THE CRYSTAL GOBLET OR PRINTING SHOULD BE INVISIBLE Beatrice Warde

Transcription

1 THE CRYSTAL GOBLET OR PRINTING SHOULD BE INVISIBLE Beatrice Warde The Rules of Typography According to Crackpots Experts Jeffery Keedy

2 IMAGINE THAT YOU HAVE before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain. Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wineglass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type page Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography The first thing one learns about typography and type design is that there are many rules and maxims. The second is that these rules are made to be broken. An d th e thir d is that b r e ak ing th e rules has always been just another one of the rules. 2 Although rules are meant to be broken, scrupulously followed, misunderstood, reassessed, retrofitted and subverted, the best rule of thumb is that rules should never be ignored. The typefaces discussed in this article are recent examples of rule-breaking/making in progress. I have taken some old rules to task and added some new ones of my own that I hope will be considered critically. Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain... Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a modernist in the sense in which I am going to use the term. That is, th e fir s t thin g he asked of this particular object was not How should it look? but What must it do? and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

3 that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of doubling lines, reading three words as one, and so forth. Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a modernist in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of this particular object was not How should it look? but What must it do? and to that extent all good typography is modernist. Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men s minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no explanation whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, Beatrice Warde s address is favoured by members of a vanishing tribe typography connoisseurs who reveal beautiful things to the rest of us (modernists). Such connoisseurs are opposed to typographic sensationalists who have no feelings about the material they contain with their extravagance (postmodernist hacks). In short, the typographers with taste must rise above the crass fashion-mongers of the day. Connoisseurship will always have its place in a capitalist, class-conscious society and there is nothing like modernism for the creation of high and low consumer markets. The modernist typophile-connoisseur should rejoice in the typefaces shown here because they reaffirm his or her status as being above fleeting concerns. After all, if there was no innovation to evolve through refinement to tradition, then where would the connoisseur be? Beatrice Warde did not imagine her crystal goblet would contain Pepsi-Cola, but some vessel has to do it. Of course, she was talking in terms of ideals, but what is the ideal typeface to say: Uh-Huh, Uh-Huh, You got There is no reason why all typefaces should be designed to last forever, and in any case, how would we know if they did? The art of lettering has all but disappeared today, surviving at best through sign painters and logotype specialists. Lettering is being incorporated into type design and the distinction between the two is no longer clear. Today, special or custom letterforms designed in earlier times by a letterer are developed into whole typefaces. Calligraphy will also be added to the mix as more calligraphic tools are incorporated into type design software. Marshall McLuhan said that all new technologies incorporate the previous ones, and this certainly seems to be the case with type. The technological integration of calligraphy, lettering, and type has expanded the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of letterforms. The rigid the right one baby? 3

4 broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is this ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization. If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea,i.e. that the important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specjfic and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether. Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt. Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more legible than one set in 11 pt. Baskerville. A public speaker is more audible in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and peaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic 4 categories applied to type design in the past do not make much sense in the digital era. Previous distinctions such as serif and sans serif are challenged by the new semi serif and pseudo serif. The designation of type as text or display is also too simplistic. Whereas type used to exist only in books (text faces) or occasionally on a building or sign (display), today s typographer is most frequently working with in-between amounts of type more than a word or two but much less than one hundred pages. The categories of text and display should not be taken too literally in a multimedia and interactive environment where type is also read on television, computers, clothing, even tattoos. Good taste and perfect typography are supra personal. Today, good taste is erroneously rejected as old-fashioned because the ordinary man, seeking approval of his so called personality, prefers to follow the dictates of his own peculiar style rather than submit to any objective criterion of taste. Jan Tschichold, 1948, published in Ausgewählte Aufsatze über Fragen der Gestalt des Buches und der Typographie (1975). Criteria of taste are anything but objective. Theor ie s of t ypogr aphy are mo stly a matter of proclaiming one s own tastes as universal truths. The typographic tradition is one of constant change due to technological, functional, and cultural advancement (I use the word advancement as I am unfashionably optimistic about the future). In typographic circles it is common to refer to traditional values as though they were permanently fixed and definitely not open to interpretation. This is the source of the misguided fear of new developments in type design.

5 sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands it usefulness to some yet unimagined successor. There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the The fear is that new technology, with its democratization of design, is the beginning of the end of traditional typographic standards. In fact, just the opposite is true, for though typographic standards are being challenged by more designers and applications than ever before, this challenge can only reaffirm what works and modify what is outdated. The desktop computer and related software have empowered designers and non specialists to design and use their own typefaces. And with more type designers and consumers, there will obviously be more amateurish and illconceived letterforms. But there will also be an abundance of new ideas that will add to the richness of the tradition. Too much has been made of the proliferation of bad typefaces, as if a few poorly drawn letterforms could bring Western civilization to its knees. Major creative breakthroughs often come from outside a discipline, because the experts all approach the discipline with a similar obedient point of view. The most important contribution of computer technology, like the printing press before it, lies in its democratization of information. Th i s i s w h y t h e d i g i t a l e r a w i l l be the most innovative in the history of type design. The more uninteresting the letter, the more useful it is to the typographer. Piet Zwart, A History of Lettering, Creative Experiment and Letter Identity (1986). B a c k i n P i e r Z w a r t s d a y m o s t typographers relied on fancy type I don t think Zwart was against expression in type design as much as he was for expression (an architectonic one) in composition. Zwart s statement epitomizes the typographic fundamentalists credo. The irony is that the essentially to be expressive. 5

6 back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract principles. I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: Ah, madam, we artists do not think we feel! That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: I m not feeling very well today, I think! He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason. I always suspect the typographic enthusiast who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight he has mutilated something infinitely more important. I remember that T. M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in colour. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing up his specimen radical and liberal manifestos of the early modernists are with us today as fundamentally conservative dogma. I suspect that what is most appealing about this rhetoric is the way the typographer s ego supersedes that of the type designer. By using uninteresting neutral typefaces (created by anonymous or dead designers), typographers are assured that they alone will be credited for their creations. I have often heard designers say they would never use so-andso s typefaces because that would make their work look like soand-so s, 6 though they are apparently unafraid of looking like Eric Gill or Giovanni Battista Bodoni. Wolfgang Weingart told me after a lecture at CalArts in which he included my typeface Keedy Sans as an example of what we do not do at Basel that he likes the typeface, but believes it should be used only by me. Missing from this statement is an explanation of how Weingart can use a typeface such as Akzidenz Grotesk so innovatively and expertly. New typefaces designed by living designers should not be perceived as incompatible with the typographer s ego. Rudy VanderLans s use of Keedy Sans for Emigre and B. W. Honeycutt s use of Hard Times and Skelter in Details magazine are better treatments of my typefaces than I could conceive. Much of the pleasure in designing a typeface is seeing what people do with it. If you are lucky, the uses of your typeface will transcend your expectations; if you are not so fortunate, your type will sink into oblivion. Typefaces have a life of their own and only time will determine their fate. In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest. Massimo Vignelli, from a poster announcing the exhibition The Masters Series: Massimo

7 pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of, if you have seen the old type foundries famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably even line). No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest wording that he could find (I dare say it was from Hansard), and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr Cleland said, No: you re wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamour and significance then the layout would have been a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying This is not the text as it will appear. Let me start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising. The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as Vignelli, (February/March 1991). In an age of hundreds of television channels, thousands of magazines, books, and newspapers, and inconceivable amounts of information via telecommunications, could just a few basic typefaces keep the information net moving? Given the value placed on expressing one s individual point of view, there would have to be only a handful of people on the planet for this to work. Everything should be permitted, as long as context is rigorously and critically scrutinized. Diversity and excellence are not mutually exclusive; if everything is allowed it does not necessarily follow that everything is of equal value. Va r i e t y is muc h more t h a n just t h e spice of life. At a time when cultural diversity and empowering other voices are critical issues in society, the last thing designers should be doing is retrenching into a mythical canon of good taste. Th e r e i s n o s u c h t h i n g a s a b a d typeface... just bad typography. Typographers are always quick to criticize, but it is rare to hear them admit that it is a typeface that makes their typography look good. Good typographers can make good use of almost anything. The typeface is a point of departure, not a destination. In using new t ypefaces the es sential ingredient is imagination, because unlike with old faces, the possibilities have not been exhausted. Typographers need to lighten up, to recognize that change is good (and inevitable), to jump into the multicultural, post structural, postmodern, electronic flow. Rejection or ignorance of the rich and varied history and traditions of typography are inexcusable; however, adherence to traditional concepts without regard to contemporary context is intellectually lazy and a threat to typography today. You cannot do new typography with old typefaces. This statement riles typographers, probably because they equate new with good, which I do not. My statement is simply a statement of fact, not a 7

8 its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their comrades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called fine printing today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. This is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of colour, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our sub consciousness is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hair spaces these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus. And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message that you are implanting a desire, straight into the value judgement. The recent proliferation of new typefaces should have anyone interested in advancing the tradition of typography in a state of ecstasy. It is always possible to do good typography with old typefaces. B u t why are s o many t y p o g r a p h e r s insistent on trying to do the impossible, new typography with old faces? Inherent in the new typefaces are possibilities for the (imaginative) typographer that were unavailable ten years ago. So besides merely titillating typophiles with fresh new faces, it is my intention to encourage typographers and type designers to look optimistically forward. You may find some of the typefaces formally and functionally repugnant, but you must admit that type design is becoming very interesting again. 8

9 mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness of the book face. Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text. Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realize that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The stunt typographer learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind. 9