Thanks Thomas. Well done.

Fantastic article! Very enjoyable read.

I'm concerned about two things about that article.

One is that to many people, old-style figures look so strange and peculiar, that if you bring them up to people who doubt that good typography is important, you will end up being dismissed.

The other is that the other differences in the example you showed were much too subtle to make an impression on the general person - and while the article itself is written for an audience of typographers, it's about how to make themselves clear to non-typographers.

To convince a layperson that typography matters, you need to do so in a simple manner that even the layperson can immediately grasp.

Thus, what I would suggest as a basis for comparison would be a page set in a modern typeface... of the thin and anemic kind favored in the late nineteenth century. Compare that with an example of readable fine typography, and you will begin to make the case that typography can matter, at least to a limited extent in extreme cases. That will be a start.

[...] To many people, old-style figures look so strange and peculiar, that if you bring them up to people who doubt that good typography is important, you will end up being dismissed.

Good typography means to forget of old-style figures, when needed.

Nice stuff Thomas.

Now the next important question, Why does Communication Arts matter?

Now the next important question, Why does Communication Arts matter?

Because there are still art directors who don't read blogs.

"The other is that the other differences in the example you showed were much too subtle to make an impression on the general person."

Not consciously, but they had a measurable effect nonetheless. Which was rather the point. Plus, in a casual conversation you won't be showing that example, you'll just be citing the fact that there is actual research to back up your position that typography affects people (whether or not they are consciously aware of it).

Plus, I've found the analogies to things like furniture, fashion and film (my "three F's") to be pretty successful in communicating to people utterly outside the graphic design realm.

Cheers,

T

I think "before and after" graphics are some of the most effective.

Here's one that I particularly like, just two sheets of letter sized paper, but what a difference! http://www.swiss-miss.com/2011/03/chris-glass-and-his-barber.html

As a type designer, I don't have to explain Why Typography Matters, but How Is it Possible to Make a Living Doing That?!

I explain that everyone with Word is now a typographer, and that despite bundling the number of font users (such as themselves) is so huge that the small segment of users (professional and otherwise) who would pay to licence something different is nonetheless large enough to support a digital font industry with hundreds of foundries producing new fonts, every day.

The next question is along the lines of How Do You Make it Different? —and that get us into Thomas' Three Fs, but I also like to discuss how the diversity of typographic form (even within a single writing system) makes sense from both a formalist and a structuralist perspective.

In other words, if you consider type shapes purely formally, there is an almost infinite number of ways a legible alphabet may be shaped.
And if you consider type forms as representing meanings within the culture in which they occurred, then because cultures are ever-changing, then so too must type forms be ever-changing.

One is that to many people, old-style figures look so strange and peculiar, that if you bring them up to people who doubt that good typography is important, you will end up being dismissed.

Years ago, I was typesetting an educational document, and pointed out to the author the fi etc. ligatures that the font I had used provided (in an expert set). She was most put out, and said she thought that they looked weird and would distract readers. I pointed to the novel that she was halfway through reading, lying nearby, and asked her to look in it for words containing fi fl ffi or ffl. She did so and was amazed to find that the book was full of those distracting ligatures. That evening she phoned me from her home to exclaim 'All my books have them!'.

Books are (mostly) your allies. They represent several hundred years of typographic practice and refinement, and can be used to demonstrate the norms of typographic communication. Even oldstyle figures.

Nice job, Thomas.
I've been spending the last year in my masters of ed in arts & learning program exploring the communicative aspects of glyphs. Several of my research projects involve students creating then assessing typographic or lettering pieces on what they perceive in terms of message, emotion, association of imagery or concept, etc.

The projects use non-latin alphabets, illegible handlettering, and/or obscure languages in order to remove the "reading of words". In other words, the pure communicative power of letters/glyphs themselves.

Many of the students were astounded how much they could communicate without "words" and as a result, many pay far closer attention to the minutia and subtleties of typography.

Now if we can only get the designers and creatives to "see" as opposed to "read".

I concur, nice article!

Norbert, In response to your post above: I very much associate emotions and vibes from fonts. Especially when they are representative of a company, movement, campaign, etc.

Ironically, I just published my first post here on typophile (http://typophile.com/node/84735) which speaks directly to the emotions involved with a certain font in particular. Sometimes I think there is a deeper meaning to the word "family" within "font family". After a certain amount of time spent together, experimenting and learning, I find it is easy to become emotionally attached to a font. Fonts are about as reliable as it gets. And predictable.

Thomas, is your definition of what is Typography that of Dictionary dot com?

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/typography

Typography is jo one of the ways to tell who is the champ... and who is the chump.

Because there are still art directors who don't read blogs.

I'm actually surprised that something as interesting and current as Thomas' article was published in CA.

What was once a venerable design publication has become a collection of regional "best of" stuff.

I can't remember meeting an art director in the last 10 years who admitted to reading CA. Print, yes, Eye, yes. CA?

What was once a venerable design publication has become a collection of regional "best of" stuff.

I think that some designers keep CA around just for that reason. It has replaced hardbound annual directories of photographers, illustrators, and freelancers with a less expensive (by subscription) and, more importantly, curated option. Perhaps the reason nobody admits to reading it is that, aside from Thomas' columns (the only articles in CA I have read since 2008), there is absolutely nothing in CA worth reading. But if one needs a directory of high-end, independent stock photography, the CA photography annual is a steal.

Great Read, Thomas!
and welcome back, Norbert!!!

@John Hudson:
Years ago, I was typesetting an educational document, and pointed out to the author the fi etc. ligatures that the font I had used provided (in an expert set). She was most put out, and said she thought that they looked weird and would distract readers. I pointed to the novel that she was halfway through reading, lying nearby, and asked her to look in it for words containing fi fl ffi or ffl. She did so and was amazed to find that the book was full of those distracting ligatures. That evening she phoned me from her home to exclaim 'All my books have them!'.

Great story! That does indeed illustrate the power of books to show the value of things people don't normally notice.

I'm not sure, though, that old-style figures are similarly invisible, or that they're as common. I'm not saying they're "bad", just that they would be more likely to be off-putting, and this would be harder to prove with a counterexample, than your case of ligatures. My intent isn't to criticize the typographer who wrote the article as far as his knowledge of typography was concerned, but simply to remind people of how the world looks to the typographically naïve.

@Norbert Florendo:
The projects use non-latin alphabets, illegible handlettering, and/or obscure languages in order to remove the "reading of words". In other words, the pure communicative power of letters/glyphs themselves.

Many of the students were astounded how much they could communicate without "words" and as a result, many pay far closer attention to the minutia and subtleties of typography.

This is, of course, fascinating and wonderful.

But I could not help but think of Beatrice Warde turning over in her grave...

Typography is not just about using what used to be only in expert sets. It is about using whatever you use well and knowing when you should not use a certain technique. Sometimes, adhering to established style recommendations goes against the grain of the subject matter. That is when a good typographer outshines a mere rule-regurgitator

"But I could not help but think of Beatrice Warde turning over in her grave..."

Her time here on Earth was well spent but is now over. She did quite well with the issues of her day. It is now time for us to make a good run at the things we face now, not just what she faced then.

Probably, Euclid is also turning over in is grave but at least his angle of rotation is predictable ;-)

"Thomas, is your definition of what is Typography that of Dictionary dot com?"

I would go with just the first half of their second definition, with some contribution from the third, but sure, close enough. (All three reproduced below for reference.)

1. the art or process of printing with type.
2. the work of setting and arranging types and of printing from them.
3. the general character or appearance of printed matter.

(Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2011. )

First, nice article, Thomas!

Non-designers typically get in arguments about form without considering function (like in the ligatures example that John Hudson mentioned), and to me that's the reason why typography is so important and relevant for designers.

Typography is the study of typefaces and their relationship with design and communication. Typography, to be effective, must be the last thing the audience has to worry about about. The typefaces can be noticeable, legible, and possibly meaningful, however, they cannot be something too complex to decipher.

There's a wonderful book by Jan Tschichold called "The Form of the Book", it deals with many aspects that are relevant to designers regarding legibility, typefaces, etc., but from the editorial design perspective. I've found the principles in that book to be applicable to today's digital design (web, apps, etc.). I highly recommend it :-)

Cheers!

- Manuel

Probably, Euclid is also turning over in is grave but at least his angle of rotation is predictable ;-)

:-)

William, I’m not sure it’s as simple as the example you cite. Though it’s certainly a stunning transition, is it a good one or even a necessary one? Was the barber doing badly before the sign change? Is he doing better now? Have the clientele changed? Have prices gone up? Are previous customers excluded? Perhaps proto capitalism is better than advanced capitalism!

I’m not sure it is a matter of just tidying the world up. Or is it? I just spent the day reading Otl Aicher by Markus Rathgeb… perhaps that is influencing my crisis. There was a line in it, which I can't find now, suggesting that good design inspires confidence in a business - the customer supposedly relates a neater sign to a better haircut - but when I see the first sign I see honesty, when I see the second, improved sign, I am perhaps a little skeptical - why does the barber need to promote haircuts with design? Do the haircuts not promote themselves? Any barber can hire a designer,* but not all barbers can cut hair! I am questioning the first principle of design, that it actually improves things, and not just superficially. Does a graphic treatment still inspire confidence in a business? Or is that concept only powerful at the onset of a graphic design cold war … as opposed to a world where almost all businesses have accumulated a “graphic arsenal”. There is something about the original that cuts through all of that. It is what it is … it’s humorous, natural, temporary, psychogeographical…

Is typography important because we like it? To say all of the above is to play devil’s advocate, humour me.

* In this scenario, it seems the designer traded his services for the haircut, which I admire, bartering is good.

The customer may expect a business to have a professionally groomed appearance, indicating that the services offered are professionally competent.
That may include the graphic equivalent of the bed-head look (faux-natural, faux vernacular, &c.) which complicates matters.
But it's the graphic designer's job to know what the current semiotics are, and manipulate the signs accordingly.

>William, I’m not sure it’s as simple as the example you cite.

What do you mean by "it?" The point of my example is that "before" and "after" pictures are a good tool to communicate the difference between poor and good design.

I wasn't arguing that well designed signs are by themselves going to make a business succeed or fail. Good visual appearance and communication are just one aspect. The question of the role of design in persuasion and business success are complex ones, and I wasn't addressing that.

I think the average person would say that, other things being equal, if they needed a hair cut, they would more likely walk into the shop with the "after" sign than the "before" sign. That's all. Also, the "after" sign is a lot more attractive, which is a social good in itself, if you like beauty over ugliness.

As Thomas quoted James Pluckett saying in the article, Apple is the best contemporary argument that good design as part of a good business can be a benefit.

I think that questions of the choice of typeface and refinements like small caps are secondary to the general question of good graphic design. Once you accept that good graphic design is a benefit, and can see that some is better than others, then I think you're ready to see the benefits of a good choice of type and refined setting. I doubt that a person who fails to "get it" about graphic design in general is going to be convinced about the need for good typography.

That is why for a general audience—perhaps not necessary for this magazine—I would start with the barber shop, and go on from there. I don't know how large the illustration is in Thomas's article, but I think you only see the "point" of old style figures when you can seem them clearly in running text. I think the thing about good typography that is hard to grasp until you get into it is that while a refinement like old style figures is a small matter, refined typography is an accumulation of small matters. When you get them all right, the result is very agreeable, even if any one of them is not such a big deal.

It being the “importance” of typography. Apologies if I mistook your post, I agree there is a very visible difference between the before and after shots, which might help open the article but we are talking in quite bold terms now; beauty vs ugliness? Who decides? Who is the arbiter of the street image? It’s a bit of a dangerous game, IMHO. Nick’s relativism is more convincing. It is perhaps easier to be objective about book typography.

That may include the graphic equivalent of the bed-head look (faux-natural, faux vernacular, &c.) which complicates matters.

It’s the faux that worries me, that is why I described the first sign as honest if nothing else. The second sign is infinitely more complex to “read”, despite the typographic clarity.

The discussion of what is gained or lost with the barber sign change is evidence enough that something significant is different. This would be my definition of 'matters' in any case.

The truth is "What does it say?" is what matters. I don't mean just the words written there. If you are going to a barber who,you would like to think they are reputable, clean, and have a valid license. The hand scrawled note says "probably not" no matter what the words say.
A hand written sign about a yard sale tells a different story. It says: "this is from my neighbor" rather than "sales pitch" if it were slick and had drop shadows.

PS: @1985; I was the one who wrote the "Euclid grave" reference, not Bill. I don't understand why you quoted it without a response?

Nick is right, of course, that sometimes looking too polished is bad for business, particularly if you are trying to communicate that you are bargain basement prices for the masses. But I do think that this not the general rule. It's just that because effective communication is paramount, and in some cases that conflicts with attractive and readable typography. The point is that there is such a thing as attractive as readable typography, and that in general it's a plus.

PS: @1985; I was the one who wrote the "Euclid grave" reference, not Bill. I don't understand why you quoted it without a response?

I know, Dez, it was funny - my response was :-) right there below the quote itself!
Then I went on to address William. Don't worry man, full credit to you!

All I meant to say was that there is not a simple scale with good typography at one end and bad typography at the other, with every typographic entity waiting to be positioned according to a subjective idea of what is good and bad. You could begin this process, and chances are you would start filling up the scale with examples, but the next man’s scale would say something else, and would be created according to different esteemed values, so on, so forth. There may be some common ground; good kerning, technical ideas etc., but when it comes to appropriateness of overall design that requires a much more complicated system to cope with the myriad responses. So, William, I would say there is probably such a thing as readable typography (objective, can be tested) but attractive typography is subjective, the latter is something you insist on rather than something you can prove.

The truth is "What does it say?" is what matters. I don't mean just the words written there. If you are going to a barber who,you would like to think they are reputable, clean, and have a valid license. The hand scrawled note says "probably not" no matter what the words say.

So, what about British Petroleum, for example? Who believes they are reputable, clean and have validity? They have a very polished graphic appearance after all. It’s an extreme example (I apologise in advance), but the contrast of neat corporate image and dire corporate behaviour has to shake faith in the currency of design, in the value of those values, if you will. My initial point regarding the clean up of the barber’s sign was that it no longer suggested to me “good haircut”, just “neat, familiar, well practised sign”, which actually made it harder to “read” in some respects. Conversely the “hand scrawled” sign did not necessarily make me think “bad haricut”, rather “kooky, hand made sign, might have an interesting chat with the barber here, a suitably local price, and a haircut un-phased by current fashion”. Try getting a designer to communicate those sentiments … they probably can’t, especially not with well spaced Futura etc., etc.

As a designer, I probably have a heightened sensibility to this crisis, but I hope you see my point.

It’s not clear cut, excuse the pun!

British Petroleum is an old multi-billion dollar corporation that has a very long standing in the business world. Having a polished graphic presentation is not only expected but required. There has been a long history of unethical activity among wealthy corporations combined with slick marketing spin. The difference between them and a small neighborhood barber shop is huge. Hand-written notes have a different appeal depending on source and audience. We treasure handwritten letters from family members. We expect a certain business decorum from large corporations but do not always trust that they are honest. Crooks and slime-balls know how to do smoke and mirrors.
A handwritten grease-pen scrawl on butcher paper covering a fresh leg of lamb from our neighborhood butcher shop means "fresh and cared for" where a plastic boxed leg of lamb with barcoded label means "nothing special" from Safeway or any other major grocery chain.

I think the sophisticated analysis here only sharpens the general point that refined, beautiful typography can be a great benefit. That its suitability depends on the situation only makes more clear what its value is.

With regard to Chris's latest point that hand written notes are sometimes best: I was really struck when visiting China how often shops put up hand written signs, and how consistently they looked good to great. That's because of a strong tradition of everyone being trained in hand written brush work. I hope that doesn't disappear because of the computer!

@William Berkson:
That's because of a strong tradition of everyone being trained in hand written brush work. I hope that doesn't disappear because of the computer!I'm afraid to agree with you because I feel that might be selfish of me.

Never mind the computer; script reform should cause that to disappear.

The reason it isn't impossible for the Chinese people to learn to read is because they really only need to memorize a few hundred basic components of characters, with meanings like "man" and "heart" and "speech".

These are combined by meaning to produce a few hundred more characters, such as "bright", formed from "sun" and "moon".

Once those characters are learned, to someone who knows how to speak Chinese, the rest of the 8,000 or so characters a person needs to know to be literate are now comprehensible; they're formed from a basic character component identifying the general category of the word's meaning, and another character with the same sound.

This is a big oversimplification of the Chinese writing system, since (for example) it doesn't deal with the fact that most Chinese words aren't only one syllable long, even though Chinese texts written in Classical style abbreviated words by only representing their first syllable by a character.

Anyways, though, this means that learning to read Chinese is not impossible, although more difficult than learning to read an alphabetic script: but since there are alternate possible ways to write most characters - the radical (meaning) is obvious, but the phonetic often could be several different characters, of which only one is "correct" - the Chinese writing system serves to make the less-educated easy to spot.

Like English spelling, only much worse.

Quaint traditions may be charming from a distance, but one has to spare a thought for the lives of those who actually have to live with them.

On the Chinese wanting to abandon Chinese characters, my Chinese speaker in the next room says "never." For inputting on the computer, Pinyin, the current standard romanization of Chinese is used. I read that in Taiwan the phonetic alphabet based on Chinese characters, known as "bopomofo," is also used. In either case, the word is immediately converted into Chinese characters on the screen. Whether they will continue to teach brush writing I think would be more of a question, but I don't know the status of this.

Thanks Thomas, that's pretty much my take on typography too. Nice quote used in your interview...

"One cannot not communicate."