[mjmcchesney]

An issue of Typography, from the Foreword of The Elements of Typographic Style by master Robert Bringhurst - just something I found rather interesting and thought-provoking...you decide:

"Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first books were printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used by Egyptian scribes writing heiriatic script with reed pens on papyrus in 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made.

Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize, whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, the Egyptian New Kingdom or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand and the forearm in particular - and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous anatomy of the human mind. I don't like to call these principles universals, because they are largely unique to our species. Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads.

It is true that typographers' tools are presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium. I suppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals typographers set for themselves than with the mutable eccentricities of their tools. Typography itself, in other words, is far more device-independent than PostScript, which is the computer language used to render these particular letters, and design of these pages, into typographic code."



[This message has been edited by mjmcchesney (edited April 14, 2001).]

[GreenPeach]

that's pretty interesting. especially the part about the body determining the standards for type. I think we see drawing and painting in those terms too. the characteristics of a "good" drawing are often based aroung what the hand does naturally. it's not just our eyes and minds that are making the decisions. this is obvious maybe.

[Collosimo]

Yeah, that is interesting to me. I am a GD student ATM. <<Jargon gets outta hand omfg!

That theory is definitely thought provoking, because quite often my teacher talks abot things being visually appealing, and aesthetically appealing, but he often forgets to mention why?...

So maybe this theory helps...



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/COLLOSIMO