Citation: Yee, Joyce (2004) A Typographic Dilemma: Reconciling the old with the new using a new cross-disciplinary typographic framework. In: 2nd International Conference on Typography and Visual Communication: Communication and New Technologies (original) (raw)
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Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography is taking from its traditional print medium. Screen-based typography is becoming as common and widely used as its print counterpart. It is now timely to re-evaluate current typographic references and practices under these environments, which introduces a new visual language and form. This paper will attempt to present an alternate typographic framework to address these growing changes by appropriating concepts and knowledge from different disciplines. This alternate typographic framework has been informed through a study conducted as part of a research Doctorate in the School of Design at Northumbria University, UK. This paper posits that the current typographic framework derived from the print medium is no longer sufficient to address the growing differences between the print and screen media. In its place, an alternate cross-disciplinary typographic framework should be adopted for the successful integration and application of typography in screen-based interactive media. The development of this framework will focus mainly on three key characteristics of screen-based interactive media – hypertext, interactivity and time-based motion – and will draw influences from disciplines such as film, computer gaming, interactive digital arts and hypertext fictions.
FaceForward International typographic conference, Dublin, Ireland, December 2015: Conference Report
The inaugural Face Forward typographic conference, which was held at the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT) in Ireland, forms part of 'ID2015; the Year of Irish Design' governmental initiative, which aims to bring global awareness to various branches of Irish design and by extension, typography. Face Forward is the first peer-reviewed conference of its kind, and offered a sizable forum for engaging with and presenting critical research into typographic production, representation and dissemination in use. With eleven tracks and more than seventy presenters, including notable designers, typographers, design critics and researchers such as Tobias Frere-Jones, Cathy Gale, and Denise Gonzales Crisp, the conference sought to bring to light connections between typographic craft, research, theory, history, criticism, and pedagogy.
Seeing through Letterforms -Typography Past and Future
Perspectives on Visual Learning, Vol. 5 / Facing the Future, Facing the Screen, 2022
10th Visual Learning Conference, 2022 provided a space for the research community to exchange and push ideas in regards to the theme Facing the Future, Facing the Screen. I took this opportunity to participate in the virtual research group and share some notes on the expanding ‘parameters’ of the typographic discipline. In the light of an ontological turn, pictorial turn, archival turn, and many other “theoretical interventions” which have generated a lot of contemporary rethinking, I explore ideas on situating typography in the space of emerging new thoughts, a fluid space that is posing a lot of routes for the expansion of the typographic scholarship. In the paper, I initially lean on Braidotti’s view on ‘posthumanism’ as a navigational tool to explore and expand the field by “comparing notes” across disciplines. Building upon this notion of comparing notes, I consider Leonidas’s reflections on typography which highlight historical and cultural complexities of the field. Their two theoretical standpoints support the main purpose of this paper which is to explore intersecting points between typography and other disciplines. I provide a very brief, and potentially very experimental, proposition of intersectionality between postdigital condition, reimagining of the archives, and typography as a culture-defining element. This paper is featured in an online volume Perspectives on Visual Learning, Vol. 5. edited by Petra Aczél, András Benedek, and Kristóf Nyíri.
Relearning Typography: Introducing a Cross-Disciplinary Typographic Framework
2004
Current theory and vocabulary used to describe typographic practice and scholarship are based on a historically print-derived framework. As yet, no new paradigm has emerged to address the divergent path that screen-based typography is taking from its traditional print medium. Screen-based typography is becoming as common and widely used as its print counterpart. It is now timely to re-evaluate current typographic references and practices under these environments, which introduces a new visual language and form. This paper describes a study that utilises a combination of empirical methods and action research projects to form a new conceptual framework for the understanding and practice of screen-based typography. This study is part of a Doctoral programme in the School of Design at Northumbria University, UK. This paper focuses on the research carried out so far, the methodology used and the findings from two stages of the study. It will end by introducing a tentative cross-disciplinary typographic framework that has been developed to date. This study starts by investigating the relevance of the current framework and evaluates the need for developing an alternate framework through a questionnaire survey. This is followed up by a series of interviews with practitioners working across different disciplines in an effort to identify new media attributes most influential towards the development of screen-based typography. Results of the surveys have shown that understanding and identifying the future role of typography in screen-based media is key to the developmental strategy of this typographic framework. Typography continues to be one of designers’ main tools of communication, regardless of medium. The introduction of the digital medium has not lessened the importance of this role and has in fact increased the reliance on typography to communicate in a clear and straightforward manner. The influence of other disciplines in the development of new media content has also been strongly supported. Conclusions from this initial research points to the fact that the development of a framework must take into account several key factors. These include the impact of technology on the development and application of typography. The framework should also be responsive to the influences of other disciplines in the development of new media content. Influences from film, computer gaming, interactive digital art and hypertext disciplines must be appropriated into the building of a new knowledge base for screen-based typography. Identifying and understanding the influences brought about by other disciplines should be a major consideration in the development of the framework.
1st International Conference on Design & Innovation UniMAS Kuching Sarawak Malaysia, 2012
Typography is one of the magical things that people use on a daily basis. Any approach can be used to create a typeface including hand rendering, computer code or program generation. Based on ‘Text and Image’ by Mark Wigan (2008), letterforms can be manipulated in many different ways depending on the mood or context to be conveyed. Besides that, different classes of typefaces (fonts) have different innate levels of readability and legibility when using typography manipulation. This paper aims to identify the most suitable ways to apply manipulation in print advertising. The objectives are to analyze the important of typography manipulation, to investigate the awareness of public about typography manipulation effectiveness and identify the elements that brings about visual impact.
Typographic experiments: A method between research and practice
Slanted Magazine, 2022
Discussions of the Internet as a laboratory or ‘World Wide Lab’ (Schmidgen et al. 2004) assume a networked digital space housing a variety of publicly accessible experiments. Actually, the results of extensive creative experiments with fonts and typography are there to be found, especially in the social media. Alongside the fact that this essay attempts to hone the critical view of creative researchers as to what a typographic experiment actually involves, which artefacts must be understood as their results and which parameters can be relevant in the execution, one thing could read between the lines throughout: All designers are by definition researchers as well! Albeit more or less pronounced, more or less conscious, but particularly when they not only publish the results of their design-based, typographic experiments on the Internet as the ‘World Wide Lab’, but when they let the design (research) community partake in their knowledge of how – in other words, by what path (methodos) – they reached these results. Basic parameters overview: downloads.slanted.de/Slanted-Magazine/Experimental-Type/Typographic-Experiments-Dr-Nicholas-Qyll-Fig_3.pdf
The typographic contribution to language
1987
This thesis presents a model that accounts for variations in typographic form in terms of four underlying sources of structure. The first three relate to the three parts of the writer-text-reader relationship: topic structure, representing the expressive intentions of the writer; artefact structure, resulting from the physical constraints of the medium; and access structure, anticipating the needs of the self-organized reader. Few texts exhibit such structures in pure form. Instead, they are evidenced in typographic genres – ordinary language categories such as ‘leaflet’, ‘magazine’, ‘manual’, and so on – which may be defined in terms of their normal (or historical) combination of topic, access and artefact structure. The model attempts to articulate the tacit knowledge of expert practitioners, and to relate it to current multi-disciplinary approaches to discourse. Aspects of typography are tested against a range of design features of language (eg, arbitrariness, segmentation and linearity). A dichotomy emerges between a linear model of written language in which a relatively discreet typography ‘scores’ or notates the reading process for compliant readers, and a diagrammatic typography in which some concept relations are mapped more or less directly on the page for access by self-directed readers. Typographically complex pages are seen as hybrid forms in which control over the syntagm (used here to mean the temporal sequence of linguistic events encountered by the reader) switches between the reader (in the case of more diagrammatic forms) and the writer (in the case of conventional prose). Typography is thus most easily accounted for in terms of reader-writer relations, with an added complication imposed by the physical nature of the text as artefact: line, column and page boundaries are mostly arbitrary in linear texts but often meaningful in diagrammatic ones.
How New Technologies Are Changing Typography: The Breaking of the Tyranny of Arial
Since the dominance of Microsoft Word and until the introduction of the @font--face CSS style, typography has been a reduction of layout to one typeface per layout, usually Arial. Increasingly the manufacturing of type has moved from the foundry to the software company. Foundries have remained the provenance of the designer, not the general public. However, that is changing with the introduction of new Font APIs (Application Programming Interface). Websites and layouts have rediscovered display fonts, serif fonts and specialty fonts once again. Will this spawn a new generation of ransom note typography, or is something else on the typographic horizon? Will there be a return to time--honored rule of three fonts for a layout that developed as the de facto rule of font restraint in traditional book publishing? Using the serif font for ease of readability saw a marked decline in the years of Web 1.0. Is that dominance over with Web2.0 use of CMSs (Content Management Systems) like Word Press? What is the impact of On--Demand Printing on typography where so much publishing is generated through Word, instead of Adobe InDesign or Quark Xpress? As the deployment of content becomes more global, what fonts support a wide variety of language glyphs? This paper will attempt to look at these issues and focus on the influence of websites and Web 2.0 themes. In addition, examples of these current usages and the impact of globalization in web and printing distribution and font usage will be examined with specific examples included to support the conclusions of this examination of the expanding use of font APIs and their impact on typographic usage.
Deconstruction, legibility and space: Four experimental typographic practices
Technoetic Arts a Journal of Speculative Research
In this article we wish to present the typographic experimentations of four designers, each of whom looks at typography and its implementations from different viewpoints; however with similar goals – namely to investigate how typographic systems can be implemented, their attributes as carriers of semantic meaning be redefined, and/or their functions be improved upon within the digital medium that presents challenges as well as opportunities that enable graphic designers to reach well beyond the traditional medium of typographic work; i.e., printed paper. The article will examine these four projects under the umbrella concept of Deconstruction, also extending into a consideration of Legibility; setting them forth as examples of the impact that the digital medium has brought to bear upon typographic practice in recent decades.