Enlightened Librarian: Some words about type

Some words about type · Dec 6, 10:08 PM

This week’s New Yorker contains a fine article by Alec Wilkinson about the type designer Matthew Carter. Carter is behind some of the best fonts designed for the Web—Verdana, Georgia and Tahoma. As a teenaged apprentice at a Dutch printing house in the 1950s, he also was one of the last craftsmen to learn to cut steel punches for individual letters by hand. Type design is one of the most rigorous, constrained, and least forgiving of crafts, especially when the tiniest mis-stroke of a file could ruin several days’ work. Carter learned to think hard before he started, and such soul-testing labour taught him the enormous discernment he has for a product designed to be invisible.

That type should be servicable and undemonstrative was stated, nearly as a manifesto, by a critic named Beatrice Warde, in 1932…. In “Printing Should Be Invisible,” an address delivered to the British Typographers Guild and later collected in “The Crystal Goblet,” Warde said, “The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landsape which is the author’s words.” He might build a stained-glass window that is beautiful to look at, she says, but a failure as a window—that is, he might set a book in type so ornate that it becomes impenetrable. The reader’s mental eye, she said, should focus “through the type and not upon it.”

As Warde put it, the highest purpose of printed words is to allow the transfer of ideas from one mind to another. The type must do that through the idea of pure geometry—through a system of shapes and relationships, thick and thin strokes and white spaces through which meaning takes form and passes frictionless to the reader’s brain. But what begins as a geometric ideal ends in the myriad tweaks, nudges and negotiations needed to make a typeface pleasing to a human eye. That’s what makes type design one of the most exacting, but also humanistic of crafts.

Perfect geometry appears to form the basis for many typefaces [type designer Tobias] Frere-Jones says, “but in fact the eye will become confused if it sees pure geometry. The forms will seem stiff and labored.” Designing type involves a kind of stagecraft—“organized cheating,” Frere-Jones calls it—so that the eye will accept as symmetrical forms that are actually imperfect. “All sorts of fancy footwork goes into type design,” he says, “and if it’s done well you’ll never know that corrections were made.”

That’s called learning the rules so you can forget them and let the work dictate, a necessary process of any artist’s maturation. It’s also the task of creating the subtle rhythms and interplays of line and force that gives the best-designed type the shimmer of a living thing. It’s creating the illusion of a typographic wholeness, a gestalt, and convincing the mind to accept, and complete it, so apprehension of the vehicle disappears, leaving only the passenger and the flight.

Read the original essay by Beatrice Warde.

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