Typography, Logotype, Font, and Logo

“The whole duty of typography ... is to communicate to the imagination, without loss by the way, the thought or image intended to be communicated by the author”.24 The previous quote by Thomas James Cobden-Sanderson, a bookbinder who worked in the late nineteenth-century, brings to mind an interesting concept, “... communicate to the imagination ...”. This suggests that there is a certain amount that the designer/typographer should leave to the viewers imagination, bringing ambiguity into the equation. Is the designer of new typographic forms pushing the threshold of this ambiguity? The advent of the television age has increased our ability to recognize letters and words at a faster rate. Because of this, Neville Brody suggests that fine detailing in typography is no longer important but the overall shape of the letterform is. It can also be said that the negative shape is just as important as the positive shape. Playing with the idea of what is figure and what is ground adds a certain ambiguity to the communication thus increasing viewer participation.

The typographer/designer/educator Jeffery Keedy feels that we have robbed society of all ambiguity and therefore interest in our typographic forms. He has stated, “Many people in life feel it's their role in life to destroy all ambiguity. I think that ambiguity is life itself and it's what makes life interesting. We too often assume that people are so stupid that they can't deal with ambiguity. I think people live for ambiguity ...”25 Keedy creates ambiguity to provide the viewer a place to participate in his message making. This is not a totally new idea when it comes to creating graphic form but when applied solely to typography it has rarely been the case.

History

There have been many different “definitions” given to typography throughout the history of graphic design. Some very utilitarian, such as this definition by Stanley Morison: “Typography may be defined as the craft of rightly disposing printed material in accordance with specific purpose; of so arranging the letters, distributing the space and controlling the type as to aid the maximum the reader's comprehension of the text. Typography is the efficient means to an essentially utilitarian and only accidentally aesthetic end, for the enjoyment of pattern is rarely the reader's chief aim. ... It follows that in the printing of books meant to be read there is little room for “bright” typography”. Morison continues, “the good type designer knows that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only a few recognise its novelty”.3 This is on the continuum of typography described as a purely technical and utilitarian act. Type is much more than this; it is the visual representation of language. Typography is part of everyone's environment and therefore should be considered as a greater contributor to our culture.

Legibility


One of the major debates surrounding the emergence of the new typographic forms is legibility. It seems that the old theories and “rules” concerning legibility are outdated. How does an optimum line width of between 18 and 24 picas, which was determined in 1929, communicate to the readers of today, who have a better tolerance for longer line widths? It is hard to validate these old rules when one looks at the many different ways that we receive information (television, movies, video games, computers, etc.), and understand that society is more visually literate and used to a sophisticated level of coding and pace. Clearly, there is a need to update our thinking concerning legibility.




There is a gray area between what is readability and what is legibility. In studying legibility Dr. Miles Tinker, an internationally recognized authority on print legibility, defines legibility as concern for perceiving letters and words, and the reading of continuous textural material. He theorized that the shapes of letters must be discriminated, the characteristic word forms perceived, and continuous text read accurately, rapidly, easily, and with understanding. In earlier writings he had used the word readability to define what he would later term legibility. It can be said that a minimum requirement for text type is that it be legible, which means that it be large enough and distinct enough so that the reader can discriminate between individual word and letters. Readability is the quality that make text easy to read, inviting and pleasurable to the eye. Text can be legible, but if the reader gets bored and tired, the designer has not achieved maximum readability.26

What is the role of graphic design in this development of new typographic forms? It seems that graphic design is going to have to take a good hard look at itself and possibly re-define its parameters. The role of the designer has been simply stated as the communicator of messages. Designers should consider these new letterforms when designing a piece so that it may speak to our time and our sensibilities not to some preconceived notion of what design should look like. Our fall back aesthetic as designers has been the Bauhaus style and its Modernist credos. These ideas of design and communication were fine in their time but our time calls for design which expands the semantic role of graphic communication.


Typography (Part 1)
Visual contrast and page designGood typography depends on the visual contrast between one font and another, and the contrast between text blocks and the surrounding empty space. Nothing attracts the eye and brain of the viewer like strong contrast and distinctive patterns, and you only get those attributes by carefully designing them into your pages. If you make everything bold, then nothing stands out and you end up looking as if you are SHOUTING at your readers. If you cram every page with dense text, readers see a wall of gray and their brains will instinctively reject the lack of visual contrast. Just making things uniformly bigger doesn't help at all. Even boldface fonts become monotonous very quickly, because if everything is bold then nothing stands out "boldly."Use the major HTML headings sparingly. One alternative to overly bold HTML headers is to use the physical style controls of HTML to make text bold or italic without increasing the font size. However, you should understand that there are some disadvantages to using physical styles to control the typography of your Web pages. The HTML heading tags (H1, H2, etc.) are designed to identify important titles and subtitles in your text, and are only incidentally meant to change the visual display of the titles. If you use the "FONT SIZE" tags in Netscape and use physical styles like "BOLD" then automatic indexing and text analysis programs will have a difficult time analyzing your web documents.
Visual logic versus structural logicThe framers of the original HTML standards were physical scientists who wanted a standard means to share documents with minimal markups aimed at revealing the logical structure of the information. Since they had little interest in the exact visual form of the document, no precise typography and page formatting is possible in current implementations of HTML. In focusing solely on the structural logic of the HTML document, the framers of the Web ignored the need for the visual logic of sophisticated graphic design and typography.The standards organization responsible for codifying the HTML language is responding the widespread complaints of graphic designers that the heading tags in Web documents often produce clunky, over-large titles and subtitles. Through style sheets and new font control tags future versions of HTML will soon allow you to specify what size font each header level will produce in each Web page. Thus you will be able to produce more sophisticated typography without giving up the substantial advantages of using the conventional HTML header tags.
Type and legibilityWe read primarily by recognizing the overall shape of words, not by parsing each letter and then assembling a recognizable word:
Avoid all-uppercase headlines they are much harder to read, because words formed with capital letters are monotonous rectangles that offer few distinctive shapes to catch the reader's eye:
Legibility depends on the tops of wordsYour choice of uppercase or lowercase letters can have a dramatic effect on legibility. In general, use down style (capitalize only the first word, and any proper nouns) for your headlines and subheads. Down style headlines are more legible, because we primarily scan the tops of words as we read:
Notice how much harder it is to read the bottom half of the same sentence:
If you use initial capital letters in your headlines you disrupt the reader's scanning of the word forms:



References
Bringhurst, R. 1992. The elements of typographic style. Washington: Hartley and Marks.
Siegel, D. 1996. Creating killer web sites. Indianapolis: Hayden Books.
Spiekermann, E., and E. M. Ginger. 1993. Stop stealing sheep & find out how type works. Mountain View, CA: Adobe Press.
typoGRAPHIC A concise, elegant essay on typography and letterforms from razorfish/bluedot.

Typography (bagian 2)
Pattern and page designWhen your content is mostly text, typography is the tool you use to "paint" patterns of organization on the page. The first thing your reader sees is not the title or other details of the page, but the overall pattern and contrast of the page. The reader's eye scans the page first as a purely graphic pattern, then begins to track and decode type and page elements. The regular, repeating patterns established through carefully organized pages of text and graphics help the reader to quickly establish the location and organization of your information, and increase the overall legibility of your pages. Patchy, heterogeneous typography and text headers makes it difficult for the user to see major patterns quickly, and makes it almost impossible to for the user to quickly predict where information is likely to be in located in unfamiliar documents:
Settle on as few heading styles and subtitles as are necessary to organize your content, then use your chosen styles consistently. The fact that HTML provides six levels of headings doesn't mean that you should ever use six levels of headings in a single page. This whole manual of over 60 Web pages uses only two headers; an H2-level page title, and boldface subtitles.
Manipulating text blocksText on the computer screen is hard to read because of the low resolution of today's computer screens, but also because the layout of most Web pages violates one of the most basic rules in book and magazine typography: the lines of text in most Web pages are much too long to be easily read. Magazine and book columns are narrow for physiologic reasons: at normal reading distances the eye's span of movement is only about 8 cm (3 inches) wide, so designers try to keep dense passages of text in columns no wider than reader's comfortable eye span. Wider lines of text require the readers to move their heads slightly, or strain their eye muscles to track over the long lines of text. Unfortunately most Web pages are almost twice as wide as the viewer's eye span, so extra effort is required to scan through those long lines of text. If you want to encourage your Web site users to actually read a document online (as opposed to printing it out for later reading), consider using the "BLOCKQUOTE" or "PRE" HTML tags to shorten the line length of text blocks to about half the normal width of the Web page.
The pages in this manual are laid out using an invisible 2-column table (BORDER="0") to restrict the text line length to about 40 to 60 characters per line. The exact character count is difficult to predict because of the way different browser software and different operating systems display type sizes. In conventional print layout columns of 30 to 40 characters per line are considered ideal, but this seems too sparse to our eyes for Web page layout.

References
White, J. V. 1988. Graphic design for the electronic age. New York: Watson-Guptil.
Wilson, A. 1974. The design of books. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, Inc.