Tag: typography

  • I am an em dash deviant

    In The New York Times, With the Em Dash, A.I. Embraces a Fading Tradition, Nisuh Abebe writes on this summer’s Internet chatter around ChatGPT’s apparent predilection for a perceived overuse of typographical dashes:

    As this observation traveled the internet, a weird consensus congealed: that humans do not use dashes. Posters on tech forums called them a “GPT-ism,” a robotic artifact that “does not match modern day communication.” Someone on an OpenAI forum complained that the dashes made it harder to use ChatGPT for customer service without customers catching on. All sorts of people seemed mystifyingly confident that no flesh-and-bone human had any use for this punctuation, and that any deviant who did would henceforth be mistaken for a computer.

    Those deviants were appalled, obviously. I am one; I am, even worse, a former proofreader who could speak at length and with passion about the uses of the narrower en dash. I understand very well that this dash-happy lifestyle is maybe atypical, but I had not expected to see its whole existence questioned.

    Ugh, I too use dashes and parenthetical statements way too much, even in my emails at work, mostly because that’s how my brain works. Makes me feel like I need to start dropping those entirely, lest I sound like a robot (remember when robot talk was expected to be choppy like Does not compute! or Danger! Danger! — I guess chatbots are our new flowery, overly typographical hipsters…)

    See also this excellent essay from last year by Bruce Sterling about other language oddities that can help suss out an LLM’s output: Preliminary Notes on the Delvish Dialect

  • ARETE — Visual History of the Latin Alphabet

    This interactive visualization of the history of the Latin alphabet from a team at the Urban Complexity Lab at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (wow, they have some other really interesting looking work on their Projects page!) is like catnip to typography fans. It traces a family tree from early Roman monumental writing up to modern slab serifs — a good reminder that this alphabet design has been pretty constant (aside from the additional development of uncials and lowercase scripts in the 800s) for the better part of 2500 years.

    Our main concern was to show the diversity and variance of the Latin alphabet over the centuries. It is often suggested that the Roman Capitalis evolved to Antiqua scripts to today’s Grotesk in a linear way. However, we believe that this is only one possible view among many. Like any cultural development, the history of type and script is, at its core, a network. Over the centuries, designers have learned from others, referred to existing designs, and developed variants. There were times of greater standardization and then again times of great variance. The Arete project wants to show and clarify this diversity and these different design lines.

    Also I like that the above earliest example they have looks like it could almost be an “Adam Norwood” wordmark if I just took out a few extraneous letters…

  • Victor Hugo: Symbolist Painter

    "Calling Card" by Victor Hugo; a painterly wash of texture and color with elaborate antique lettering hand painted on top that appears to spell "V I C T O R O G U H" (Victor but then Hugo backwards).

    I’ve never read any of his novels (I know I should!), but I only recently learned that Victor Hugo was also an artist and painter. I can only find a couple dozen low-res images online, but the impression I get is that he was ahead of the Symbolist painting movement by a couple of decades, and was working on these around the time his fellow French writer Baudelaire was cranking out Les Fleurs du mal. In any case they’re surprisingly weird and impressionistic, and seem to employ printmaking techniques that also make me think of early photographic experiments (see for example his Silhouette Fantastique or the wonderfully creepy Lace & Ghosts).

    The painting above seems to be named Calling Card and reminds me of an 1855-era Wayne White typography painting (it looks like the ornate lettering spells out VICTOR OGUH, with “Hugo” reflected backwards?)

    I wish there were better scans of these available!

  • Monastic vs Scholastic Reading Habits

    Example from a 15th Century manuscript in Latin featuring extensive marginalia, handwritten notes between lines of text, and a manicule pointing to a specific passage
    PETRUS LOMBARDUS, Sententiarum libri IV (no copyright)

    It’s interesting to know that the introduction of scholarly reading — needing to reference many different texts quickly for relevant snippets to quote from — led to changes in how text was laid out, with new features like section headings and passage markers (and those nifty typographic manicules) being added initially by readers as quick reference aides:

    Amongst the medieval literate elite, there were two major methods of reading: monastic and scholastic, each divided into three ‘levels’. Monastic reading consisted of lectio / meditatio / contemplatio – that is: reading / meditation / contemplation. This method was primarily concerned with memorisation and enlightenment through repetition and deep reading (contemplation). To read this way was to know by memory and intimately understand a very few books in their entirety. […] Scholastic reading appears in the 13th century and proliferates in universities, growing in popularity throughout the late Middle Ages. It comprised of legere / disputare / praedicare, or: reading / discussing / presenting. The emphasis here was on a person’s capacity to read widely and to be able to pull choice quotes from important works to use in intellectual debates (disputatio) or lectures.

  • Max Planck Society: Glyph

    Getting burned out on playing Wordle? Want something that’s more about the letters individually? Want to play around with taxonomies of multicultural letterforms for the sake of science? (who wouldn’t??)

    Glyph is a newly-launched game that will help researchers better understand how crowdsourced individuals around the word perceive the shapes, texture, and patterns of letters from 45 different written languages. The video below explains how it works:

  • Hershey Fonts

    A glyph map of vector-rendered letters from the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets

    Over on Hackaday, a good history of Hershey fonts, a still-surviving vector font format designed for use in the 1960s for optical cathode ray printers, printing characters onto microfilm at a time when computer displays were still a novelty (now they are useful for CNC milling, laser etching, etc.).

  • The Letterform Archive: Now Open to All

    This great news ought to keep fans of typography and lettering busy: the Letterform Archive, the physical collection of letter arts based in San Francisco, has digitized a significant chunk of their holdings and that searchable database is now free and open to the Internet.

    There’s lots to look at, but don’t miss that they have the complete run of Emigre magazine available!

  • 8-bit Arcade Fonts

  • Jan Tschichold on Sans Serifs

    It is high time to call a halt to the spread of sans serifs in architecture and elsewhere. Jan Tschichold, Treasury of Alphabets and Lettering (1952, p.39)
  • Type in the environment and in architecture

    As my office building at the University adds more and more permanent signage with zero consistency in typeface choice or other typographic consideration, this passage from Adrian Frutiger stood out:

    The reader encounters typefaces in other forms as well as in printing. His daily environment, in face his entire living space, is filled with typographic characters of all kinds.

    Unlike printed matter, with which the reader can bring the written word into his field of vision according to his own desire and choice, lettering on buildings is forced into view without restraint. Depending on its design, such lettering can provide an enrichment of the environment, almost in the sense of ornamentation, or, on the other hand, it can be ugly and therefore experienced as aggressive “pictorial noise”, inimical to the environment.

    In this connection, lettering can be regarded as two-dimensional architecture. This realisation makes it possible to appreciate the designing of public signs and notices from a completely new viewpoint, by integrating them into the total concept instead of simply “sticking them on” or “hanging them up”.

    — Adrian Frutiger, Type Sign Symbol p. 70