The language of type and image in newsprint

Mario Minichiello

Typography by its nature can be temporary, an assertion which holds true for many of us who have worked in the graphics industry. But I would like to also focus on a subtler element of type. Much of the type I have encountered also assumes a temporal quality.

While most type is connected to life in the world, rather than spiritual life, it none the less provides both a connection by an affinity of the mind to that of the designer, and a sense of the spirit, or temperament of the author, or narrator.

This is more than just the tone of voice that fonts provide. Articles and books, even religious scripts have all but a short time to live then they are cut down like origami flowers and recycled, or worse they never die and become the kitsch fonts that young thrusting typographers use to mock the past, a place where some of us still live.

It may have something to do with the changes in grammatical structure ? ast tenses that now only belong to the past; language has had many face-lifts, but some faces can never change.

Fonts are character, for example: BBC, Disney, Triumph, Ducati and Coca Cola.

Typefaces are fashion sensitive, they are the clothes that words dress in and just as we make judgements about people by what they wear, so we make judgements about the information we are reading by the type faces that information is clothed in.

When in the past, rapid change was limited by technology, a pattern of application started to emerge. For example most typewriters were stamped out in metal using Courier, while Baskerville was used for prayer books or hymn sheets.

Today there are still some abiding norms - packages and boxes that use mainly Impact, while Arial is the font of dyslexia friendly offices. Verdana for emails, and Helvetica was used on my last two speeding fines all from Cambridgeshire Police authority, while the story supporting the acquittal of the Police officer caught driving at 150 mph on the same road in the same week (like most Newspaper stories) was written in Times New Roman.

With our exposure to different fonts and their use by skilled graphic designers, a relationship has started to emerge.  Fonts as characters, form a voice in our minds as we read them, they have qualities of gender and tone; they provide a profound way of understanding, a massive range of information, concepts and emotions.

This has resulted in changes to our own mental interiors, which is very much part of our on-going evolution as a species. We can see from events in the past how type helped excite and promote intellectual development. Type may be temporal but achieves results very quickly.

 Type really does offer a face for every occasion. In the past the options may have been limited, but font design changed rapidly, offering more choice to a word hungry world.

It?s easy to underestimate the affect of the advent of the press and the early printing industry.

Printing made books affordable and smaller, more portable, encouraging reading that

furthered education.

As reading grew as a skill, mass printing expanded the knowledge and expectations of an increasing number of citizens.  Pamphlets and posters spread ideas and empowerment; I have

no doubt that this was as revolutionary as the Internet is now.

The Nazi party understood this all too well. They were the great destroyers of art and intellectual thought. They disposed of the Bauhaus, for being ?too Jewish? (Mel Brookes eat your heart out).

In the print industry Josef Goebbels replaced sans-serif type with what he regarded as the more German looking font Fraktur, (sans serif was seen as a Jewish invention, Helvetica described as ?a circumcised type face?). However Helvetica was by far more legible and able to be set on narrow leading, thus packing more text on a page and so it did, eventually, and as quietly as pages turning in a library, replace the ornate, ?bell end shaped? Fraktur as the national typeface.

The Futurism movement in Italy loved the ?speed? potential of text and words. They became so concerned with speed in every part of art and design that poems such as  mots in liberta contained no adjectives, adverbs, finite verbs, punctuation, nothing to slow it down. Futurists believed they had invented a new language: onomatopoeia. They defined it in their technical manifestos as consisting of four basic types: realistic, analogical, abstract and the 'sound of a state of mind?. (Berlusconi eat your head out).

At the furthest extension of control, today?s screen based technology can make us ? the originators ? subordinate to poor fonts. Speed and space induced illegibility causes not only posture and eye problems as our bodies strain to adapt in an effort to read, but perhaps serious repercussions in inaccurately relayed information ? for instance at a power station, hospital or air traffic control.

Hard to read type is not just a temporary mistake. It can present a real danger in a world where information is relayed so quickly. Problems have been identified with the following figures:

5 S          0 O          1 I           6 8

Until recently air traffic centres did get their fonts wrong, compressing too much information into one screen, reducing the size to make content unreadable. There are now strict regulations in the UK to avoid this.

But it isn?t just about information and comprehension ? as Neville Brody states:

?Mere legibility in fonts is the equivalent of mere shelter in architecture?.

The bond between typography and language is a balance between structure and improvisation.

It lives through the order of language and grammar. This has seen the rise of grammar as a key part of some design programmes (mine at Loughborough mainly). Lynne Truss?s book ?Eats Shoots and Leaves? is a part of our curriculum. However we should all understand the state of the temporary and the attraction of change, so that once you establish rules or have a stated ? no tolerance? approach to anything in this field your words will soon become the ?welcome mat? for the next generation of designers to trample on.

The central aspect of typography is that it mirrors the qualities and meaning of both text and image such as illustration and photography. Fonts help in the expression of language and thought.

There is a richness of design, humanity or warmth that connects us to typography. A font influences how we are going to read and think about the information it carries before we even start to read it. We might add to this the appropriate tone of voice of the end user.

An example of the growing awareness and sensitivity to type is to be found in the famous case of James Herbert, Author of Horror titles such as the ?Rats? and ?The Fog?. He requested Palatino as the font for his new book but the publisher ignored him and published in Times Roman. He insisted and they had to pulp all the books and republish in Palatino, which fitted the feel and nature of the story better in the authors opinion and went on to sell extremely well.

Just as other great organisations in the past have understood and used this power for their own aims so corporate news media businesses such as News International provide us with classic examples of ?how to do it? now.

Whilst one News International title The TIMES played down events of the recent Michael Jackson trial, another - The SUN, when the defendant came to court late and allegedly in his night wear ran a headline Bananas in pyjamas ? sub heading: He?s better late than Neverland.

The Sun with its block san serif face instantly proclaims itself to be brash ? bold ? modern.

The Times with its Roman type face demands to be read in a serious and considered way, which connects to the aspirations of its readers, and they are as sensitive to the type?s character as those of the Sun. The Times reader assumes himself intellectually more able than the Sun reader, who on average needs to have only achieved the educational reading age of a typical eight year old. The Sun reader could not ?give an old fart? for any of that ?cleverness?, reassured by the music hall style entertainment usually provided in the past by a visit to the mad house, or today to the TV Big Brother house. He wants to enjoy words, jokes and double-entendres and knock them about in his mind: ?Carry on Caxton?. The Sun reader see all that type in the Times as fog, while the Times reader is reassured by a voice that has authority and reassures him, in modulated tones that he is, by reading it, part of a great British establishment.

Alongside the actual font there are also the subtleties of visual feeling: spacing, leading, kerning etc, choices made all too easy by the pull down computer menu.

Take some lines of Shakespeare, and instead of setting it in a delicate serif typeface use a big condensed heavy Sans Serif face with drop shadow: our understanding of the work is completely different. Death to ?Word Art?:

?Shall I compare thee to a summer?s day?? Arial Black

?Shall I compare thee to a summer?s day?? Times New Roman:

?Shall I compare thee to a summer?s day?? Arial

Fonts subvert or enhance meaning.

I have a special place in my heart for the humble British shop front, where seem to exist some of the best examples of integration of all the above: wood furniture shops called ?Wooden it be Nice?, fast food purveyors called ?Leaning Tower of Pizza? or ?Burger off? or ?Battersea Cods? Home? and ?Junk and Disorderly?.

Then there are the shops signs that have inspired others, like ?Everything But the Girl? (80s band) and ?Fun Boy Three?, the fonts are nearly always works of art.

This street poetry owes much to the comedy style of Britain and its entry into everyday lingo.

The market place is where type is the most temporal and the liveliest testing ground for its affectedness and public performance.

In conclusion there are questions to be considered here for designers. How is it essential to have synergy between the font and the writing (between design and meaning)?

How do we start to consider the subliminal information about a product as conveyed by the font we us, its voice, its spikiness, its thinness, its structure?

We are receiving this information without awareness, like handshake or a perfume. It connects to us in ways that are hard to explain, it leads us into delicious trouble. Where can it take us next?