At one time, I was probably the biggest typographical snob (and bore) you were ever likely to meet. I grew up in a house littered with books about typography, and beautiful books. My grandfather typeset private press books, using hot metal, well into his eighties. My father had helped develop page layout software and hyphenation programs in the sixties, and sold typesetting equipment. The virtues of Baskerville over Bodoni was a topic to be discussed at family gatherings.

My grandfather loved typefaces, and he collected as many as he could. This is not a trivial matter for Monotype casters: each size of a typeface had its own set of keyboard layouts, matrices and wedges. Screwdrivers, spanners and other tools were required to change a font. I used to lunch with him every day in his workshop, and we used to pore over old type specimen books, discussing the pros and cons of different designs, and the best ways to use them: leading (the space between the lines) often being the most important consideration, in his view.

My relationship with type got even deeper when I started typesetting myself. I used to spend evenings in my flat leafing though type samples, reading everything I could about them. At one time if I was shown a few characters from 4000 typefaces, I could instantly state the name of the face, the year of its introduction, and the name of the designer. I actually used to get people to test me. I began to develop very strong views on the suitability of different typefaces for different jobs.

Looking at a menu in a restaurant would not be about the food listed, it would be about how appalling it was to letterspace Stempel Garamond italic. When anyone’s relationship with something gets this intense, strange things start to happen. I developed a sort of typeface synesthesia: assessing a body of text would provoke a ‘whole-body’ reaction. In my mind, many typefaces had a smell, texture and flavour.

Gill Sans smelled of soap, and tasted like bakelite. Palatino sounded like a Eighties-era synthesiser handclap. Times New Roman smelled of engine oil. Bembo felt like velvet.

Which brings me to Helvetica.

I have noticed online, (no doubt provoked by the film about it) that Helvetica is enjoying something of a revival. I keep reading about how people love its minimalist beauty.

I always hated Helvetica. It was the font of last resort, the default font that no-one would mind something being in (perhaps Times New Roman if a serif face was required). My foreman always used to want things put into Helvetica. I might ignore the instruction, and do the job in, say, ‘Kabel’ by that forgotten genius, Rudolf Koch. Fret over the leading, wallow in the idiosyncratic beauty of the letterforms. Back the proof would come, marked, ‘reset in Helvetica’.

And then I would get my revenge. I would reset in Univers. My foreman could never tell the difference between Univers and Helvetica, but I could. To me, Helvetica was day old white bread; Univers was the Beatles, with the lyrics rewritten by Samuel Beckett. Univers had the intense flavour of dehydrated oranges – the kind they used to give to astronauts. And – bizarre though it is to remember and relate – in my mind, it hummed. Hummed like a black and white television set.

To this day, Univers casts a spell. The designer, Adrian Frutiger, designed it before Helvetica, but they were released almost simultaneously, in 1957. Other Frutiger designs, notably the self-named Frutiger itself, and Avenir, are astonishingly beautiful, almost essays in the subtle craft of typography. After all, these designers have always got to produce something that looks so much like the letter in question, that the reader never even notices the typeface. How do they produce work of such variety and brilliance?

I know there is nothing really wrong with Helvetica. Tastes differ, and many people who know a lot more about typography than I do, praise it highly. But I suspect that many use a little typographical knowledge to suggest the possession of enormous cultural discernment. Rather like some fake wine buffs: lots of theatrical sniffing and smacking of lips. But people who live and breathe the stuff, day in and day out feel quite differently about it. It’s not an opportunity for a bit of after dinner one-upmanship; it’s their daily bread.

An artisan wine maker, with Pinot Noir grape pips stuck in his toenails, will no doubt chuckle at British tourists snuffling and snorting over his wine, as if they had any concept of the labour involved in its production. And I am a tourist myself now: I have lost my synesthesia. It’s as if a vast range of colour, present in my life for a few years, has been turned off, and can only be recalled with effort. Badly designed street signs no longer provoke physical pain. Menus suggest food first, and typography second. I still grumble when people kern numbers, but I can cope with that.

And my typographical snobbery was never really snobbery, because snobbery is an affectation. I really did care very deeply about the shapes of letters of the alphabet, in the way that only earnest, intense young men care about anything. With age comes a bit more breadth of vision, and I prefer it that way. Outside of your family, these things matter less. The sacrifice is that everything starts to look like Helvetica.

From xkcd.

[Imagine this: giving Dan Wagstaff a card in Comic Sans.]

With this note added by the bookshop staff:

From: i love typography

[via I love typography, via @JAFurtado]

I love Typography (iLT) was born on August 8, 2007; I, on the other hand was born in 1969. iLT was born from a desire to bring the subject of Typography to the masses. All too often, articles on typography are rather bland and, although informative, do little to elicit feelings of wow.

So, iLT is designed to inspire its readers, to make people more aware of the typography that is around them. We really cannot escape typography; it’s everywhere: on road signs, shampoo bottles, toothpaste, and even on billboard posters, in books and magazines, online…the list is endless, and the possibilities equally so.

This is not totally related, but here is a collection of 20 Websites with Beautiful Typography.

I’ve had a few discussions recently with bookmakers, designers, and typesetters about the “importance of good book design.” There is a particular philosophical position that goes something like this: good book design is to some degree hidden. When you pick up a book and flip through it, well-wieghted fonts, pleasing margins, nice paper stock, balanced spacing, etc etc. all contribute to a positive interaction with a book. On the other hand, something sloppily designed will come across as sloppy, and you’ll have a negative experience, even if it’s unconscious.

I agree with all of the above, that there is something immensely pleasing about a well-designed book; something off-putting about a badly-designed book.

What about eBooks?

The strange thing though is that this conversation tends to veer off when discussing eBooks. I get the sense from some designers (and some readers), that since eBooks can’t be controlled in the same way as print and paper books, somehow they are inferior – and that people just won’t be attached to them, drawn into them in the same way as they are with “real” books.

To which my reaction is: eBooks, and digital devices are a different medium, they call for a whole new design approach. The constraints are different, the reader’s needs different, and so how you’ll design a text is going to be different. I was shocked that with the iPod, the small screen actually seems to me an *advantage* over the paper book in some ways. And so where Kindle & Sony Reader have tried to reinvent the book in electronic form, using the same kinds of design principles, the ereaders on the iPhone/iPod have instead tried to build a new kind of design/interaction standard into existing constraints of devices people already have. I find the second approach more compelling because it’s adding real value where before there was none. That is: I no longer have to carry a book around, because I have 75 of them sitting on my iPod – which I’m carrying anyway. The Kindle & Sony Reader both say: please carry me around the way you used to carry your book. There’s nothing wrong with that, but in some sense it’s a conservative approach to eBooks.

Design and Constraint

There’s an old story about how true freedom and true art come only from constraints, not lack of constraint. And so designing books for digital means that we need to not just accept but to embrace these constraints, and build a new design aesthetic out of them. It took a decade before we started getting it right with web sites; eBooks need similar attention.

Scroll: Essays on the Design of Electronic Text

Al that to say: I’m very happy to see: Scroll: Essays on the Design of Electronic Text by the Grad students at the iSchool, University of Toronto:

The class of FIS 2309, Design of Electronic Text, at Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto was challenged to create an open-access electronic journal to publish their major papers for the course. The goal of the project was to provide the students with the opportunity to gain knowledge of electronic text: its design principles, uses and methods for evaluating usability. Content comes from the students themselves, as they submit original papers on topics revolving around the issues and challenges of creating electronic text. [more...]

I’ve not yet delved into the papers in the journal, but I am looking forward to it.

Typographical personifications are usually better known by a myriad of colorful and fanciful names, such as Typo fairies, Typo demons, and the like. They are fictional beings commonly used as an explanation (or excuse) for typos. Though mostly known nowadays for their appearances from typed documents to instant messenger, the gag originated with 19th century printers and typographers, who (good-naturedly) blamed all their mistakes on various fairies, dwarves, and gremlins. [more...]

They’re called: Typo Fairies or Typo Demons in English, Tryckfelsnisse in Swedish, Sætternissen in Danish, Trykkleif in Norwegian, and Painovirhepaholainen in Finnish… and other names in other languages.

From BBC’s h2g2:

In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of the population of the Christian countries was illiterate. The skills of reading and writing were largely the preserve of the Church and, in particular, the monasteries. There was of course no mechanical means of producing or reproducing text, so everything had to be done laboriously by hand.

After prayer, writing was one of the most prominent activities of the monasteries. Bibles, missals and breviaries all had to be written out many times over, so that they could be distributed wherever required. Demand was always high, and the entire Bible had to be written out thousands of times…

Titivillus (sometimes spelled ‘Tutivillus’) is a demon. He works on behalf of Lucifer, or Satan, or Belphegor, and in the Middle Ages is the one who loves to introduce errors into a scribe’s work as soon as the scribe’s concentration lapses.

Errors and omissions in the Holy Scriptures were obviously a serious and constant problem, not least because an error that crept in unnoticed might itself have been copied many times over before it was spotted – if it ever was. Of course, after the invention of the printing press an unnoticed error would be reproduced even more rapidly. In 1561 a document entitled Anatomy of the Mass, edited by a monk, was found to contain an enormous number of errors. The monk said that the devil had caused the printer to produce the errors. At that time the Pope ordered a printing of the Bible, and promulgated a Papal Bull resulting in automatic excommunication of any printer who introduced any alteration to the text. Nevertheless the result was so bad that correction slips had to be printed, cut out, and pasted in the right position in every single copy. This incident was regarded as one of Titivillus’s great triumphs. [more...]