Widows and orphans

• 4 Sep 2010
• design typography movable type
• permalink

Typography is first and foremost about relationships, so it’s no surprise that typographers named anomalies after the abandoned and the isolated. They are dramatic terms: who would want to make a widows of a line or orphan a word?

A widowed line is one left to fend for itself, independent of the rest of its paragraph that hangs behind on the previous page. The orphaned word dangles precariously off the tail of a paragraph, set on a line of its own with only a period to defend it from the void extending off to the edge of the paper. Both are to be studiously avoided.

Of course, on the web, typographers have given up: the variability of devices and screens and the gross imperfections of our tools mean that controlling such things as where the end of a paragraph might lie is well out of the question. In print, the designer carefully eliminates imperfections with minute adjustments in tracking, subtle shifts in the size or placement of text on the page, or slight tweaks to the margins—all aimed at eliminating larger distractions by introducing smaller ones.

This sort of attention is beyond anomalous on the web, and not just because of the imprecision of CSS and HTML. I think the very idea is antithetical. There are not enough designers in the world to look after the widows and orphans of the web (much less the myriad other type crimes that occur here every day). The nature of the web, and of tools like this one (tumblr) treat text as an end in and of itself, and design as a mere shell in which to drop it. We design generically.

How different things were a century ago, when movable type was still common, and the most efficient means of publishing meant a small phalanx of men arranging a legion of sorts (thin metal bars each bearing a letter) into a page of text. Every letter was selected and placed and spaced individually. The idea of laboring over the spacing of individual letters wasn’t painstaking, it was necessary.

There’s something terribly appealing to me about spending that much time on mere text. It’s part of why I’ve revamped my website to demand such attention. If people put as much care today into what they printed as movable type required, perhaps we’d find that, though we said less, we had more to say.