The Interaction Design of Typography

In Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst sug­gests that thought­fully designed type and an intel­li­gently designed printed page do more than tell a story: they cre­ate “look­ing room” for the user, lur­ing him into the words, into the page, into the dis­cus­sion care­fully crafted before him. Type, as a lan­guage crafted by history’s finest design­ers, must serve to con­vey mean­ing, sym­bol­ism, and emo­tion con­tained within the words them­selves, but it must also touch the heart of the reader, bring­ing her into the con­ver­sa­tion. In order to feel that she is a part of the con­ver­sa­tion and not merely a voyeur, she needs open space and room to breathe. The let­ters are trans­formed from mean­ing­less rep­re­sen­ta­tions of sounds and become things them­selves, gate­ways into learn­ing, knowl­edge, debate, engagement.

When a reader looks upon a beau­ti­fully designed page, she is drawn, almost with­out even think­ing about it, to read the words. She takes them in, unfold­ing the nar­ra­tive in her mind, and she asks ques­tions about the text, the author, the book itself. This engage­ment, this inter­play between the reader and the words, is beau­ti­ful inter­ac­tion design. An intel­li­gent, car­ing typog­ra­pher care­fully chooses type­faces, line lengths, mar­gins, etc. that allow the user to enter a con­ver­sa­tion with the writer, to engage with the words before her. It is not merely good usabil­ity or leg­i­bil­ity that the typog­ra­pher cre­ates; it is an expe­ri­ence. It is dia­logue. It is co-creative nar­ra­tive. Its trans­parency only under­scores its impor­tance: with­out it, this del­i­cate rela­tion­ship between reader and writer would be lost. The mys­tery of this design is that it is so unten­able, and yet so very impor­tant. It is, in no small way, a cor­ner­stone of our very culture.

The cul­tural price we pay

Yet in the June, 2007, edi­tion of Communication Arts mag­a­zine, John Hudson sug­gests that the stan­dard­iza­tion of let­ter­forms via mod­ern typog­ra­phy actu­ally diluted cul­ture by dimin­ish­ing or even oblit­er­at­ing regional let­ter­forms. He writes, “The great­est reduc­tion is prob­a­bly in the loss of much regional vari­a­tion in let­ter­forms, the local dialects of script.” With the intro­duc­tion of stan­dard let­ter­forms, local scripts died out or became unso­phis­ti­cated. Eventually they would become alto­gether illeg­i­ble by those not reared on the local let­ter­forms. Moreover, one could no longer look at a script and know where it was penned, for writ­ers every­where used the same let­ter shapes. Truly, this is an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment: I can only imag­ine how impov­er­ished we would be as a peo­ple if we could not enjoy hear­ing dif­fer­ent accents and vocal melodies; the loss of regional scripts must have been, at the time, equally grave.

A designer’s manip­u­la­tion of a reader’s emo­tions is intentional.

Of course, along with the cul­tural rich­ness afforded by the melodic dif­fer­ences in spo­ken lan­guage comes assump­tions and prej­u­dices. When we hear some­one speak­ing with a British, Australian, or Southern accent (or indeed, any of their myr­iad vari­a­tions, for even these cat­e­gories are very broad and con­tain vastly dif­fer­ent vocal­iza­tions) we form imme­di­ate pic­tures of them, which in turn shape our inter­ac­tion with them.

Manipulation, design, and interaction

We could lay the same com­plaint against writ­ten let­ters: before the stan­dard­iza­tion of typog­ra­phy and let­ter­forms, peo­ple might have made deter­mi­na­tions about the author based on his pen­man­ship rather than the char­ac­ter of his text; they might assume prej­u­dices against him because of what region his let­ters iden­ti­fied him as being from. They might allow their visual impres­sions of a page to sway how they felt about the content.

Of course, that’s the pur­pose of design. The dif­fer­ence is that a designer’s manip­u­la­tion of a reader’s emo­tions is inten­tional.

Modern, stan­dard­ized typog­ra­phy does not free us from the pit­falls of prej­u­dice or asso­ci­a­tion: type­faces such as Optima, Helvetica, Bordoni, and Garamond all evoke from us, as design­ers, writ­ers, and read­ers, dif­fer­ent emo­tions or reac­tions. It does not free us from con­no­ta­tions and cul­tural bag­gage but instead builds upon them. This is one of the essen­tial func­tions of a type­face. Writers pore over their word choices, the rhythm of their sen­tences with care­ful delib­er­a­tion, know­ing that these ele­ments and the melody they estab­lish will shape the voice of their mes­sage, either mak­ing or break­ing their work. The type­face is cho­sen with sim­i­lar care, for the amount of neg­a­tive space, the curve of the ser­ifs, and the weight of the strokes in com­bi­na­tion shape the expe­ri­ence of a typeface.

Typography as shared language

What stan­dard­ized typog­ra­phy really does for us is estab­lish a visual mythol­ogy just like any other set of sym­bols, allow­ing us to use a kind of culturally-universal emo­tional short-hand in order for us to inter­act with each other via a visual medium. If I use Comic Sans (which I wouldn’t, but let’s just say that I would) I know that my reader will have asso­ci­a­tions of child­ish­ness, play­ful­ness, lack of sophis­ti­ca­tion, like­ablity, approach­a­bil­ity, etc. Those expe­ri­ences and asso­ci­a­tions have already been encoded for us in our cul­tural DNA.

Certainly we lose some­thing as a cul­ture with stan­dard­iza­tion, but we gain some­thing as well. The lan­guage of design is enriched by shared, cul­tural sym­bols even while the art of writ­ten let­ter­forms and the writ­ten page is dimin­ished. To my mind, this is a sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence between art and design. While good art might use sym­bols with cul­tural mean­ing, it does not rely upon them as a vehi­cle of expe­ri­ence. Art is a pri­vate con­ver­sa­tion between two peo­ple: the artist and the viewer. Art relies upon the abil­ity of indi­vid­u­als to tran­scend shared, cul­tural con­no­ta­tions and asso­ci­a­tions and access some­thing of their pri­vate worlds, some­thing per­haps mean­ing­ful only to them. Design may do this, but it doesn’t rely upon that abil­ity, and therein lies the key difference.

(I expect to write some­thing more sig­nif­i­cant some­time soon about the dif­fer­ences between art and craft and where design fits into this pic­ture, but my thoughts are still percolating.)