Maxim Zhukov. Modern Typography: Hi & Lo
In conjunction with the judging of the Type Directors Club’s Type Design Competition of 2012 (TDC² 2012) a special event took place on Thursday, 12 January 2012. The TDC Judges Night 2012 was a panel discussion with the judges Roger Black, Matthew Carter, Paul Shaw, and Erik Spiekermann. It was moderated by Maxim Zhukov, the chairman of TDC² 2012. Below are his opening remarks.
In the last twenty-something years there have been a number of radical advancements in typographic technology, which changed the traditional typographic landscape, and our assumptions about the very nature and mission of typography. Those developments were marked with the widening disparity between the traditional, ‘learned’ typography and the daily, vernacular written communications (‘texting’), the growing typographic awareness of the public at large, and a de facto death of handwriting.
The opposition of writing and printing used to be one of the cornerstones of the profession as we knew it. Remember Emil Ruder’s Typographie : «Der gute Gestalter muß die Vermischung von Schreiben und Drucken ablehnen» ?
Emil Ruder. Typography: A Manual of Design (Niederteufen: Verlag Arthur Niggli AG, 1967), 22.
Emil Ruder. Typography: A Manual of Design (Niederteufen: Verlag Arthur Niggli AG, 1967), 25.
As we take stock of the advances of recent years, we often find ourselves praising their positive externalities — a surge of interest in type design among non-specialists, a gradual transformation of the craft from a guild system to a more democratic and open model of design and innovation — while also lamenting what we see as a profanation of traditional typographic values.
In the 1990s the typographers’ cri de bataille was ‘Mac is not a typewriter’… The question my students always ask when I mention all those ‘Ten Commandments of Typography’, ‘Top Ten Type Crimes’, ‘10 Common Typography Mistakes’, and such — like ‘Use real italics’, ‘Use curly quotes’, etc. — is, ‘What’s a typewriter’?…
Sholes & Glidden Type Writer (a.k.a. Remington No. 1, before 1878): 43 characters, all caps, no figures 0 and 1, no parentheses and brackets, no exclamation point.
Ruder insisted that ‘Simplicity is the goal of technical progress and there is hardly any warrant for using five different alphabets to set an ordinarily text: capital, roman and italic; lowercase, roman and italic; and small capitals’. Meanwhile, the design of typefaces developed in an opposite direction, diversifying and refining their attributes, providing for more sophistication, flexibility, and subtlety. Thanks to the ‘advanced typographic features’, and the built-in ‘artificial intelligence’ of the OpenType format (e.g., ‘contextual alternates’, case-sensitive punctuation, four or more sets of figures, etc.), the emulation of the visual features of writing in typographic composition seems at its all-time highest.
Gabriola, by John Hudson (Microsoft, 2008). Stylistic glyph sets.
But what happened to the very object of that laborious emulation? Handwriting — both formal (calligraphy) and informal (chicken scrawl) — quietly died of natural causes and has been supplanted by keyboarding. Not only Macs and PCs, desktops and laptops, but also PDAs, phones, e-books and tablet computers, all hand-held devices, turned out to be glorified typewriters, and much more. And they don’t call them personal computers for nothing… Penmanship standards and skills just went out the window. In some scripts, primarily East-Asian, even the ability of correctly reproducing the letterforms is quickly becoming a rare skill (‘they can read ’em but they can’t write ’em’). New, and newer, playful spelling rules have emerged. Punctuation has been dealt a great loss: all that’s left are a period and a comma. A lot of new abbreviations (e.g., DIKU = Do I know you?; PSOS = Parents standing over shoulder; SLAP = Sounds like a plan) have become a Newspeak of personal communications.
Gary Shteyngart. Super Sad True Love Story: A Novel. (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2011), 32.
Of course, in this brave new world of text messaging and 140-character Tweets there is no room for caps, let alone small caps. Italics and bold are abstract concepts, and formatting in general is a non-issue. Would that make old Emil happy? I am not sure.
The general puzzle, as I see it, is this: the public at large today is more aware than ever of fonts and typography; they now have opportunities to choose (and customize?) fonts for their personal use, often in ways not anticipated by designers; the market is in many ways oversupplied. At the same time, emerging media (SMS, Tweets, blog posts) are defined by a bare-bones simplicity in which formatting and other ‘small things’ are either an afterthought or simply redundant.
The larger point — which should provide great fodder for this panel — is whether any of this constitutes a real sea change. It is true that the type profession has always been defined by an attention to ‘small things’. The teenager texting her friend under the table during math class probably thinks formatting is a ‘small thing’, but only in the same sense that formatting is a small thing in the handwritten notes that classmates used to pass to each other 20 years ago. The intent and even content of these two forms of communication seem to be the same. What has changed is the medium: people now type what they used to scribble. But quick notes were never the same as formal letters, and standards of penmanship have always differed across the two. How much of what we’re seeing now represents a genuine abandonment of traditional typographic values, and how much is driven by the natural constraints of a very limited, informal form of communication?
Were the end-users of typography ever really aware of the ‘Ten Commandments’? The discussion of italics and caps in text-messaging reminded me of an Onion op-ed ‘When I Put Something In Italics, I Mean It’ (Issue 36 • 29; August 23, 2000).
In texting and Twitter abbreviations like ‘LOL’ are indeed often spelled in lower-case, but this is a time-saving measure: pressing the ‘shift’ key wastes valuable seconds! So, when caps are used, they are used mainly for emphasis, WHEN YOU REALLY MEAN IT. As the Onion piece from the year 2000 suggests, this is nothing new. The main question is whether the consequences for the profession are different this time around.
My question is, how does all that… pandemonium affect the work of the type designer? What new priorities and thresholds, if any, does it set?…
[The Rose Auditorium at The Cooper Union, New York. Thursday, 12 January 2012]
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