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2bc772d
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Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
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typography
language
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Robert Bringhurst |
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2e2545a
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In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles.
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typography
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Robert Bringhurst |
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8161539
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Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.
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words
literature
writing
fonts
typeface
typography
power
letters
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H.G. Wells |
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7384370
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Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response.
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reading
reason
exposition
typography
logic
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Neil Postman |
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d5bc649
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"The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing lots of things, not knowing them."
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telegraphy
intelligence
public-discourse
typography
knowledge
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Neil Postman |
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ae80ef2
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We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography.
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telegraphy
public-discourse
typography
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Neil Postman |
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3bc2b92
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Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the typographer in search of special treatment.In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; not it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike . Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words.
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corporate-bullshit
typography
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Robert Bringhurst |
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f73107b
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Type designers are, at their best, the Stradivarii of literature: not merely makers of salable products, but artists who design and make the instruments that other artists use.
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stradivarius
typography
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Robert Bringhurst |