I believe the art of design must be related to the art of not thinking too much. Whenever I go into OCD mode about how long the arm is on the T compared to the stem plus the terminal (in order to think better about other things in design) or the height of the eye in the e compared to the width of the spine in S or whether the length of the ascender in k is twice as long as the leg or a multiplier of the golden ratio, I find that I'm not getting any closer to learning how to put these letters together in the first place.
Maybe the first step of design is to create limitations so that one doesn't have to spend all day thinking about possibilities like Oblique vs Italic, Old style vs Modern, Ultra Bold vs Ultra Light, 42 point vs 48 point, two picas between the A and T vs 5 and the Cheltenham family vs the Goudy family. Perhaps the art of creating limitations is similar to digging up particular lego blocks out of a giant bin. If there are 10,000 typefaces, seven possible widths, 12 kinds of serifs, 3 kinds of postures, four kinds of contrast, five kinds of x-height, five kinds of ascenders, three kinds of letter stresses and 19 type sizes, that's 10,000x12x3x4x5x5x3x19 which is about 2 billion possible combinations of type - Which makes for a big lego bin.
After reading chapter two, once again, I come to the conclusion that typography is not a combinatorics problem. When you find a good typeface, you categorize it based on whatever grabbed your eye in the first place and put it somewhere safe for use in a later project. Don't bother considering all the properties at once.
It's nice feeling for me to know that some things in life just aren't meant to be thought about very much.
(Attached is the front cover of a book written by Donald Knuth, a computer scientist, about typography. He also struggles with learning abstractly.)
No comments:
Post a Comment