Typography as a historical medium
Type as a sign system.
As outlined in my structure looking at type as an historical context and a framing of an era or time.
These quotes explain type as one of these areas, a historical medium, a signifying medium or having effects on the cultural and social make up of a time, area or region.
Type as a historical medium
The printers work, for example, to which the new world will be built. Concentrated work of organisation is the spiritual result which bring all elements of human creativity into a synthesis: the play instinct, sympathy inventions, economic necessities. One man invents printing with movable type, another photography, a third screen printing and stereotype, the next electrotype, phototype, the celluloid plate hardened by light.
Beirut, M ,1999 , Looking Closer Three , 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Typophoto, Moholy Nagy PG 24
Every period has its own optical focus. Our age: that of the film; the electric sign, simultaneity of sensorily percentile events. It has given us a new, progressively developing creative basis for typography too. Gutenberg’s typography, which has endured almost to our own day, moves exclusively in the linear dimension. The invention of the photographic process has extended it to a new dimensionality, recognised today as total. The preliminary work in this field was done by the illustrated papers, posters and by display printing.
Beirut, M ,1999 , Looking Closer Three , 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Typophoto, Moholy Nagy PG 25
Cold, rigid, implacable I may be, yet the first impress of my face brought the of knowledge and wisdom long hidden in the grave of ignorance. I coin for you the enchanting tale, the philosophers’s moralising and the poet’s visions. I enable you to exchange the irksome hours that come, at times, to everyone for sweet and happy hours with books.
Beirut, M ,1999 , Looking Closer Three , 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. I AM TYPE, Fredric W. Goudy PG 35
In the epoch between Gutenberg’s invention and the Linotype machine, the philosophy behind the design of printed letters evolved in response to smaller technological and cultural shifts.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. A Natural History Of Typography, J.Miller, E.Lupton
The Darwin of linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) who destroyed the ordinary assumption that language exists to represent ideas. While language is commonly understood as a collection of names assigned to pre-existing concepts, Saussure argued that without language, there are no concepts. For Saussure, the most troublesome feature of the linguistic sign was its arbitrariness: there is no resemblance between a sound such as “horse” and the concept of “domesticated quadruped” No natural link binds the material, phonic aspect of the sign (the signifier) to the mental concept (the signified): only a social agreement appears to hold the two sides together.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. A Natural History Of Typography, J.Miller, E.Lupton
What is the sort of semiotic system in typography? What are its signifiers, and what are its signifieds? Typography is one aspect of the broader practice of writing, which Saussure described as a sign system separate from speech itself. He saw speech as the original, natural medium of language, while writing is an external system of signs (for example, the alphabet) whose sole purpose is to represent speech. Writing is thus a language depicting another language, a set of signs for representing signs. Typography, then, is removed one step further: it is a medium whose signified is not words themselves, but rather the alphabet.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. A Natural History Of Typography, J.Miller, E.Lupton
Beatrice Warde claimed that a page of type should transparently reveal its verbal text like the gleaming bowl of crystal goblet. But is it possible for typography to ever passively contain a pre-existing, “content” or signified? Westerners revere the alphabet as the most rational and transparent of all writing systems, the clearest of vessels for containing the words of speech. Unlike ideograms or hieroglyphs, the alphabet depicts only the material surface of language, rather than its ideas. The alphabet is a mechanical device, a short string of characters capable of converting an infinity of spoken words into script.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. A Natural History Of Typography, J.Miller, E.Lupton
The philosopher Jacques Derrida has confronted a contradiction in Suassure’s theory: while Saussure celebrated the fact that verbal signs do not transparently reflect ideas, he could not tolerate the same situation in writing. Saussure was outraged by the alphabet’s refusal to patiently reflect its spoken referent, yet he had discovered that in writing, as in language, the realm of the signifier generates meaning apart from a pre-existing signified. And the same is true for typography’s relationship to the alphabet.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. A Natural History Of Typography, J.Miller, E.Lupton
Typographic form was no longer compelled to refer to an ideal canon of proportions: instead, the alphabet was understood as a collection of linguistic elements open to manipulation. Modern typography replaced idealism with relativism. The notion of a direct ancestral bond between the typography of the present and a divine classical past was displaces by a model of the alphabet as a code of relationships that could yield an infinity of variations. The alphabet understood as a collection of individual organisms gave way to a genetic code that could spawn offspring of endless diversity. The alphabet has lost its center: operating in its place was a new mode of design which we call structuralist typography.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. A Natural History Of Typography, J.Miller, E.Lupton
We might find it impossible to read black letter with ease today, but in prewar Germany it was the dominant letterform. Baskerville, rejected in 1757 as ugly and unreadable, is now regarded as one go the most serviceable typefaces for long text setting.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Type and deconstruction in the digital era, R.Poynor
The pre-digital typefaces that Brody drew for The Face emphasised the new perspectives on contemporary culture embodied in the magazine’s editorial content. They also functioned as a medium through which Brody could develop a socio-cultural commentary of his own.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Type and deconstruction in the digital era, R.Poynor
This is getting around to the idea that letter-forms, like fashion silhouettes, are one of the overt indices of style: as type designer Herman Zapf put it, “they are one of the most visual expressions of an age”
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Typefaces are rich with the gesture and spirit of their own era, M.Rock
Letterforms frame the message; they place the content in historical and cultural context. While the canons of readability and legibility are usually stressed (perhaps because they are more easily defended), fonts are rich with the gesture and spirit of their own era.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Typefaces are rich with the gesture and spirit of their own era, M.Rock
Zapf sees the contemporary type designer as working within history, drawing on the work of Gill, Rogers, and Dwiggins for “inspiration, recognising that our cultural and commercial conditions are different from theirs.” In other words designers should be updating conventional structures to more contemporary forms. Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Typefaces are rich with the gesture and spirit of their own era, M.Rock
“Traditionalists” who grumble that type died with the passing of hot metal miss the point that these new faces suggest. Innovative designs don’t threaten the integrity of typography. On the contrary, they document and codify the “current,” generating the artifacts that will serve to frame our own generation.
Beirut, M ,1994 , Looking Closer, 1st ed. Allworth Press, New York. Typefaces are rich with the gesture and spirit of their own era, M.Rock
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