tagged with design
Realignment
When I began this site, I was intentionally vague about my intentions, in large part because I wasn’t entirely sure of them myself. I knew I wanted to write about books, and I knew I wanted to explore what it meant to hold a personal discussion about books (which are always read in solitude) in the public space of the web. But I did not know – and did not want to know – where that discussion would take me.
So over the summer I took a meandering route, reading and writing more or less as things came to me, without much consideration for how (or if) it would all come together. And it shows. There’s a spontaneity and stream of consciousness to the writing that I find both appealing and frustrating. Appealing in that I’ve been free to toy with ideas and then discard them without justification; frustrating in that the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. In fact, some of the parts are clearly superior to the whole.
I suppose this is, to some extent, the inevitable consequence of publishing frequently; the quality of the writing is bound to ebb and wane. But I do think it warrants some adjustment. For one, I’m clearly better at writing long than writing short, so I’m going to make an effort to do more of the former and less of the latter. If that means I post less frequently, so be it. Reading long can be difficult on the web (as my last post attests), but I’m not about to concede that it can’t be done.
In fact, I’m so convinced it can be done that I’ve redesigned the site to make it friendlier to readers. Each post will receive it’s own page – a room of its own, so to speak. The sidebar content has been tucked into the footer, which is now hidden away with a bit of javascript (click on the little “more” tab to retrieve it). I’ve also eliminated the related books sidebar, which never really came together as I thought it would. The result is, I hope, a site that invites and encourages reading – hopefully a welcoming oasis in a web otherwise awash with clutter.
An argument could be made that this goes too far – that I’ve sacrificed certain inalienable principles of web design (notably, orientation and ease of navigation) in favor of creating a space for reading. But since this is a personal site I feel free to experiment in ways I may not recommend for a client. And I think reading is an often and unfortunately neglected behavior in the context of web design. Bringing attention to a cause usually involves taking things to an extreme, and I’m happy to be out on a limb on this one.
The previous version of this site (now referred to as the First Edition) is now available at 1e.aworkinglibrary.com and will remain there indefinitely. I intend to archive all design iterations this way, such that one can follow the process through which the design has traveled. While some things have changed here, one fact remains constant: that the writing and design on this site are inescapably intertwined. For that, I offer no apology.
Unreadable?
Joe Clark has an article in the debut issue of Scroll magazine on the “unreadability” of the web. In it, he expresses dismay for the ways in which the web has shortened our attention spans and set expectations for content that is short, pithy, and ultimately mindless.
We realize now that long documents do not work on the web. We should never have thought otherwise. But all those short documents we’re reading instead are poisoning our ability to read long documents.
Clark makes a couple of points as to why the web is unsuitable for long: screen resolutions that remain poor substitutes for ink on paper; the inability to “curl up” with a screen; and the very nature of hypertext, with its constant invitation to distraction. All good points, and why many of us in the book business do not foresee an end to the printing press in the near term.
But perhaps more disturbingly, Clark suggests that the hours we spend reading short on the web are inhibiting our abilities to read long even when we’re away from the screen. Our brains are being “rewired” for short, such that when we do curl up with a book, we no longer have the fortitude to get through it. We’re less patient, more distracted, attuned to the efficiency of a text instead of its intellectual rigor. “This is your brain on RSS,” he asks. “Any questions?”
Ironically, the design of Clark’s piece in Scroll unintentionally echos many of his points. The entire magazine is set with a line length that is far too long for comfortable reading, in a typeface that, while lovely, is not at all suitable for reading long. The magazine is printed on a bright white coated stock, in essence replicating some of the inherent problems (i.e., glare and too much contrast) of reading on the screen. And the pages are littered with pull quotes that distract the eye, much like sidebars and hyperlinks do on the web. Clark’s article is no more readable in print than it would have been on the screen.
And here’s what’s missing from this conversation: the design of a text has a lot to do with how we read it, whether we look to “get in, get it over with, and get out” or decide to settle in for the long haul. Many of the design decisions on the web that inhibit reading long have nothing to do with our reading styles, and everything to do with the business decisions of the publishers: the annoying habit of splitting long articles into multiple pages to increase page views; the stream of advertising and related content in the sidebar; the spate of clique-like social media links which seem to always appear at the top of an article, inspiring you to share it before you’ve read it; and most egregiously, an inattention to the typographic details that make reading easier and more pleasurable.
I’m as guilty as the next person in flipping through site after site as quickly as I can, skimming articles while I post to twitter or IM a colleague or delete the last six emails received. But I have not – yet, at least – lost the ability to read long; in fact, at the end of the day, I’m often eager for the relative slowness and calm that a book can provide. Some of this is because the physical cues of a book – the soft paper, the warmth of the text on the page, the way it fits into my hands – suggest a different mode of reading. But I don’t believe we’ve yet attempted – yet alone exhausted – methods for triggering these same feelings on the web.
Even this site – which was inspired by book design and falls somewhere between restrained and aggressively minimal on the design scale – tilts away from reading long in several ways. There’s no navigation bar, few hyperlinks, and the sidebar is so meek it almost apologizes for its intrusion. As perhaps it should. If we design distraction into the web, we aren’t exactly in the best position to complain when distraction consumes us. But must we design this way? or has the time come for designers to recognize that speed and efficiency are not the sole parameters with which to judge the screen?
Macro- versus microtypography:
While macrotypography – the typographic layout – is concerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and position of the columns of text and illustrations, with the organization of the hierarchy of headings, subheadings and captions, detail typography is concerned with the individual components – letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the components that graphic or typographic designers like to neglect, as they fall outside the area that is normally regarded as ‘creative.’ Hochuli, Detail in typography (7)
A well-designed text will seem weightless after a time; the initial feel of the book fades away as the mind becomes engrossed in the words. Any shiver in the page – a bad break, a too-long measure, a space too wide or narrow – and the book will press into the reader’s hand and tug at the lids of her eyes. It takes a designer who is also a reader to be be attentive to the ways by which the page becomes a burden to the words.
On the “science” of typography (regarding the design of Adrian Frutiger’s Univers):
If all this gave off an air of scientificity, attractive to typographers interested in possibilities of logically determined design, the considerable sophistications of Univers depended on old-fashioned drawing skills and patient small adjustments: it was an exemplary product of the Swiss craft tradition. Though it anticipated the possibilities of computer-aided typeface design, this was done quite innocently. Kinross, Modern Typography (154)
It’s a common fallacy to observe the trappings of science in a work or text and assume that the process of science lies underneath. Similarly, many people read Pynchon’s novels and assume a familiarity with physics far beyond what he actually possesses (his physics education didn’t persist past his sophomore year); in the preface to Slow Learner, he confesses:
For a while all I worried about was that I’d set things up in terms of temperature and not energy. As I read more about the subject later, I came to see that this had not been such a bad tactic. But do not underestimate the shallowness of my understanding. For instance, I chose 37 degrees Fahrenheit for an equilibrium point because 37 degrees Celsius is the temperature of the human body. Cute, huh? Pynchon, Slow Learner (13)
It’s the equivalent of a literary or artistic viceroy, in which the appearance of a scientific justification is enough to suggest the existence of the real thing.
Tschichold arguing against Swiss design:
He suggested that a preoccupation with the arrangement of blocks of text led to the reduction of words to mere colour and a denial of their meaning. … In a series of objections to the cult of sanserif, he asserted that it was not the duty of letterforms to correspond to the spirit of the age, nor to its newest material products (skyscrapers or car bodies); rather ‘typography must be itself. It must be adapted to our eyes, and to their well-being.’ Kinross, Modern Typography (152)
Much lamentable book design is a result of disregard for the well-being of our eyes.
An interesting description of the way in which modern typography was adopted (and adapted) in America:
Designers were to become as Toscanini to the Beethoven of the writer, arranging and re-scoring and inevitably leaving very evident signs of their involvement, for example in the complete integration of text and image. This was an opposite from the traditionalist ideals of invisibility and unity of materials. … In the USA, modern typography now had no independent existence; it had been dissolved into something larger and more worldly. ‘The vastly expanded resource available to the book designer indicate a fundamental change in his function. He is essentially an art director …’ Kinross, Modern Typography (134)
I wonder also if this modernizing and essentially authorial approach to book design described herein was a reflection of the very American attitude of colonizing new territory. American artists are often loathe to accept the boundaries of the discipline as they are presented to them; that typographers should be no different is no surprise.
On the question of what is literature:
John M. Ellis has argued that the term ‘literature’ operates rather like the word ‘weed’: weeds are not particular kinds of plant, but just any kind of plant which for some reason or another a gardener does not want around. Perhaps ‘literature’ means something like the opposite: any kind of writing which for some reason or another somebody values highly. Eagleton, Literary Theory (8)
Similarly:
New typography thus resisted the idea that literature should enjoy a separate, special status: it was another design problem. And perhaps more interesting than ‘literature’ for new typographers were industrial catalogues and other texts with complex problems of ordering and configuration to be resolved. Kinross, Modern Typography (117)
Of course, what you value reveals a lot about who you are – and what you want of the world around you.
On “masculine printing” versus “feminine printing”:
At a printers’ convention in August 1892, De Vinne proposed the ideal of ‘masculine printing’, in opposition to the ‘feminine’ variety that he saw as a weakening of standards. This latter was an approach interested in ornamental effects and especially in a cultivation of hair-line delicacy … By contrast: ‘The object of the masculine style [was] the instruction of the reader.’ Kinross, Modern Typography (53)
Disregard the unnecessarily gendered language and you’ll find a strong argument for legibility. And by legibility, I mean not merely what’s required to discern the words on a page, but a design that encourages thoughtful reading. De Vinne’s use of the phrase “instruction of the reader” suggests a concept of design that is oriented towards learning.
A self-conscious experiment
Any intellectual endeavor is bound to be more interesting if it is unsure of itself. A supremely confident effort will only reach as far as necessary to confirm its assumptions; it will go no further, and it will not question its reasons for existing. By contrast, an insecure process will act out its doubt by exploring, looking for the ways in which it may prove to be incorrect or incomplete or even irrelevant. Instead of searching for tautologies that prove its own effectiveness, it will seek out every plausible way to be discredited and dissect them, one by one.
It’s an exercise in discomfort, but one which can be fruitful if you’re persistent.
I was intentionally abstract about the purpose and methods at work on this site when I started it, knowing that if I prescribed a path from the beginning it would be easier but less engaging. Now, a little more than a month later, some of that purpose is coming into relief – a few edges of a path that is still being carved. This act of tracking and responding to books – collecting the texts that strike me as holding some truth – is an attempt to sketch out the foundations of a personal critical approach, the first step of which is to define the shape of my own beliefs; from there, I can better explore and question them.
The critical approach questions: and it questions its own assumptions as part of a refusal to take anything unquestioned. There are no beliefs – not of a golden age, nor of transparent communication – that can stand free of these questions and doubts. In this way the critical approach will always live on, never quite satisfied. It is coloured by dissatisfaction, even melancholy: it lives in the contexts with which it finds itself, but questions the terms of those contexts and is often unhappy with them. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (361)
So, the process I now find myself involved in is one of definition (seeking out the source of my beliefs in the books I’ve read and reread) and simultaneous questioning (following these beliefs from book to book to see if they become clearer or merely dilute, turning them inside out as they pass through different writers) all the while paying attention to the language itself, cognizant (and accepting) of my prejudice for ideas that are articulated with beautiful prose.
I am also beginning to think more clearly about the relationship between design and criticism, whether it be of a criticism that itself addresses design, or of a critical approach that is communicated through design. When developing any critical method, you must consider why it needs to exist in the first place: what are we to learn from it? How will it reshape what we already know (or think we know)? Who does it benefit?
The reproduction and distribution of text is part of the life-blood of social-critical dialogue. The argument for openness and clarity in typography is made, most importantly, for this reason. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (362)
This part of the path is still woody and overgrown, but I can just make out an opening ahead: if typography is the means by which criticism is distributed, then criticism owes much of its existence to typography. And typography – when executed in such a way as to serve the text and not compete with it – is a participant in that criticism. It is the parameters of that participation that I am keenly interested in.
That, it seems, is the direction I’m headed; and I’m happy to say, I don’t know where I’ll be when I get there.
Coming back around again to criticism and ideology:
… cultural studies has been developed in application to popular culture and is in opposition not only to an exclusive, high culture but also to all distinctions of value within culture. It thus conflicts with the highminded, reforming and occasionally revolutionary way of designing (of William Morris – and company), which would certainly maintain distinctions of good and bad in the ways in which the material world is ordered: on such presuppositions must any confident design education be based. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (322)
There are two ideologies at play here: that of the cultural critic and that of the typographer. The practice of cultural studies is informed by concerns of oppression and driven by an interest in culture at the margins; as such, it treats with suspicion any attempt to discern the value of a particular cultural element, believing that such distinctions are usually an attempt by one culture to oppress another. This relativistic stance emerges from a deeply held interest in reducing inequality.
However, the typographer is an aesthetician, someone who is rooted in the material world (and not just the intangible world of ideas); he believes in craftsmanship and skill. The iterative process of design – start with something rough and slowly work to refine it, improving its physical qualities with each step – gives birth to a belief system that registers the difference between good and bad without apology. As such, the typographer requires a critical perspective that embraces the work of assigning value and formulates a process for doing so; he cannot make sense of an approach that denies all distinctions of value in the name of equality.
Kinross’ larger point here is that we cannot simply borrow literary theories and apply them to design without first considering their effectiveness – and, I would argue, their underlying beliefs – with respect to this different medium.
Regarding the “new” typography:
First, and so obvious that one sometimes neglects to mention it: the materials of printing played a part. Red has been the traditional second colour of printing since Gutenberg.…In the context of socialist revolution, it could take on new meanings. Similarly, ‘bars’ had been familiar to printers since at least the early nineteenth century. Now they were seen freshly, through constructivist spectacles, as elemental forms. Much of the energy of Bauhaus and modernist typography comes from this process of old or already available materials being seen in a new light. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (250)
Which is, of course, what creativity is all about: an adjustment to one’s perception, a new context for an existing observation. If creativity demanded that we bring into existence that which is completely foreign, the end result would be so unfathomable it would spill over the limits of our perception. An original design (or text) must have enough of the old and familiar within it for us to recognize its originality.
For designing is not creation out of nothing (as in the idea of the genius-artist, conjuring unexplainable beauties from a void). Rather it is a matter of working, usually with given materials, constrained by many interconnected and often pressing factors. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (314)
On the origins of the designer:
The familiar account, which I think has much truth in it, is that out of the Arts & Crafts rebellion emerged the figure that we call the designer – the typographic designer, the book designer. This person attempted to order the processes of production in printing, and attempted to reinfuse the aesthetic element, the dimension of material and visual surplus – pleasure – which printers could no longer provide as an inbuilt part of what they were printing. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (187)
Refreshing to hear someone admit that design is first and foremost about pleasure, a point that is easy to lose sight of in the corporate environment.
A reminder about the collaboration required to produce a beautiful book:
Within the best book competition, we need an award for good editing. And it would be interesting to test the thesis that good design is only possible with books of substance, their material intelligently sorted out. The only fetishistic books would then be books that are actually about fetishism. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (213)
I don’t need a test to prove this; a book design can be attractive regardless of the substance of the text, but it can’t be beautiful. A beautiful design occurs at the intersection of great design and great writing.
Typographic disorder inevitably follows from disorder in construction; and, equally, typography by itself (if it could be ‘by itself’) cannot be effective with bad copy. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (228)
Kinross on Tschichold’s turn towards the traditional:
This astonishing change came to dog Tschichold’s career. When, in 1946, he first explained it publicly (in a highly-charged exchange with Max Bill), his reasons were of two kinds: that his modern typography had been authoritarian and militaristic and so imbued with the spirit that also drove German National-Socialism; and that modernism in typography was limited to publicity work (as opposed to book design), could not properly articulate content, could be practised only by an uninitiated élite. These arguments – a tangle of true perceptions and ingenuous special pleading – inform what may be the only decent attempt at postmodernism in typography, done for the most serious moral-political reasons. Kinross, Unjustified Texts (175)
Yet today much book design has gone the way of “publicity” work, has relinquished the love affair it had with texts. Which is not to say there aren’t any beautifully designed books being published, but they are increasingly difficult to find. Serious readers are forced to contend with incompetently designed and poorly composed texts if they are to read at all.
Diary of a Bad Year starts off with a single narrator (an older male writer) but the text is split between his writings and his diary. Visually, this split is represented with a shift in the shape of the text: the top three-quarters of the page (the essay) are justified, while the bottom quarter (the diary) is ragged right; a thin rule separates the two. Above, the voice is proper, in its place (but only barely so); below, it’s casual and at times self-conscious. So the vertical shape of the page is precarious: a heavy block rests upon a few shallow, uneven lines.
As the book proceeds, another voice enters: that of a woman. Her voice comes up from the bottom, further splitting the page, so that it’s now in thirds. And she doesn’t respect the boundaries as he did; whereas the narrator was careful to craft sentences and paragraphs that could begin and end on a single page, her voice ranges across the pages. As a reader, you must choose between shifting from her narrative to the writer’s in mid-sentence (leaving her to trail off) or else skip over the writer’s voice and stay with her for a few pages, only to backtrack and catch up with him later. The design of the text then physically captures the sense of youth careening ahead, of an old man chasing after it, losing his way in the process.
When the woman’s voice first breaks the page, it’s in a passage where she talks about how the writer’s eyes are going:
He forms his letters clearly enough, m’s and n’s and u’s and w’s included, but when he tries to write a whole passage he can’t keep the line straight, it dips like a plane nosediving into the sea or a baritone running out of breath. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (42–43)
It’s another twenty pages before he follows after her and runs across the page as well:
These thoughts about the body occur not in the abstract but in relation to a specific person, X, unnamed. On the morning of the day he died, X brushed his teeth, taking care of them with the due diligence we learn as children.…X was not buried but cremated; and the people who built the oven in which he was consumed ensured that it was hot enough to turn everything to ash, even bones, even teeth. Even teeth. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year (60–61)
In both passages, there is a sense of routine – of trying to maintain control even as it slips away – while the design of the page supports the text in subtle ways. The initial control of one voice gives way to two (and later, three); the essays cede space to the woman’s criticism of them, so that the justified lines are diminished as the ragged text swells up from the bottom of the page, in contrast to the writer’s own diving handwriting.
Two concerns need to be set aside before criticism can escape its literary chains and venture into mass culture. The first is the mistaken assumption that the products of mass culture are somehow less worthy of criticism, because they just aren’t all that complex or interesting:
We are accustomed to think of these subtleties in quasi-Pavlovian terms, as hidden stimuli that “turn us on” without our knowing it: nipples airbrushed into sunsets, lewd words traced into some ice cubes, etc. But this conception of the way ads work, and of the way we apprehend them, is much too crude. They function, not mechanically, but poetically, through metaphor, association, repetition, and other devices that suggest a variety of possible meanings. Miller, Boxed In (31)
In other words, there’s not as much distance between a poem and an ad as the poet would have you think. At least, not inasmuch as the critic is concerned.
The second assumption is that in order for a critic to establish that a meaning is evident in a text (wherein a text can consist of words or images or both), she must establish intent; i.e., she must not only convince you that the text means something, but that the author of the text intended it to mean so:
If criticism can demonstrate convincingly that a commercial uses certain strategies, then we can assume that those strategies are, in fact, at work, whether or not the advertisers might acknowledge them. Ibid. (32)
As with advertisements (or designs) as with poetry: the author’s intent is unknowable (perhaps even to the author) and irrelevant: once written down, the text takes on a meaning of its own.
On being a critic
The first definition of critic is often negative: “one who expresses an unfavorable opinion of something.”1 The principal image here is of one who complains, who judges – probably prematurely and harshly – that which would be well enough left alone. A critic is one who spoils the dinner party with her invocations of disapproval.
Let’s put that aside for now. For while the negative connotation persists in sticking to the critic’s shoes, it’s really not her fault. A more effective definition of the critic is one who looks for the truth. By “looks” I mean looks with an attentiveness to the details, to the hidden meanings or sideways connections, to what is on the surface and what lies beneath; by “truth” I mean just that: real, reasoned truth, not the postmodern display of it – overwrought with self-doubt – but the real fucking thing. As hard as it may be to believe in some circles, we all still know what truth is; we’ve just allowed ourselves to become convinced that since truth is hard to find we shouldn’t bother to look.
Where the critic chooses to look is her prerogative, but she may look anywhere and still be a critic. Literature and film are natural points of focus, as is design; but I’ve seen criticism applied as effectively to Shakespeare as to TV commercials. In fact, in many ways, criticism today is more interesting when it looks to those areas that have traditionally been ignored; Shakespeare does not lack for critical attention, but Starbucks may.
How the critic looks is more interesting. For every critic harbors an ideology that informs her criticism. She may not admit of that ideology; or – bless her heart – she may not recognize it, so ingrained is it in her thinking that she cannot step back far enough to see it. But it’s always there. The application of her criticism is, then, a test to see if the object of study lives up to this ideology; or, if it fails, to dissect the nature of its failure such that something may be learned from it. It is through her criticism that she spreads her ideology, and as such, her criticism is a method for promoting a better world.
Put another way: criticism is the means by which an ideology is promoted and distributed with the aim of making the world a better place. Each critic may have a different idea of what that “better place” may be like (meaning, they may have different, and even conflicting, ideologies), but the methods and nature of their goals are always the same. To judge the critic, then, you must judge her vision of what the world should be.
It is my belief that the methods and ideas that make up the field of literary criticism are in fact most effective when allowed to escape the traditional field of literature. It is also my belief that these methods – in particular, those of close readings and an attention to historical and political context – are as applicable to literature as they are to design. And, furthermore, that these methods are especially suitable to that breed of critic known as the designer.
Designers possess the natural attentiveness that is at the heart of any critic. If you’ve been trained to notice that single awkward moment on the page where an ff ligature is missing, or that one extra pixel of space that offsets a column, then you already possess the skills of a literary critic. You just need to heed the words as much as the type. And since design is already entangled with the text itself – being the physical means by which a text is produced – an attentiveness to the meaning of words is hardly outside the designer’s purview.
I have read and listened to many a designer profess their disgust with the way things are in the world today. Many an organization has been created whose stated goal is to leverage the talent of designers to reduce world poverty, or combat the malicious spread of globalization, or end the war. What seems to follow is a lot of hand wringing and poster design. Let’s be honest with ourselves: no war will come to an end because of a poster. We don’t need more posters; we need critics – people who have the skills and persistence to uncover the truth and proclaim it loudly.
What I hope to do in this space over the next few weeks and months is to demonstrate how what we traditionally know of as “literary” criticism is applicable beyond literature, and how it can be an effective tool for designers. I’ve begun to lay the groundwork for this already, but it’s going to take some time to really work out all my ideas here. I hope you’ll bear with me; this is the kind of argument that is likely to proceed in fits and starts, and I may change my mind about some things along the way; the path to an idea is often as interesting – if not more so – than the idea itself.
As we follow that path, think again of our poor critic, as she’s forced from the dining room and told never to return. Now look, instead, at who’s asking her to leave: who is he protecting? Why is he so afraid of what the critic has to say that he tries to silence her? What does he have to lose? What do you have to gain?
- From the Oxford American Dictionary.↩
