How to think about typography
This is more of a stream-of-consciousness musing than it is a considered post. I’m giving a talk on typography next week and this is what I’ve been thinking about.
Here’s one way to think about it: Typography is about relationships.
There’s two sorts of relationships we’re talking about here: internal relationships and external relationships. Internal relationships connect different parts of your content to one another; external relationships establish your content within a larger context.
Before I go any further, I should touch on the other leg of typography: making your text legible. Understanding the basic rules that define how to set a measure, choose sufficient leading, and the like are also part of typography, but these are the most fundamental rules, engrained in us by the literate culture we’ve grown up in. These rules are mutable, but over decades and centuries. Generally, they can be thought of as constant. Think of them as proper spelling.
Internal Relationships
The next level of typography is like grammar: indicating how different parts of the content relate to one another. There’s a wide array of ways to indicate relationships (this list is probably not exhaustive):
- size
- weight
- style (e.g. italic)
- color
- typeface
- position (i.e. negative space)
- capitalization
Depending on your medium and the nature of what you’re doing, you may not have all of these options open to you—but you’re virtually guaranteed to have at least a few, even if you’re using a typewriter.
There are conventions at work here, too, but they tend to be more flexible than those governing basic legibility. Larger text is more important than smaller text. Bold text denotes emphasis. All capitals are more important than mixed case. Italics denote emphasis, or asides, or internal monologue, or… well, italics are used all over the place. A fully indented paragraph is a block quote. (Bringhurst’s third chapter focuses on these conventions.)
The exact way these relationships play out in the text is up to the typographer, and she should choose with respect for (but not necessarily strict obedience to) these conventions. This is especially true on the web, where new relationships between content proliferate.
This is (I think) what Cameron Moll refers to when he talks about “text as user interface”: well-set text guides a user through the content gracefully, using typographic cues to indicate how different parts of the text relate to one another. (A standard telephone book is a great example of this. A typical page uses only three weights and simple indentation to make a dense table so clear it requires no legend or further explanation.)
External Relationships
Typography also places text within a larger context. If legibility is spelling and internal relationships are grammar, the external relationships are a writing style. A typographer establishes context by adopting (or rejecting) the conventions of other works, styles, or eras. This is where font selection comes into play, but it also informs the ways in which you establish your hierarchies and internal relationships, and perhaps even what you consider legible.
In its most basic form, context manifests as a respect for conventions of the past: a Renaissance text will not use italic for emphasis (or bold text at all); a modernist one will adhere to a strict, modular grid; a contemporary one may deploy a wide diversity of styles from a massive type superfamily.
Typefaces carry their own message, and so do the various styles a typographer may choose and the way that she deploys them. Generous whitespace may bring a serene austerity to a text while Garamond confers upon it a stately grace; a ragged right may bring a lively, dynamic feel to a page but broken baselines add an uncomfortable tension.
This level is typography at its most artistic and subjective, and it’s an opportunity for the design to reflect and reinforce the feel of the text. It’s a crucially important part of the craft—typography without style is filing—but it’s nothing without the other two.
