Typography has something of a split personality—it’s both the technical act of writing words into the world by giving them form, and it’s also a way of understanding the world through the forms of its writing. Designer Paul Elliman describes this two-way street concisely:

Writing gives the impression of things. Conversely, things can give the impression of writing.

I’d suggest this reading and writing at the same time, or typography, is the root level skill of graphic design, and I’d like to talk about typography as something that joins reading and writing. Three modes of production will be presented in chronological order as a compressed reenactment of 500 years of typographic tradition, each one revolving around a particular technology: metal typesetting, phototypesetting, and digital typesetting. 

The idea is to learn something about typography and therefore graphic design by practicing it, and along the way to understand how typographic techniques have changed over time in order to develop a nuanced facility in using the current digital tools. 

We’re going to start with Albrecht Dürer: painter, engraver, mathematician, goldsmith. He lived in Nuremberg and was a leading protagonist of the Northern Renaissance. I would also certainly call him a designer. This is Melancholia I, a print from 1514.



Movable-type printing had been introduced in Germany only 75 years earlier. It had already existed in China for 400 years, invented by Bi Sheng in the Northern Song Dynasty around 1040 A.D. In Dürer's Europe, the production of typeset pages in multiple copies was still new, but as an engraver of metal printing plates Dürer was familiar with the process. This image has been reproduced many times and discussed, dissected, and deconstructed. What I like about it is something simple—it depicts a figure sitting still, kind of stymied. 

Continues in class ... 

Over 500 million copies and 1100 editions have been published; mine’s an English translation from 2005 [↓]:

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes recounts the multiple, occasionally pointless and inevitably comedic, adventures of the eponymous gentleman. Alonso Quijano has read too many stories of chivalry which, as a result have caused him to go mad, believing that he should become a “knight errant” just like the protagonists of his treasured books. Quijano changes his name adopting the honorary prefix “Don,” enlists his neighbor Sancho Panza to join him as squire, and sets off to roam the Spanish countryside performing deeds of bravery and nobility for anyone who might (or more often, might not) need his help. The chapters that follow detail Don Quijote’s run-ins with windmills and watermills, with traveling monks, goat herders, enchanted caves, minor royalty, and proper outlaws. 

The novel was first published in 1605 by Francisco de Robles of Madrid in a print run of 400 copies. It was an immediate success, reprinted in Brussels, Milan, and Valencia. Here's the title page from 1605 [↓]:

The book‘s success sparked pirate editions. A decidedly unlicensed “sequel” was soon published by a pseudonymous author under the title Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licenciado (doctorate) Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, de Tordesillas in 1614. 

By this time, Cervantes was already at work on his own legitimate followup [↑] which was published in 1615. In a bracingly modern metafictionalh moment of The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, Cervantes describes his hero wandering in Barcelona and stumbling onto something familiar:

As he was going down a street, Don Quixote happened to look up, and over a door he saw written, in very large letters: Books Printed Here, which made him very happy because he had never visited a print shop, and he wished to know what it was like. He went in with his entourage, and he saw them printing in one place, correcting in another, typesetting here, revising there, in short, all of the procedures that can be seen in large printing houses. [...] He moved on and saw that they were also correcting another book, and when he asked its title, they responded that it was called The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by somebody from Tordesillas.

"I have already heard of this book," said Don Quixote, "and by my conscience, the truth is I thought it had already been burned and turned to ashes for its insolence; but its day of reckoning will come, as it does to every pig, for feigned histories are good and enjoyable the closer they are to the truth or the appearance of truth, and as for true ones, the truer they are, the better."

And having said this, and showing some signs of displeasure, he left the printing house.

Continues in class . . .

As it turns out, the day I wrote this was Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday. Writer, typographer, printer, publisher, politician, inventor, statesman, gentleman scientist, linguist, librarian, and the first Postmaster General of the United States, Franklin was the consummate networker. Distributing his ideas far and wide through a dizzying range of practices, he established a network of printing franchises by sending former apprentices to set up shop in new towns and collecting dues. He traveled extensively to London and to the courts of France, fostering alliances that helped form a nation. He wrote incisive arguments and entertainments under a  constellation of pseudonyms including the Casuist, Silence Dogood, Busy-Body, Poor Richard, and J. T. to suit the purpose at hand. He advocated for a paper currency to facilitate the liberal distribution of goods and services while he was also a printer and so stood to make money by printing the paper currency which he lobbied for! He was often working both sides of the equation and I think this compromised quality is what I like about this familiar engraving—his almost-smirk.



He published a weekly newspaper, an occasional magazine, and the annual Poor Richard’s Almanack. Along the way, Franklin pursued his polymathic interests, inventing (a partial list): the medical catheter, the armonica (a musical instrument), a phonetic alphabet, the circulating stove, swim fins, binoculars, and the lightning rod. He founded the first public lending library, a volunteer fire department, the American Philosophical Society, a university, and was the first Postmaster General of the United States. He was a committed generalist.

. . .

Beatrice Warde also used her frontline position in typography as a gateway to injecting her voice into a wider conversation through her writing. 



Warde was born in New York City in 1900. Her father was an experimental musician from Germany who developed a chromatic alphabet. Her mother was May Lamberton Becker, a columnist at the New York Herald Tribune at the turn of the 20th century. Beatrice was often involved in  her mother’s work at the Herald Tribune, so she had an early appreciation for letters, for typography, for writing, and for editing. 

After homeschooling until age twelve, Warde was sent to Horace Mann School, a progressive academy in New York City. She whizzed through her classes in Greek and Latin, everyday skills, and public service. She graduated in two years. From Horace Mann she went to Barnard College, which was a part of Columbia University. There she studied English, French, Latin, writing, and philosophy, among other subjects. Warde was something of a prodigy. 

Continues in class . . .

If the printing process was one of the main facilitators in the development of the modern world, then the phrase ‘modern typography’ may be an unnecessary duplication of sense. Is not all typography modern?

And so begins the exceptionally cogent argument that design historian and publisher Robin Kinross offers in his foundational book Modern Typography. It’s a singular account of the rise of typography as a discipline. If you are interested to have a firm grounding in typographic history, this is absolutely the place to begin. I strongly suggest buying the book, putting it on your shelf, and looking forward to referring to it again and again. 



My own copy shows that iI have returned again and again — it’s lousy with notes [↓].



Top right of this page is one particularly important note, a kind of schematic diagram implied in the text. Kinross suggests that typography emerged as its own professional practice separate from printing, in part anyway, as a result of this self-propelling and self-reinforcing three-way cycle [↓].



Emerging mass production required specialization to break up the task into more efficient units. Specialized workers could develop specific competencies which then fueled the speed of mass production. Specialization was then facilitated by standardization, of the materials and practice of printing (measurement systems, type height, naming protocols). Agreed standards allowed printers to work with common type foundries and presses which then accelerated the mass production process. (I really should have drawn the arrows going both directions as each part of the process reinforces the other ... oh well.)

I would like you to pay special attention to places in the chapters I have asked you to read where one of these three parts of the triangle above appear. Make mental notes and physical notes. We will look at this together in class next week.

If the printing process was one of the main facilitators in the development of the modern world, then the phrase ‘modern typography’ may be an unnecessary duplication of sense. Is not all typography modern?

And so begins the exceptionally cogent argument that design historian and publisher Robin Kinross offers in his foundational book Modern Typography. It’s a singular account of the rise of typography as a discipline. If you are interested to have a firm grounding in typographic history, this is absolutely the place to begin. I strongly suggest buying the book, putting it on your shelf, and looking forward to referring to it again and again. 



My own copy shows that iI have returned again and again — it’s lousy with notes [↓].



Top right of this page is one particularly important note, a kind of schematic diagram implied in the text. Kinross suggests that typography emerged as its own professional practice separate from printing, in part anyway, as a result of this self-propelling and self-reinforcing three-way cycle [↓].



Emerging mass production required specialization to break up the task into more efficient units. Specialized workers could develop specific competencies which then fueled the speed of mass production. Specialization was then facilitated by standardization, of the materials and practice of printing (measurement systems, type height, naming protocols). Agreed standards allowed printers to work with common type foundries and presses which then accelerated the mass production process. (I really should have drawn the arrows going both directions as each part of the process reinforces the other ... oh well.)

I would like you to pay special attention to places in the chapters I have asked you to read where one of these three parts of the triangle above appear. Make mental notes and physical notes. We will look at this together in class next week.

Phototypesetting was always a transitional technology between metal and digital typesetting. It evolved through several stages, none of which ever really stuck. Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu, a film directed by David Loeb Weiss, captures one moment in this transition by chronicling the last day of metal typesetting at the New York Times on July 2, 1978. The Times was moving away from Linotype machines and on to the next level of typographic automation, where a new system used a hybrid of computerized storage and photographic reproduction techniques to set all the words in the daily newspaper. 



The film was shot entirely in the New York Times building in midtown Manhattan, where production was vertically integrated, in this case lit­erally, as a series of stacked basements and sub-basements where type­setting, printing, bundling, and even distribution were handled. 

Daily production started from the editorial staff on the top floor and proceeded from one level down to the next, ending with delivery trucks pulling up to a loading dock and carting away bound papers for distribution. 



It’s useful to think about what these technical changes allowed for the distribution of news. What resulted from being able to set the paper so much more quickly? More editions per day? More money for reporting? Perhaps a rearrangement of physical space? Or more resources for long articles and also a broader range of quick-hit stories? Shifts in typographic technology inevitably provoke deep changes in what can be said, how it is printed, and what effects these printed words have in the world.



The film is approximately 30 minutes. It is narrated by veteran Linotype operator Carl Schlesinger. 

Continues in class . . .

László Moholy-Nagy was a Hungarian artist, designer, writer, and teacher. He worked in Germany, England, and the United States. This portrait from 1926 maybe reveals something of Moholy’s disposition. He’s wearing a workman’s jumpsuit over a dress shirt and tie, looking like a hybrid worker-technocrat. He oriented himself more as a designer than an artist, although the distinction was fuzzy. He looks rather austere, but wasn’t—his friends called him “Holy Mahogany.” 

Moholy was interested in photography. It was relatively new at the time and he recognized it as a contemporary way to make images. His photographic experiments often pushed at the edges of the medium. He exaggerated perspective and used unexpected vantage points to abstract the subjects he shot. He cut up prints and assembled collages. He gathered images into composites. And he made photograms. Here are two: 



Photograms are images made directly from, or, in fact, by, an object. The object is placed directly on photo-sensitive paper and then the paper is exposed to light. The result is a contact print, a kind of light tracing. You might think of a photogram as seeing through an object to its essence. There’s a one-to-one directness to the print, where the object is reproduced at the same scale as the image made of it. The process is immediate and the result has an equally urgent quality. It is not dissimilar from printing. 

American artist Man Ray developed the technique around the same time and he called them “rayographs.” Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky, a Russian Jewish boy from South Philadelphia. He found his way to Paris, and made art. Lots of it. So, for example this is one of his photograms on the left. But he made many things other than rayographs, including poetry and even typography. I love this poster on the right which Man Ray designed for The London Underground in 1932, which seems to pick up a sentence mid-thought. It’s not a photogram, but who cares, it has something of that quality.



And even a good century before, British botanist Anna Atkins produced an extraordinary collection of photograms made with sunlight as cyanotypes of the different types of algae. These pictures were meant as an inventory of algae varieties found in England where they accompanied a text in what has been claimed as the first photographic book, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions (1843).



Stunning.

Continues in class . . .

What follows is a work in progress, the product of one year at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies tracing the legacy of graphic designer Muriel Cooper. It’s organized as a guided tour of various sites on the campus of MIT, attempting to track 40 years of Cooper’s work across different departments within the university. 



Muriel Cooper always sought more responsive systems of design and production, emphasizing quicker feedback loops between thinking and making, often blurring the distinction between the two. OK, let’s go ahead and get started. 

1. An accidental archive at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies 

We begin in a locked closet housing a collection of posters, documents, videotapes, and related printed matter which forms a de facto archive of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. Embarking on a client-design relationship with the Center, I arrived in Cambridge to spend a few days going through the archive and examining its contents.

The Center for Advanced Visual studies was set up in 1967 by György Kepes as a fellowship program for artists. Initiated with considerable institutional and financial support, the Center produced artworks, exhibitions, and public programs that were often accompanied by a poster or publication. These posters provide an immediate, condensed, and visually legible accidental archive of its almost four-decade history.



While working my way through the contents of the closet, I was struck immediately by the surface qualities of this extraordinary set of posters. It was not simply the graphic design nor the typography that caught me—rather it was their mode of production. The design of the posters changed sporadically as new designers or administrators appeared, but what remains the same is the way each self-consciously incorporates its production method into the design. 

Continues in class . . . 

At the American Institute of Architects national conference in 1973, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville described her search:

I have begun to try to find an answer for myself as a woman designer. Designers must work in two ways. We must create visual and physical designs which project social forms but simultaneously we must create the social forms which will demand new visual and physical manifestations.

A printed version of her talk soon appeared under the title A Reexamination of Some Aspects of the Design Arts from the Perspective of a Woman Designer, published together with her students’ [↓] work in British design journal Icographic 6.



These were students in The Women’s Design Program at the California Institute of the Arts, a newly established program in a newly established art school which de Bretteville was instrumental in founding. The Women’s Design Program was meant to foster collective investigation between students and faculty. It was non-hierarchical, exploratory, participatory — a clearly distinct approach from the top-down knowledge transfer of more conventional teaching. And one that is neatly inline with de Bretteville’s call above. The two-sided model she suggests is powerful, recognizing that *how* design work gets done can carry as much meaning as *what* results.

On returning from Italy in 1969 after working with Olivetti, de Bretteville moved to Los Angeles to be involved in the formation of the new school. She was hired to design the printed materials to attract a new kind of student. She also edited an issue of Arts in Society. The issue has a wonderfully predictive subtitle, setting the stage for what’s to come. Again, the community, the setup, is as important as whatever teaching might happen there.

Not long after beginning to teach at CalArts, de Bretteville joined with fellow art faculty Judy Chicago and Arlene Raven to form a new offshoot, independent program they named the Feminist Studio Workshop. The initial brochure usefully repeats a picture of the three founding women together, each taking turns facing the camera. Here is the one with Sheila facing forward [↓].



The Feminist Studio Workshop met first in de Bretteville’s home, and soon was housed in the the Woman's Building, a collective site west of downtown Los Angeles. Here is a “video letter” from a participant who describes the setup. Again, the way the work gets done is what matters. 

Continues in class . . .

Adam,* why do you choose Arial for the letters that sit across the surface of your paintings and objects? Why not Helvetica, the industrial sans serif typeface with letterforms that are both more formally resolved and in tune with the art histories to which your work connects?

In the series “Black Dada” (2008–09), you use photocopied enlargements of Sol LeWitt’s Incomplete Cubes (1974) layered with large capital letters to spell part of your work’s title. These paintings (well, silkscreens on canvas) attempt to connect to more than one era—the 1910s of the Dada movement, through your use of its broken language strategies and your title, and also the 1970s of the unfinished Conceptual art project, through images of the Incomplete Cubes.



In “System of Display” (2008–09), a series of wall-mounted mirrored black boxes, you layer found images, photocopied and enlarged, with text fragments screened on the glass surfaces. This comprehensive series is mounted as a relentless row of ten or more boxes on the gallery wall, each containing a different found image and text fragment. Clues to the meaning of the series are located in the individual works’ titles. For example, EE (Generates / Giulio Paolini, Young man looking at Lorenzo Lotto, 1967) (2008–2009) reaches to both the late 1960s of Italian Arte Povera conceptualist Giulio Paolini and the late fifteenth-century Renaissance-to-Mannerist painter Lorenzo Lotto.

Poet Jena Osman recently described your layered text-image compositions as copies that “lovingly degrade the past in order to create a new lineage that can move into the future.” In an interview with curator Krist Gruijthuijsen you said, “My work cancels out any kind of autonomy . . . it much more concerns the connections between things that are often made disparate or have been disconnected.” It seems pretty clear that you’re trying to recompile history by creating a set of signs whose place in time is complicated. So, Adam, why Arial?

. . .

Helvetica itself was nothing new anyway—it was a redrawing of Neue Haas Grotesque in the 1950s, which itself was based on Akzidenz Grotesque from the early twentieth century, in turn derived from the Standard Grotesque of the late 1800s. Arial could easily fit into this lineage. As described in the Readme file that ships with v3.0 of the font software, “Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such [sic] more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century.”

* ”Adam” is contemporary artist Adam Pendleton, whose work uses typography and recycled writing extensively.

Continues in class . . . 

Neeta Patel wrote this around the end of her senior year for a day in the near future:

you are about to begin listening to the annual class day speech. relax. concentrate. you are graduating from princeton university tomorrow, eleven am. dispel every other thought. let the world around you fade. best to close your eyes. for once this long weekend, allow yourself to see absolutely nothing but the after image of the back of that kid’s head in front of you. just listen now. are your eyes closed yet?

The text marks more than a passing resemblance to one written by Italo Calvino. Published in English with a stunningly self-aware cover in 1982, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller is a book of beginnings.



Wikipedia calls it a “frame story”—frankly a new term for me where the narrative is about the reader trying to read the story. It’s no surprise that Neeta's text finds that form as she had spent the previous summer trsanscribing Calvino's novel into a series of notebooks in her own, rather specific, handwriting. Her pages were eventually scanned and reprinted in a series of facsimile editions. A page of her book looked like this:



Anyway, back to her speech, which continues:

find the most comfortable position: seated with your feet firmly on the ground, or maybe you prefer them crossed. left over right or right over left? arms folded across your chest. or maybe you’d rather your hands folded in your lap. put them on your head if you like. careful, don’t hit your neighbors with your elbows. apologize if you do. there. maybe scoot down in your chair, lean back a slight bit. is that better? alright, you know best. of course, the ideal position for the next five minutes is somethingyou may never find. take off your shoes, if that helps. 

it’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular speech. you’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. there are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from college. 

She (finally) reveals a bit more context:

you cast a perplexed look to the person sitting next to you (or, rather: it was she who looked at you, with the amused expression of someone who cannot believe that this is the chosen class day speech she’s being forced to listen to, only to forget the words in a few minutes’ time). 

are you disappointed? let’s see. perhaps at first you feel a bit lost, as when a person appears who, from the name, you identified with a certain face, and you try to make the features you are seeing tally with those you had in mind, and it won’t work. but then you goon and you realize that the speech is readable nevertheless, independently of what you expected of the unexpected speaker, it’s the work in itself that arouses your curiosity; in fact, on sober reflection, you prefer it this way, confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is. because the truth of the matter is that when you know where you’re going, you turn into a piece of stupid concrete. 

Reading here, you are getting only a slim portion of the actual effect. The text was typeset in Neeta's handwriting, like so.

A point she unpacks next.

allow me to recount to you a brief story of an alphabet that might help make this right now a little more concrete. this speech is brought to you by a font i designed during my time as a visual arts major here. it’s a font based on my handwriting. maybe you’ve seen it around campus, via posters i designed or in the halls of one eighty five nassau street. designing this font took the better part of two years. it’s actually kind of absurd because this typeface, if you could see it, does not look so sophisticated (it’s actually pretty wonky and awkward), and it’s a wonder that it took anything more than a few hours to create, let alone two years.

Continues in class . . .

Computer scientist and Stanford professor emeritus Donald Knuth’s early digital typesetting experiments had a big impact on how we set type today. He also suggested a typographic path not taken. This was how he began his Josiah Willard Gibbs lecture at the American Mathematical Society on July 4, 1978:

I will be speaking today about work-in-progress instead of completed research. This was not my original intention when I chose the subject of this lecture, but the fact is I couldn’t get my computer programs working in time. Fortunately, it is just as well that I don’t have a finished product to describe to you today because research in mathematics is generally much more interesting while you’re doing it then after it’s all done.

It’s a prestigious lecture awarded annually for individual contributions to applied mathematics and when Knuth faced the room of mathematicians assembled in Providence, Rhode Island, he proceeded to talk not about math, but instead about typography. He began by showing slides, one after the other, pages from Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society illustrating how its composition and typography has changed over the last 100 years. For example, he showed this page from 1922 and pointed to its sharp modern serif type.



These were typographic fine points likely lost on his audience. But he had a reason, or an agenda anyway. He was showing these because he was upset by how the journal looked now. The Bulletin had switched to phototypesetting and Knuth found the result so (typographically) poor, that he refused to publish his work in it. 



Knuth talked not just about the typography in the journals, but also about a project he was working on to improve the prospects for digital typesetting. The “work-in-progress” he alluded to at the start of the talk, a new digital typesetting system, continued for the next 10 years. He discussed a few specific problems along the way in precisely describing subtle curves in the shapes of letters.

Continues in class . . . 

Here’s a diagram from William James’ 1890 book, The Principles of Psychology:

The drawing makes concrete what has been implied all semester: reading and writing are intimately connected through the *specific* shapes of the letters. Your brain decodes the shapes and corresponds the marks across a learned dictionary look-up table to produce words which produce sentences which convey and record ideas.

It is or will have been an abbreviated semester. We moved from Don Quijote to “Modern“ Typography, photography to digital typography. We saw lots of other people make typography. We tried our own hands at it. 

When it is your time to present, you take control. And for the following 15 minutes you may lead us through the work that you have made in any way that you find best helps us to understand what you have done and why you have done it. Then you will listen.

The group of us—the other students, me—will then let you know what we see in the work. This is what matters, remember. You may have great intentions, brilliant concepts, and even an articulated aesthetic position, but all of this must eventually be legible in the constellation of glyphs that you have arranged on so many pages. Recall from the semester that typography is most definitely a finite circuit: Writing *is* reading *is* writing *is* . . . 

OK. Let’s get started. Who’s first?