Again, going back to some core reading on the subject of typography and how I can connect the PgCert intervention and ideas of decolonisation to this.
I read Paul Luna’s excellent book Typography, Oxford University Press (2018).
“There is some irony to be found in the fact that it took the dematerialisation of type, from metal to digital, to make it so widely present in so many minds.” (Luna, 2018)
“It takes a broad definition of typography – as design for reading, whether in print screen, or in the environment – and draws out ideas about the development of letterforms, the organisational and perceptual issues behind key typographic decisions, and the differences between printed and on-screen typography.” (Luna, 2018)
“The way we present language graphically has always been a subject for serious study, but often this work did not connect with or even reach the wider reading public.”(Luna, 2018)
“By mechanising the production of letters, the invention of printing both fixed the Latin script and enabled systematic variation of it.”
(Luna, 2018:7)
“These constraints of consistency and repeatability meant that makers of type developed styles and conventions, establishing a canon of established letterforms.”
(Luna, 2018:7)
“There was a general belief, throughout the artistic and scientific worlds (which of course were then not as separate as they are today), in divine proportion – a fundamental set of geometric relationships that can be found in nature, in mathematics, and even in man. This belief is most memorably demonstrated by Leonardo da Vinci”
(Luna, 2018:9)
“The eye rather than measurement should be the arbiter of beauty.”
(Luna, 2018:10)
“But if we look at any kind of modern publication, we see a variety of letterforms coexist. The headlines and text of a printed newspaper need to be distinct and on web pages links have to stand out – a typographic monoculture cannot support the variation and differentiation that we require for effective reading.”
(Luna, 2018:17)
“Shopfronts, branding, and advertising show the great variety of letters that can evoke different expressive or emotional associations in the reader’s mind.”
(Luna, 2018:17)
“Selecting the kinds of letters to use for any piece of typography is a fundamental design choice, because it can have an impact on all of these aims. Some are more legible, some are designed for particular technologies, and some strike us as having intrinsic emotional associations.”
(Luna, 2018:17)
“What determines the shapes of the letters we use? […] And why do the shapes of some letters have such extraordinary communicative power, capable of affecting the way we perceive the messages that are written with them?” (Luna, 2018:17)
Luna, P. (2018) Typography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press