| Next to being a reader, I am a writer too. I use
letters to build the words that shape my texts. I used to do that with
a fountainpen on paper that’s how I started. And in order to make
my scribbles readable to others, those who would publish my text, I would
re-write the text on a typewriter and mail it.
So I got hooked on the typewriter, and forgot about
hand writing altogether. But the typewritten originals of my texts were
still structured like manuscripts. So, in order to make them readable to
those who would publish them, I would cut up the fragments of the typescript
and paste them in the right order onto new sheets of paper, which I then
photocopied and faxed.
About a decade ago, I switched from the typewriter
to the computer, an IBM-clone with an amazing 20 Meg on the hard drive.
First, this was like just another typewriter and I would work on it the
same way I would on the Remmington: take a white sheet of paper, adjust
the margins to my mood, and start hammering the keyboard. Only in this
case the paper was blue, the letters were white and the keyboard broke
down after a month or so.
Still, the device was great, not only for cutting
and pasting, but also for accentuating text. So, gradually, I developed
ways of making hierarchies in the writing explicit in the appearance of
the text; of discerning between finished paragraphs and sketches, sidelines
and quotes, headlines and footnotes in ways that were almost impossible
to achieve on a typewriter, and that would have looked completely untraceable
in my own handwriting. The computer combined the flexibility of handwriting
with the clarity and structure of typing. The print-outs looked like they
could go straight to the press.
But gradually, I refrained from printing out my
texts altogether, because I could now send them on a floppy disc to those
who would publish them.
Nowadays, I’ve grown used to choosing a typeface
that suits my mood when I start typing, to formatting or reformatting passages
of my text in ways that indicate a shift of atmosphere or content, to adjusting
the window-width and the margins to the kind of text I am writing, inserting
hyperlinks or highlights where needed, and meanwhile working in the background
on a compilation of screenshots of images that could go with the text.
If I wanted, I could format the whole thing as HTML, or Acrobat- or QuarkXPress
file but mostly I just e-mail the roughly laid-out word document
to those who publish my text.
On the whole, it seems to me that this short summary
of my writing history shows a shift from reading to viewing. The visual
appearance of my writing has become more and more important to me, and
this is in no small way connected with the development of my writing tools.
Not only does the average up to date word processor allow me to format
my texts in very specific ways, but the tool that I am writing them with,
the computer and the screen, almost force me to do that.
Words on screens tend to become images. Unlike
a piece of hand- or typewritten paper, text on a screen wants to look like
it is typeset and printed. An important part of the visual aspect of word
processing software is geared to emulate this look of a printed page. Of
course, this is only a simulation, but the effect
is that we are often seduced into looking at a screen as if it was something
else than summarilly rendered text - like it was designed and published. This
is, in my view, a distancing aspect of screens. Not having rendered the
text myself, it almost looks and feels as if I am watching someone else
write.
There is another aspect of screens that distances
them from writing: we are used to watch them, not read them. This is almost
a cultural dictate: screens are for watching, paper is for reading. Although
I admit to a slight exageration here, I do think I can safely state that
the directly visual aspect of things on screens is generally stronger than
that of things on paper. We watch TV, we read the paper. So, when I use
the screen as the medium in which I write, in some respects I change from
a reader into a viewer, and I become, almost by necessity, a graphic designer
of my own texts.
Of course, when one has been writing about graphic
design for more than fifteen years, as I have, there evolves a kind of
awareness of how one’s own writing looks. Or should look. And I’ve always
been blessed with the opportunity of working together with designers who
would not only tolerate, but actually appreciated the way I was opinionated
about the design of my own texts. As a writer about graphic design, I have
gradually started to slightly mingle with the affairs of designers, when
it comes to the design and typography of what I write.
Now, I am acutely aware that this is a dangerous
position: All too easily comes the reproach that the critic is actually
a frustrated designer who conceals his lack of talent while pontificating
about quality. I assure you it is not that I don’t want to be a graphic
designer. I just want to point to an interesting aspect of today’s communication
environment.
Today, we work with the same tools. Graphic designers,
typographers, writers, editors, illustrators, photographers, publishers,
all work on computers. Or many of them do. Yet most of them see this digital
device as a tool that is programmed to help them do their work, as opposed
to the work of others. In a very urbane sense that may be true. I have
five different word processors, while you may have five different image
manipulators. I mainly work on a PC, and most of you probably work on Macs.
But we all drag and drop and click things on our screens. When working
on the computer, we all physically do very similar things.
One of the interesting things about computers is
that their architecture compels their users to adjust to a certain practical
routine in handling digital information, that is technically the same for
everyone, be they working on a hypertext or an architectural construction
or a graphic design or an interactive artwork. On a computer, the basic
thing you do is to order information. And the next thing you do is to edit
that information. Practically you do these two things, regardless of whether
you are an artist, a designer, an architect or a writer. When using a computer,
you order and edit...
Another aspect of computers is that the same device
can be used for very different things. It’s a mere matter of the kind of
software that is installed on them. This leads to hybridisation, both in
terms of what is installed on an average, or even specialised, computer
and what any application can do. In daily practice this means that one
can write things in QuarkXPress and design things in Word’97. Both programs
perform these non-core tasks crudely, but it’s a hell of a lot better than
trying to write on a Linotype machine, or to design on a typewriter.
In spite of this flexibility, or hybridisation,
computers are still often used as if they were tools in the traditional
sense: things that can help perform one, or a few related functions. In
fact, of course, they can help you do much more…
Not only do computers, as tools, provoke a merging
of disciplines, they also provide a medium through which most aspects of
commnication can be channeled. This may sound rather obvious, but I think
it is not yet fully and generally understood that the computer is more
than a tool: it is a medium. I cannot stress this enough: it is not the
World Wide Web, or the CD-ROM, or the game - these are manifestations,
subcathegories - but the new medium is the computer, or more precise, the
monitor, the screen. What paper is to magazines and books and letters,
is the screen to the Web and CD-ROMs and e-mail: the carrier, the medium
- the surface on which we can experience the ideas and content that others
have produced for this medium.
Now why is this new medium so generally considered
to be unfit for reading? I have mentioned a few underlying reasons: we
associate the screen with viewing, and for most of those who use it to
produce content, it is considered as a tool, that at best grants a preview
of things that are supposed to find their definitive form printed on paper.
But this is increasingly becoming an obsolete view
towards the computer. More and more people do more and more reading onscreen.
And the only thing that amazes me, is that there are still so many people
who print hard copies of their computer output, of documents, emails or
web pages. Wasn’t the electronic revolution supposed to save us the drudgery
of smearing ink on pulp of dead trees? Why do people still carry suitcases
full of printouts with them, while they could just leave the information
that is printed on them where it came from, on a notebook?
Partly, of course, this is because reading text
onscreen can still be a difficult, even painful, process. The current architecture
of computers, their screen-designs, their interfaces, their formats, is
still thought from the perspective of a tool. A lot of work has still to
be done on many aspects of the design of computers, before they will have
become as sophisticated a medium as television or books are.
In this context I want to focus on two aspects
of this problem. First of all, I’ve always been amazed at the lack of typographic
scrutiny invested untill recently in making type fit for reading text onscreen.
For the most part, this is because of the ‘tool-identity’ of the device:
Macintosh typography, for instance, has long been focused on printing,
and font foundries too, who produce digitally designed type, were and arestill
to a large extent assuming that most reading would be done on paper. This
is not to say that screen fonts were completely neglected, but the impetus
has been more to provide a closer correlation between screen and paper
versions - the ‘preview-mode’ - rather than to provide onscreen legibility.
There are, however, a handfull of type designers
who have looked at it in another mode, and one of them is Matthew Carter.
This distinguished typographer has interesting things to say about type
on screens:
“In graphic design circles,” he says, “people think
of screen fonts as preview mode It's only when the toner hits the
wood-pulp that we usually judge a typeface. But that's an increasingly
short-sighted view of life. Larger numbers of computer users spend their
entire time in front of a screen and never (or seldom) print anything.”
“A lot of kids nowadays can
use a computer before they can write,” Carter continues, “Their introduction
to the world of letters is via fonts, not via handwriting, which is an
extraordinary reversal from what we are used to. The computer screen is
not just a ‘preview’ mode, but rather a vehicle that delivers the final
product. People are reading and interacting with the screen. Today, what
happens on-screen is more important than what comes out of the printer.”
What Carter is acknowledging here, is that the
screen is a medium, not a looking glass. And he has made two fonts to prove
his point Verdana and Georgia , dedicated screens fonts that
are now being given away, with Carter’s consent, by no other company than
Microsoft to anyone who cares to download them from their website, be they
PC or Mac users.
I have immediately installed these typefaces as
defaults, instead of the ubiquitous Times and Ariel or Helvetica, because
they make reading from the screen so much easier and so much more aesthetically
pleasing. Most older letters still clearly suffer from the fact that they
were derived from an ink-on-paper environment, whatever amount of work
there has gone into hinting them for onscreen use in bitmap format. Verdana
and Georgia, on the other hand, where designed as bitmaps from the beginning,
and Carter tackled and solved most of the problems that pixelated type
gives rise to by addressing them in their own environment on the
screen. These are letters derived from the pixel, rather than from the
pen or the brush or the chisel. Spacing, kerning, weights, the balance
between upper and lower case, all would probably be over- or under-proportioned
in print, but they work perfectly on screen.
I don’t know how they look printed on paper
I’m one of those people who don’t own a printer anymore. I have a zip drive.
That’s the archive of texts and images and things interesting or beautifull
enough to archive. The rest is in books or in magazines - no print-outs.
The first time I see my own work on paper, is when a new issue of Eye is
published, or another magazine or book to which I have contributed.
It could also be a website, or a CD-ROM, and, of
course, it is different I love print, and books and magazines, for
what they can do better than other media. But what I want to stress here,
is that the computer is a medium in its own right as well. And it is a
medium that is in dire need of the kind of typographic scrutiny that can
make reading from paper such a rewarding experience.
Of course, as one distinguished type designer once
said to me, a medium with a resolution below, say, 300 dpi is utterly uninteresting
for typographers why, you can’t even see the difference between bold
and half-bold! And what kind of detailing could you possibly do on a screen
that displays no more than 72 dots per inch?!
From the traditional typographers’ point of view,
that is a respectable stance. But, apart from the fact that screen resolutions
will ameliorate, it is a good modernist tradition to try and make something
good with very simple means, as bitmap pioneers like Emigre’s Zuzanna Licko
have shown from the mid-eighties onward. But in spite of these pioneering
efforts, most typographic attention to rendering type on computers untill
now has gone into translating existing typefaces to perform on screen,
or to design new typefaces for print. The first is, I think, a rather odd
thing to do - apart from sentimental reasons there is no point in trying
to make a car look like a coach without horses, as Wim Crouwel once remarked.
And designing new fonts for print on the computer is a sensible use of
the power of the tool, but it ignores its potential as a medium.
I would rather hope that typographers would stop
worrying about resolution and learn to love the screen for what it can
be - a great medium for reading. Of course, they cannot perform this task
all by themselves; In order to make the screen a better reading environment,
a joint effort is needed by hard- and software designers, graphic and type
designers, writers and publishers, and, ultimately access providers, lawers,
and legislators.
But in this joint effort, type designers are indispensible.
And I hope that my little plea for typographic scrutiny in screen environments
will be remembered, when in this conference you will be confronted with
the grand traditions of typography for print. The screen needs your attention! |