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.)