dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
Typography is all around us, and, thanks to the proliferation of digital publishing tools, typography’s basic terms are on everyone’s lips, in at least a superficial way. To the extent that most people who write letters today do so on a computer in some sort of word-processing program, we’re all typographers. So why isn’t typography talked about on a day-to-day basis, the way we talk (and read) about so many other processes that affect us?
Fellow Readers
I was reminded of this question recently when I reread Robin Kinross’s “Fellow readers,” which was reprinted as the final essay in his collection of typographic writing, “Unjustified texts: perspectives on typography” (London: Hyphen Press, 2002). (“Fellow readers: notes on multiplied language” was originally published in 1994 as a pamphlet accompanying a reprint of his book “Modern typography.” All of these were published by Kinross’s own excellent publishing company, Hyphen Press; the Hyphen Press titles are currently distributed in the United States by Princeton Architectural Press.)
What Kinross wrote in 1994 was this: “Could typography be a topic of regular and intelligent discussion in newspapers? The typographer Erik Spiekermann set off this hare in his book ‘Rhyme & reason,’ in which he complained that one could never read discussion of typography there. If music, architecture, cookery and gardening have critics and columnists, then why not typography?”
When I first read this, I got full of schemes to bring typography into the arena of public discussion. (Actually, I first started hatching such schemes back when I originally read Spiekermann’s book.) A critical typographic eye prowling through the streets of the city, commenting on good and bad uses of type in public and commercial lettering, would be at least as useful to the average member of the public as similar criticism of the architecture that surrounds us. In fact, typographic criticism could be put to use by far more practitioners than architectural criticism can (though both kinds of criticism make us more informed users of both buildings and letters).
Neither I nor anyone else that I’m aware of has managed to convince the editor of a major daily newspaper—or even a stylish weekly—that a regular column of typographic criticism was in order, but on rereading Kinross’s words, I realized that this was exactly what I was practicing right here in the “pages” of Creativepro.com. The audience (that is, you) is a much more specialized one than the general readership of a newspaper, but it’s potentially widespread both geographically and culturally. Perhaps the kinds of criticism that I write here can percolate through the typographic culture and have an occasional effect for the better. I hope so.
Spread the Word
The kind of writing that Kinross was hoping for is probably more rigorously critical than what I do here. Quite often, what I’m doing in this column is highlighting something interesting that seems worth making people aware of—a book, an event, a newly available typeface—so I’m seldom writing just to deliver a critique. At the same time, I don’t hesitate to point out the weak points of what I recommend, or the places where otherwise admirable typographic practitioners got lazy.
When it comes to advice on using type, I’m much more likely to lambaste bad practice. While I’m always sympathetic to the real-life pressures on people who make dumb typographic mistakes—and I’ve made my share—I suspect that we’d all be better off if we saw a regular feature in every daily newspaper, or perhaps on the evening news, spotlighting the really egregious misuses of letters in our daily environment. It would be sort of like those features that are popular at the moment in some newspapers, focusing on violations of city building codes or instances of dangerous crosswalks at intersections. (Such a project, of course, if it didn’t pull its punches, might have to be called “How to Lose Friends & Influence People.”)
But typographic criticism doesn’t have to be just negative, just pointing out all the bad examples. It should also celebrate the good ones, and muse publicly on the nature of our constant interaction with type and lettering in our everyday environment. (Read a good train schedule lately?)
I’d like to encourage the readers of “dot-font” not only to practice better and more careful typography themselves, in everything from writing business letters to executing major public-signage projects, but to demand more critical thinking about how we use type every day. Go ahead and write that column for your local newspaper! Write two! The more the merrier. There’s an enormous amount of typographic ignorance in the modern world; but there’s a great deal of typographic knowledge, too—far more than there ever was in the past. Let’s spread some of that knowledge around.
This article was last modified on March 4, 2022
This article was first published on January 13, 2003
Commenting is easier and faster when you're logged in!
