And no sooner do I make fun of open-source typefaces than someone points me to Crimson Text, a Garamond-inspired open-source face (with an eminently elegant ampersand).
Lest you think I’ve changed my mind on open-source fonts: it still suffers from sloppiness, though: for example, none of the different weights and styles sit on the same baseline, and the kerning needs work. Still, it is far better than most.
Inspired by Dan Cederholm’s “Use the Best Ampersand Available,” Mark Pilgrim has a new site featuring ampersands from open-source fonts.
Only problem is, only one or two are ever going to be the best ampersand available. Which is kind of the problem with open source.
Now we learn that poor font selection can improve reading comprehension. Comic Sans makes you understand things better. Heaven help us.
There’s an interesting idea at the center of this: that putting your reader to work increases their engagement with the text. It puts me in mind of Umberto Eco:
I insisted, if somebody wanted to enter the abbey and live there for seven days, he had to accept the abbey’s own pace. … Therefore, those first hundred pages are like a penance or an initiation, and if someone does not like them, so much the worse for him. He can stay at the foot of the hill.
Eco sees this as a means of selecting his readers—the ones who cannot be bothered to slog through the beginning section, he does not want—but I think there’s another way to understand it: by forcing the reader to work at the text, he must engage with it. The connection does not just select the reader, it reshapes him around the text.
Simplicity, legibility, and clarity are virtues, certainly—but they can also be obstacles. Complexity and obfuscation are not the enemy of communication.
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.
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):
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.)
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.
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.
Elegant, simple, beautiful, and instant comprehension. What could be better?
