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Originally Posted by beppe
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The purpose of typography is to disappear so you absorb the contents without noticing the letters.
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simply and plainly ridiculous, not you dear friend, but your statement. The fine art (repeat art) of typography is liquidated like this. Pfui! there you go, Manunzio, Bodoni, all the work on design of characters, the composition, the choice of paper, the balance of the page. The fine art of bounding.
All this liquidated with few words. under the superiority of what, of whom ...
Horror. Horror vacui.
Attachment 56265
this is a page of a book printed in 1958, by bona in 900 copies. This is number 886. It is the history of D'Olao Magnus archibishop of Upsalla of th costums od the Northern People. it appeared in Rome in 1554 (printed in Basel in 1567.
Reading it gives a lot of pleasures. More than just the words. |
I said "content," not words.
I maintain my opinion that typography is *not* supposed to draw attention to the layout or the shape of the letters, but to allow reading to be a pleasant experience.
Highly ornamental and carefully-structured layouts are still supposed to draw attention to the contents, not the typography itself, in the same way that good architecture works to invoke certain feelings in the person in the building. A person should think, "wow, it seems so bright and open in here," not "wow, look at the height of those rafters, and the windows are angled to fill the corners with light." A person reading a well-designed, heavily-formatted page should notice the key details on the page (names of sections, pictures attached to certain meanings) and that the reading was pleasant... they shouldn't consciously think "centered all-caps text, how nice."
Good typography makes the contents memorable; only typography geeks should notice the details. (I suspect that MR forums draws more than the average number of typography geeks.)
Or, what Ea said: even very ornamental typography is supposed to draw attention to the text, not itself. The reader should leave the book thinking, "wow, every era was clear and distinct in my mind," not "the first page of each chapter had numbers covered in scripty ornaments."