Forgive my ruthless universalising: when it comes to a word, you can speak it or you can write it. But every time a word is used, it is subject to an infinity of contextual and gestural modifications, qualifications, stipulations, provisos. You could call typographic language the 'body language' of the written word- but because of my horror of bodies I prefer to think of both written and spoken language in terms of accent and rhythm, whether visually or sonically perceived. But that perception is usually unconscious, automatic, instinctive. If after reading this cursory miscellany you feel even an iota better able to identify and understand the sensations you already experience in reading, I will be a little happier.
As with the skills of oratory and rhetoric, the ability to manipulate the form of the written word to influence others should be used with care. This is not a new idea: the Dadaists saw typographic tradition as another means employed by the establishment to protect their own economic and hegemonic interests. Playfully contorting and recombining elements of the ubiquitous print culture, their periodicals- for example Tristan Tzara’s Dada and Kurt Schwitter’s Merz- threw open a new realm of typographic possibility. Typefaces and sizes clashed and vibrated upon the paper, text ran in all directions, at all angles. Marcel Duchamp went so far as to abominate the ‘tyranny of the alphabet,’ claiming ‘the only thing worse than a serif typeface is a sans-serif typeface.’ Yet at the heart of their reproach was an injection of nihilistic and fearless multidirectional energy, as Tzara pontificates in the 1918 Dada Manifesto:
“Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed.”But the magazine was always a kleptotype: fertilised willy-nilly by the distinct design conventions of books, newspapers, advertising, packaging; it gives birth to a hybrid offspring of intricate flexibility, vast possibility. Look at a magazine now and you might see the co-dependent growth of our entire typographic language: justified narrow columns with inset drop caps, text colour variations, illuminations flowing free from text areas and out into the margins. These were all methods used in the earliest substantial printed book of the west- the 1455 Gutenberg Bible- in its struggle for life and expression.
Perhaps it is fair that typography has been dubbed the most conservative of the arts- guarded as it has been by a stubborn clique of highly specialised terms, practitioners, technologies; but from another vantage it’s the most abstract, freeform branch of anatomy, of ergonomics, of optics, of neuroscience. The study of legibility- which is not the same as readability- has been the task of both scientists and typographers for centuries and probably longer.
But whilst our eyes and hands have remained the roughly same for the last 250,000 years or so, the same is not true of our habits, and especially our reading habits. So although relative proportions of height to width, of page to text, of heading to body, of margin to gutter &c. have remained to an extent stable (notwithstanding fluctuations in fashion) their application in our textual material serves an ever changing set of purposes.
Unless you’re some kind of bootless Edwardian hack, you most likely read magazines between other times- on the way somewhere, waiting for someone to shut up, as a papery respite from your glowing Mac labour-unit, whatever. So you might digest the whole thing gradually over the course of a week, in uneven doses: sometimes a minute, others an hour at a time. And typographers have their own part to play in making this as simple and pleasurable as possible: the text must both enliven the page and be readily understood- not just in terms of legibility or aesthetic fluff- but also by providing an instant visual map of the content, so that it can be read or skipped past. Pull quotes, box outs, headers and sub-headers; all are cues, instant orientation points for an article or feature, a scattered précis, allowing the reader to flick quickly through masses of information and choose unswervingly the word, sentence, paragraph or page that suits their whim.
The very best magazine typography takes all of this into account- it knows the magazine as an object, it knows how it will be browsed listlessly in bookshops, and it uses the very rhythms of apathy across its entire structure- mimics them and then takes them elsewhere. Those relaxed, anthropometric proportionalities are twisted in on themselves, given new breath; the typographic frame and the written painting work together to improve one another. I think of layout in terms of rhythm- the beat of contrast and accent- negative space and positive text image- and as with my favourite glitched out Euro-crunk or minimalist phase composition- it’s where the rhythms deviate and disintegrate gracefully that the hairs stand up on the back of my neck.
Check out the Non-Format team and their work on design rag Varoom, or the small and beautiful movie mag Little White Lies. Or Hello! Magazine- purely typographically it’s an ocean of bright, bland, shouty, seemingly infantile volatility- a potent smack in the eye for those who’ve spent too long cultivating unworldly perspicacity- but I defy even the most snobbish of aesthetes to flick through it without respecting it’s bull’s-eye accuracy in targeting a demographic of brain-dead illiterates. Just as the Sun is written exclusively by Oxbridge literature grads, there is often serious typographic talent behind the most apparently garish publications. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing.
As we move grudgingly but seemingly inevitably further and further away from print and from paper magazines, our typographic rules are reinvented- our reading and writing is undergoing a shift of context, which brings with it a shift of content. The miniscule resolution of computer monitors, the crudity of XHTML and CSS when applied to type and layout and the limitations of font usage on the Internet seem to conspire against our ability to express through text. But as ever, it is these obstructions that will refine our senses, and gradually we will overcome them, or simply get used to them.
