Typography Typography Quotes & Sayings

Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. — Kenneth Goldsmith

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book - to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor - to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire - to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower - to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind - to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in - Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation. — Edgar Allan Poe

Designers provide ways into - and out of - the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. ( ... ) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design's most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading. — Ellen Lupton

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty. — Emil Ruder

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. — Isabel Allende

There were voices on the other side - eldritch voices, the sort of voices that mere typography will remain totally unable to convey until someone can make a linotype machine with echo-reverb and, possibly, a typeface that looks like something said by a slug. — Terry Pratchett

I discovered that I never really used Helvetica but I like to look at it. I like the VW beetle, too, although I've never driven one. — Stefan Sagmeister

Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society. — Neville Brody

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar — Marshall McLuhan

If you love it, you don't know much about typography. And if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either and you should get another hobby. — Vincent Connare

A page of a book is like a human face. Look at a page by Hemingway and compare it with Sterne and Marcel Proust. They are different typographical beings. But force upon them those ragged edges, and the influence of the author's style on the physical aspect of the page, their typographical physiognomy will disappear. No, unjustified setting is a sort of gleichschaltung [enforced conformity] through diversity, a very phoney diversity. Produced methodically by chance. For the comfort of the keyboard, and not for the comfort of the eye. — Stefan Themerson

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography, man compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit. — Robert Bringhurst

Typography needs to be audible. Typography needs to be felt. Typography needs to be experienced. — Helmut Schmid

Typography is a minor technicality of civilized life. — Stanley Morison

The book, that stubbornly unelectric artifact of pure typography, possesses resources conducive to the flourishing of the soul. A thoughtful reading of the printed text orients one to a world of order, meaning, and the possibility of knowing truth. — Douglas Groothuis

Typography's really white, you know. It's not even black, in a sense. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In a sense, it's like music - it's not the notes; it's the space you put between the notes that makes the music. — Gary Hustwit

Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. — Neil Postman

The Ardent Hymn that Unites Peoples. — Pablo Neruda

I was never really satisfied with writing only text or with the way my texts looked when they were published. Most online journals have a pretty lame sense of typography - bad font, counter-intuitive margins and line spacing - that it makes me sour on my writing. — Masha Tupitsyn

In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles. — Robert Bringhurst

To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting. It is up to us to use these media critically or passively. — Ellen Lupton

Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. — Jonathan Lethem

Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces. — Wolfgang Weingart

For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique. — Wolfgang Weingart

By all means break the rules ... — Robert Bringhurst

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. — Tristan Tzara

Someday I'll design a typeface without a K in it, and then let's see the bastards misspell my name. — Frederic Goudy

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration — Neil Postman

There are bad types and good types, and the whole science and art of typography begins after the first category has been set aside. — Beatrice Warde

Typography must be as beautiful as a forest, not like the concrete jungle of the tenements It gives distance between the trees, the room to breathe and allow for life. — Adrian Frutiger

If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying ... — Michael Bierut

It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. — Zadie Smith

All typefaces are historical. — Jonathan Hoefler

Discipline in typography is a prime virtue. Individuality must be secured by means that are rational. Distinction needs to be won by simplicity and restraint. It is equally true that these qualities need to be infused wiht a certain spirit and vitality, or they degenerate into dullness and mediocrity. — Stanley Morison

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity. — Marshall McLuhan

I wanted to make people aware of libraries as an ecosystem that are threatened in the same way as coral reefs. There's a kind of serendipity that occurs in a library that never happens online. Browsing a stack is a unique experience: that feeling of being attracted by a book, by its cover or typography. What makes me melancholy is the thought of books disappearing from libraries. — Phyllis Rose

Its focus wasn't on the written word but how the word was written. — Neville Brody

You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography. — Herb Lubalin

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy. — Jan Tschichold

By the year 2000 every secretary will have a favorite typeface. — Roger Black

Television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a contradiction in terms; and that television speaks in only one persistent voice - the voice of entertainment — Neil Postman

One of my colleagues is convinced that having a wide range of types to choose from is a complete waste of time. He swears by two typefaces: Gill (1928) and Frutiger (1975), which he uses for road signs (among other things). ( ... ) [U]ntil 1975, the year in which Adrian Frutiger's eponymous typeface came onto the market, my colleague could only have made half of his selection. It seems to me that this proves the case for continuing to design new typefaces. — Gerard Unger

Simplicity, wit, and good typography. — Michael Bierut

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. — Timothy Samara

In the eighties, I was fortunate to be one of the young art directors that Jerry Roach, creative director at JWT New York, took under his wing. He taught me how to use typography more visually, to push against design norms and not to rely on preconceived notions of what something should look like. I learned that nuance is everything and to agonize over the details. I have Jerry to thank for driving plenty of people crazy over the years! — John Butler

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially incoherent. It brought into being a world of broken time and broken attention, to use Lewis Mumford's phrase. The principle strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it. In this respect, telegraphy was the exact opposite of typography. — Neil Postman

Typomania is curable but not fatal. Unfortunately. — Erik Spiekermann

Keep it simple: In general, interfaces should use simple geometric forms, minimal contours, and a restricted color palette comprised primarily of less-saturated or neutral colors balanced with a few high contrast accent colors that emphasize important information. Typography should not vary widely in an interface. — Alan Cooper

I don't think that success is the premise to what is good or bad. — Ed Benguiat

What a graphic designer tries to do is make sure the typography is emotionally consistent with the brand. — Michael Ian Kaye

Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. — Hermann Zapf

Type and typography - what you do and how you do it - are both science and art. — James Felici

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. — Steve Jobs

The contributions that one makes in typography, design, and art in general cannot be, and must not be measured on how much money is involved. That would lead to total chaos. The word itself (contribution) is to give to a common purpose. — Ed Benguiat

Typography can be as exciting as illustration and photography. — Herb Lubalin

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. — Laini Taylor

The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them. — Neil Postman

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
patterns of communal interdependence. — Marshall McLuhan

A plain circular bullet is widely disdained for its banality. — Carolina DeBartolo

This project started nearly twenty years ago as an assignment in my typography class at art school. Students were encouraged to see letters beyond their dull, practical functionality. We played with their unique shapes and tinkered with their infinite possibilities. The challenge was hard, so the reward of "cracking" a word felt great. This became a lifelong project for me. — Ji Lee

It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal. — Eric Gill

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing. — James Fenton

Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the typographer in search of special treatment.In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; not it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike . Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words. — Robert Bringhurst

Typography is what language looks like. — Ellen Lupton

Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions. — Claude Bernard

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things. — Renzo Piano

All the old fellows stole our best ideas. — Frederic Goudy

The first thing one learns about typography & type design is that these rules are made to be broken. — Jeffery Keedy

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time. — Robert Bringhurst

A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well . — Robert Bringhurst

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them. — Tom Wolfe

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, edu- cate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art. — James Felici

Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea. — Paul Rand

You can say, "I love you," in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it's really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work. — Massimo Vignelli

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. — Robert Bringhurst

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose or the rhythm of a good story. Desire to share an experience which one feels is valuable and ought not to be missed. The aesthetic motive is very feeble in a lot of writers, but even a pamphleteer or writer of textbooks will have pet words and phrases which appeal to him for non-utilitarian reasons; or he may feel strongly about typography, width of margins, etc. Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations. — George Orwell

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. — Steven Heller

This torn typography

of healed glyphs

a stuttered ancient

alphabet in skin

spells warrior tales

of battles lost

and gained

and homecomings

hard won

their meaning

barely touched

with fingertips

and gentle lips

to give them honor due

survivors

home to hearth

and loving arms

far-eyed survivors

who hear yet

the clash of arms

from distant corners

of the sky. — Munro Sickafoose

Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy's habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product. — Ellen Lupton

The better people communicate, the greater will be the need for better typography-expressive typography. — Herb Lubalin

I'm very much a word person, so that's why typography for me is the obvious extension. It just makes my words visible. — Erik Spiekermann

Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image. — Herbert Bayer

There's a simplicity in typography that demands absolute accuracy ... the only way you can experience it is by doing it, and you can't do it on a screen because a screen never gives you the entire picture. — Bruno Maag

Perfect typography is more a science than an art. — Jan Tschichold

They should make new ways to better design buildings and books. The computer was the end of Swiss typography! — Emil Ruder

Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities. — Robert Bringhurst

What makes Helvetica more beautiful is the word "Helvetica" as a logotype in its typeface. It just makes the rest of the alphabets effective. — Shawn Lukas

Typography exists to honor content. — Robert Bringhurst

Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness. — Robert Bringhurst

When typography is on point, words become images. — Shawn Lukas

There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. — Beatrice Warde

If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won't help, — Edward Tufte

Malevich, Lissitsky, Kandinsky, Tatlin, Pevsner, Rodchenko ... all believed in the social role of art ... Their works were like hinged doors, connecting activity with activity. Art with engineering; music with painting; poetry with design; fine art with propaganda; photographs with typography; diagrams with action; the studio with the street ... — John Berger

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. — H.G.Wells

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

The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer's task with the help of this black to capture space, to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them. — Adrian Frutiger

I was a generalist in college. You take a lot of courses to feel out what you're interested in. I really felt web design was too limited for me to interested in it - [instead] I was really into typography. — Jessica Hische

Typography is what communication looks like.
There is beauty in the language and beauty in the way it is presented. — James Felici