Quotes About Typography

Everybody wants to design a bloody typeface.

Most people take the way words look for granted ... Words are there to be read – end of story. Once however typomania sets in, it becomes quite a different story.

Beatrice Warde: "La copa de cristal o por qué el arte de la impresión debe ser invisible". Su teoría, sencilla pero contundente, defendía que incluso el mejor tipo de letra existía solo con el objetivo de comunicar una idea. No había sido creado para ser visto y mucho menos para ser admirado. Cuanto más visible la fuente o la maquetación de una página, peor la tipografía. (...) Cuanto más transparente el cristal, más se apreciará su contenido.

The lettering is clean, beautifully proportioned, easily read, and, well, ordered.

It was the best of Times New Roman, it was the worst of Times New Roman.)

designer can inject the most artistic flair. The word "ampersand" didn't come into being until the nineteenth century. At that time & was customarily taught as the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet and pronounced "and." When schoolchildren recited their ABCs, they concluded with the words "and, per se [i.e., by itself ], 'and.'" This eventually became corrupted to "ampersand." The symbol is a favorite of law and

Soon I was incorporating :( and ;) and ;( too and after that the live emoticons, and now, without any intention of ever reducing the enormity of my human emotions to these shallow shortcuts, to this typographical juvenilia, I went around all day reducing them and reducing them, endowing emotions with, and requiring them to carry the subtle quivering burdens of my inner life.

At the basic consumer level, the profusion of fonts appeals to a culture that celebrates expressive individualism.

There isn't really a stylistic recipe for fonts to make them particularly suitable to be translated into different scripts.

Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new fount to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.

CHAPTER 13: WORKING WITH STYLE SHEETS

You could say that bad typography brought us the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the housing crisis and a good number of other things.

Alex Madrigal of The Atlantic has reported that fifteen of the top twenty retailers in the Fortune 500 use Helvetica,

But since printing came in no one wants illustrated works, they are happy with these cheap books with their ugly, square letters all squashed together.

We have thought carefully about how our use of typography, colour, and images can support and enhance 'Guardian' journalism. We have introduced a font called Guardian Headline that is simple, confident, and impactful.

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.

I believe that design must be integrally wedded to editorial content. Some people read images, others read words, but most of us read both. So the overall design, art, photography, text, and sometimes even the typography should be, in the best of cases, considered "content." Hence the art director's content must complement the editor's content.

However, [Edmund G. Gress] wrote, " we must not simplify to such an extent that life and movement are gone. That is where those persons go wrong who claim that type was made to read, and nothing else matters but the setting up of a paragraph in a legible type so that it can be easily read. We do not read everything that appears in print, but do read that which appears interesting.

The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography.

Helvetica is the font of the Vietnam War.

For designers, the rigidity of an alphabet presents a never-ending artistic challenge: How do you do something new and still preserve the letters' essential forms?

If you imagine b, d, p, and q, those are letter forms that all the children always mess up. They are mirror forms of one another. That feature is emphasized in a font like Arial, where the shapes are literally mirror forms.

I have little interest in illustration, which lacks a kind of transcendental quality. It is too literal. I find typography more straightforward, conceptual, and appealing, with its strict geometric vocabulary. There is a bridge between typographic design and fine art, especially since typography possesses a complex subtlety. The idea, the method, and the honesty in expression are central to a designer who works with type.

Simplicity, clarity, complexity, and ambiguity are not mutually exclusive states in language; the sensitive typographer is one who can manifest these states in the right mix by controlling the elements at his or her disposal.