, G. C. Corrected edn. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Dowding, G. (1998) An Introduction to the History of Printing Types: An Illustrated Summary of the Main Stages in the Development of Type Design from 1440 up to the Present Day; An Aid to Type Face Identification. London: The British Library Publishing Division. Duncan, R. & Smith, M. J. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. London and New York: Continuum. Dziedric, N. & Peacock, S. (1997) Duncan, R. & Smith, M. J. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. London and New York: Continuum. Eisner, W. (2008) Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist. New York: Norton. Fingeroth, D. (2008) The Rough Guide to: Graphic Novels. London: Rough Guides. Gramsci, A. (1925) Maximalism and Extremism. Online. [Accessed: 12/04/16] Hajdu, D. (2008) The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. New134

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hands, G. (2000) Marx: A Beginner’s Guide.Hodder & Stoughton. Heller, S. (2004) Cult of the Ugly. Online.[Accessed: 05/10/15] Hendel, R. (1998) On Book Design. New Haven &London: Yale University Press. Hess, E. (1992) Witek, J. ed. (2007) ArtSpiegelman: Conversations. Mississippi: Jackson. Hochuli, J. (2015) Detail In Typography. Paris,France: B42. Jennett, S. (1964) The Making of Books. 3rd edn.London: Faber & Faber. Jury, D. (2009) What Is Typography? Mies,Switzerland: RotoVision. Kaufman, R. (n.d.) Aura, Still. Benjamin, A.ed. (2005) Walter Benjamin and Art. London and NewYork: Continuum. Kellner, D. (2002) Jean Baudrillard.Bertens, H. & Notoli, J. eds. (2002) Postmodernism:The Key Figures. Blackwell Publishers. Kempgen, S. (2008) “Unicode 5.1, Old ChurchSlavonic, Remaining Problems—and Solutions,Including OpenType Features,” Slovo: Towards aDigital Library of South Slavonic Manuscripts, 21-26. Kinross, R. (1998) “Introduction to theEnglish-Language Edition,” The New Typography: A 135

Further Reading Handbook For Modern Designers. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp.xv-xliv. Landy, M. (2002) Antonio Gramsci. Bertens, H. & Notoli, J. eds. (2002) Postmodernism: The Key Figures. Blackwell Publishers. Langer, L. (n.d.) Duncan, R. & Smith, M. J. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. London and New York: Contuum. Lewis, R. (1996) Absolut Book.: The Absolut Vodka Advertising Story. Tuttle Publishing. Linotype: The Film — In Search of the Eighth Wonder of the World. (2012) Directed by Douglas Wilson [Film]. Linotype: The Film. Loxley, S. (2004) Type: The Secret History Of Letters. London & New York: I. B. Tauris. Lunn, E. (1982) Marxism and Modernism: An Historical Study of Lukács, Brecht, Benjamin, and Adorno. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lupton, E. (2004) Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History Meets Theory. Online. [Accessed: 05/10/15] López, J. & Potter, G. eds. (2001) After Postmodernism: An Introduction to Critical Realism. London: The Athelone Press. May, D. (1942) 101 Roughs. Chicago: Frederick J. Drake & Co. McLean, R. (1975) Jan Tschichold: Typographer.136

1st edn. London: Lund Humphries. McLellan, D. (1986) Marx. Fontana Press. Orwell, G. (1989) Nineteen Eighty-Four. PenguinBooks. Packard, V. (1962) The Hidden Persuaders.Penguin Books. Paolozzi, E. (1952) Was This Metal MonsterMaster-or Slave? Printed Paper on Card. Online.[Accessed: 23/02/2015] Phillips, T. (1982) Canto : [no title].Screenprint on Paper. Online. [Accessed: 23/02/2015] Phillips, T. (n.d) Dante’s Inferno: Notes On ThisWork. Online. [Accessed: 23/02/2015] Poynor, R. (2003) No More Rules: Graphic Designand Postmodernism. Laurence King Publishing. Reading Museum (2014) Britain’s BayeuxTapestry at Reading Museum. Online.[Accessed: 06/04/2015] Rius & Appignanesi, R. ed. (2006) IntroducingMarx. Icon Books. Robin (196?) A Letter Against Johnson’s ChangeOf Style. Letter. Schulze, F. (1996) PhilipJohnson’s Life And Work. Illustrated edn. Universityof Chicago Press. Sabin, R. (1996) Comics, Comix and GraphicNovels: A History of Comic Art. London: PhaidonPress Limited. 137

Further Reading Saussure, F. (2011) Course in General Linguistics. Translated from French by Baskin, W. New York: Columbia University Press. Schaefer, E. (2008) Chimes: Comics Valuable Too. Online. [Accessed: 20/03/2015] Silverblatt, M. (1992) The Cultural Relief of Art Spiegelman: A Conversation With Michael Silverblatt. Witek, J. ed. (2007) Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Mississippi: Jackson. Smith, G. (1987) From Mickey To Maus: Recalling The Genocide Through Cartoon. Witek, J. ed. (2007) Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Mississippi: Jackson. Spiegelman, A. (1992) Silverblatt, M. (1992) The Cultural Relief of Art Spiegelman: A Conversation With Michael Silverblatt. Witek, J. ed. (2007) Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Mississippi: Jackson. Spiegelman, A. (1993) Sabin, R. (1996) Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon Press Limited. Spiekermann, E. and Ginger, E. M. (2000) Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works. 2nd end. Berkeley, CA: Adobe Press, U.S. Steinberg, S. H. (1996) Five Hundred Years of Printing. Edited by Trevitt, J. 3rd edn. London: The British Library Publishing Division. Tate (2004) Whaam!: Display Caption. Online. [Accessed: 19/03/2015]138

Thompson, M. (1979) Rubbish Theory: TheCreation And Destruction Of Value. Crow, D. (2003)Visible Signs: An Introduction To Semiotics.Switzerland: AVA Publishing SA. Trotsky, L. (1931) The Permanent Revolution.E-Book. Marxist Internet Archive. [Accessed: 12/04/16] Tschichold, J. (1930) New Life In Print.Armstrong, H. ed. (2009) Graphic Design Theory:Readings From The Field. New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press. Tschichold, J. (1930) What Is New TypographyAnd What Are Its Aims? Translated from German byKinross, R. Burke, C. ed. (2007) Active Literature:Jan Tschichold And New Typography. London:Hyphen Press. Tschichold, J. (1934) The Placing of Type In AGiven Space. McLean, R. ed. (1975) Jan Tschichold:Typographer. London: Lund Humphries. Tschichold, J. (1987) The New Typography: AHandbook For Modern Designers. Translated fromGerman by McLean, R. University of California Press. Tschichold, J. (2006) The New Typography: AHandbook for Modern Designers. Translated byMcLean, R. English-Language edn. Berkeley:University of California Press. Vocabulary.com (2014) 15 Words WhosePronunciation Has Changed Over Time. Online. 139

Further Reading [Accessed: 22/11/15] Warde, B. (1930) The Crystal Goblet: Or Why Printing Should Be Invisible. Armstrong, H. ed. (2009) Graphic Design Theory: Readings From The Field. New York: Princeton Architectural Press. Warde, B. (1955) “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible,” Jacob, H. ed. The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography. London: Sylvan Press, pp.11-17. Weingart, W. (1972) How Can One Make Swiss Typography? Bierut, M. & Helfand, J. et al. eds. (1999) Looking Closer Three: Classical Writings On Graphic Design. New York: Allworth Press. Witek, J. ed. (2007) Art Spiegelman: Conversations. Mississippi: Jackson. Wolk, D. (2007) Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Da Capo Press.140

This book was designed and typeset by Simon Hope.It was printed and bound by hand in London.The text face is FreightText Pro, designed by Phil’sFonts. This is an enlargement and revision of JoshuaDarden’s original Freight Text family, publishedthrough GarageFonts in 2005.The captions are set in FreightMicro Pro, part of theextended Freight family by Joshua Darden, initiallypublished GarageFonts in 2005.Titles are set in FreightSans Pro, the counterpart ofFreightText Pro and also initially released by JoshuaDarden through GarageFonts in 2005.