Find a library that has issues of Emigre magazine and read them. Fuse magazine will be harder to find, but seems quite applicable here. You should also read Gerard Unger’s book While You’re Reading. It is not directly relevant and will not answer any of your questions, but it will give you a great foundation in understanding what type and reading are, and why they are what they are, which will make it easier to think about where it’s all headed. Last, contact Nick Shinn about his essay It’s Hip to Be Square. It’s a great read about why traditional type designs will become less relevant and new type will be square.

Read the interesting comment posted by Mr William Berkson on the 19th of December, 2006, 1:08 PM, at :
http://typophile.com/node/30130

I still can’t get over how novel/uncomfortable the Kromofons concept is.

I highly suggest you absorb mr. Martin Venezy’s written thoughts called “Design and Melancholy.” You can find this essay in his amazing book “It is Beautiful ... Then Gone.” [ along with the most impressive hand-made typographic experiments I have ever seen. ]

In great depth and consideration, it ponders the simple moments of our lives when we find an arrangement of things, circumstances, interactions, and / or ideas that appear in a fleeting instance as perfectly designed — as if beyond human capability — and then are just as quickly gone from our perceptions. Within that moment, pure beauty is realized in the simplest of forms and it is in this realization that we, as designers, can create the kind of conceptual wonders that you are aiming for.

martin’s design studio can be found here :: Appetite Engineers

Should check out Bill Hills thoughts on this subject... http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=54978

with regard to mr. berkson’s commentary and opinions...

If typing in lowercase is an issue for the majority on this forum, I will gladly compromise. Let me clarify that I’m not looking for degradation or a “flame war.” I really do want feedback. This forum was recommended to me by a professor for research purposes - as a tool.

I’m not asking anyone to do my “homework” for me. I’m interested in thoughts, opinions and suggestions. I want to learn. I understand that at this venue in my career, I don’t know as much about typography as a middle-aged individual who has dedicated their life to design.

Back to the subject at hand...

Thanks in advance for any contributions, I really do appreciate it. I am in talks with the head of “special collections” at my university library, which is also proving helpful. He is the only mentor I have right now, aside from my type instructor.

Milwaukee...say hello to Max and what the heck is the name of that type instructor? Is it still the same guy from about 5 years ago...Richard something with a Z?...can’t remember...say hello to him, if that’s him, too. Thanks. Feel free to contact me through my web site any time. I might not know much more than you do, but am always up for musing. Your big questions are fun to think about.

The opening chapter of David Consuegra’s American Type Design & Designers (Allworth Press) provides an excellent time-line of the technological changes in typography, with related events.

Text usually seems to be at the vanguard of new media technology, due, I think, to the alphabet’s low “bit-rate” of information required for meaningful communication. So although we may develop more sophisticated ways of communicating with existing technologies, as long as we are inventing new media it will depend on text from the outset.

Agreed. Call me limited, but I cannot imagine a more practical and efficient communication tool than the alphabet. I’d like to see English spelling become more phonetic and logical, but that would take one serious bit of house cleaning, and everyone would have to be on board...or maybe that’s evolving right now in the world of instant messaging (something else I know nothing about!). Finding a way to incorporate and convey tone and tempo might be nice, seeing as that’s what people tend to have problems with when communicating with strangers over emails and in discussions like this. So, like economics, think about what the demands are, or will be, and start the forecasting there.

In some ways text is more efficient than speech—more easily stored and searched, arguably easier to render decipherable—and in fact you can already see it encroaching on verbal communication. It might be an issue of not quite having reached the tipping point here, but why do people still use IM with the advent of things like Skype or other “internet phone” applications?

Think: have you ever seen someone send a text message when they’re perfectly free to call someone? Or seen someone shoot off an email when they could just shout over the cubicle wall?

Totally. It’s a little freaky...to me it’s even a little bit sad.

Email over talking has been a huge source of tension and ironic inefficiency in our work environment. Everyone more or less agrees, but no one can help themselves. But how else can one person communicate an idea with multiple recipients simultaneously? I think that’s what drives the email use more than anything else. Or it’s just because it’s so easy and we’re all inherently lazy. Or maybe we’re all just pressed for time, or so we think. Is it fear? Do we all subconsciously feel like we are running out of time and therefore everything is incredibly urgent? Are we running out of time? Or is it the availability of technology that lends itself to extreme urgency driving our behavior? Is my computer an extension of me or am I an extension of it?

WHO IN THE HELL IS STEERING THIS SHIP?!

I am guilty of using text messaging or email when verbal communication is a feasible option.

There are a lot of other variables that factor in to whether or not I want to make face-to-face contact with another person I suppose. My mood or demeanor towards that person often come into play, for example. Sometimes it is easier just to say something in a text message because you’re less likely to strike up a “conversation.”

One can draw parallels between wireless communication and telepathy. This is how many computers are communicating today, right? So lets just say we begin merging our technology with the human body for the sake of “efficiency” (this is already happening on a small scale). If the biological computations of the human brain were to begin working more like a machine, how would this change human interaction and communication? What if we could communicate using only our minds without actually speaking?

I can’t imagine what this would look like. Would our brains tell us we’re hearing speech, or would we visualize letterforms and text? Or... would it be something else?

I apply this to typography as a craft and I get scatterbrained. Synaptic connections between two brains? What a mess.

Forgive me, my imagination poses a lot of questions. Just thoughts.

Text usually seems to be at the vanguard of new media technology, due, I think, to the alphabet’s low “bit-rate” of information required for meaningful communication.

It’s funny how little of the alphabet needs to be intact for it to remain legible, yet little needs to change to make people start ranting about how horrible some changes are.

Interestingly, I have been told that Massismo Vignelli recently spoke at Parson’s where he stated that Emigre magazine was the worst thing that ever happened to design. When the audience laughed he told them that they shouldn’t laugh about Emigre; that they should cry over how horrible it was. Wim Crouwell was also there; it must have led to a pretty wild conversation. One of my professors is going to be sending notes from the session out soon, I’ll be sure to post them...

Joshua Paynter,
I read you are a “student (a.k.a. a clone),” that suffers a bit from decay, considering you are not living on a desert island — do something to protect your letters, you don’t want to read in others’ mind that we are able to make houses any shapes we like.
Your questions are good : look at the children, they are small, but they think big.
I will never forget an old man at the boxe gym in Italy saying “it was good to have that simple soup on war times...”
On topic, I now finished this book, it’s excellent.
Regards.

>On topic, I now finished this book, it’s excellent.

It was a sad day when Scott left us.

The Moomin Books are great! I’m glad I have a six year old to read them too.

joshcrates

Can I have you as a student! If only we could just pluck them up!!!

Gerald

The Bieler Press
http://BielerPress.blogspot.com

I read about that, Simon, he also wrote it online, it seems he really wanted to write full time. Indeed, Joshua Paynter, another resource you would like to check out is Scott Berkun’s blog.
I’d love to be your student as well, Mr Gerald Lange — keep up the good mushrooms —, you know, in the dialect of my hometown, “föns” means mushroom (“fungo” in Italian) ; with my design buddy at the university time we used to make fun of font files calling them metaphorically “föns,” with a biological denotation. Beauty is really a language...
Rergards.

Alessandro, perhaps you realize this and are just being humorous, but I don’t think those are mushrooms in Gerald’s avatar. I believe they’re printer’s balls — traditionally used to distribute ink on a letterpress form.

— K.

[Aside]

The Moomin Books are great!

Coincidentally, I’m reading one at the moment: Moominland Midwinter. I love the mix of delightful children’s story with Scandinavian existential angst.

HELP! I need to know what’s up with these Moomin Books. Please, someone, hold my hand and point me in the right direction. In the meantime I’ll do some googling. I am intrigued big time.

It was a great joy to discover children’s literature during my staying in Finland, really delightful and human.

Alessandro -

I have enjoyed what you’ve posted thus far. Grazie.

—

bieler -

Is there any way I can be your student?

—

Thank you for giving attention to this thread. I think it has been successful, because I have some good things to sink my teeth into. I’ve got a lot to think about.

Names that come to mind: Marshall McLuhan. Paul Virilio. Mihai Nadin: “Civilization of Illiteracy”, available online. Nicholas Negroponte: “Being Digital”, no coherent theory but nice ideas. Maybe even Michael Giesecke: “Der Buchdruck in der fruehen Neuzeit” is about the development toward typographic culture, a wonderful exercise in regarding our culture as something which is not eternal but has a history too; I cannot find an English translation, maybe there are at least some related essays in English?

But I was never able to translate these thoughts into design. Theory is theory. Type is type, however much distorted it is.

A.S. — Read the interesting comment posted by Mr William Berkson on the 19th of December, 2006, 1:08 PM, at: http://typophile.com/node/30130
J.P. — with regard to mr. berkson’s commentary and opinions... If typing in lowercase is an issue for the majority on this forum, I will gladly compromise.

Then I am glad I have to write in English on Typophile since I write German with English (or Tschicholdian) capitalization: not no but less caps than usual. Is that alone regarded as an offense? Come one ...  :)

Theory is theory, everything is ok in the end. If it’s not ok, it’s not the end.
Erst die Möglichkeit, einen Traum zu verwirklichen, macht unser Leben lebenswert.

I believe Massismo Vignelli was one of a few of Emigre’s select enemies way back when. I started selling off my collection on eBay a while back and eventually just started using a blanket statement “Discernible articles within include....”

Gerald

LOL, well, he designed the poster “It’s Their Bodoni” in 1996 circa.

The title of this makes me think of Hybrid digital humans who can ’read’ data directly rather than printed glyphs per se. Derivative to be sure - but is that the sort of thing you had in mind?

Love Snufkin !

Eben is on it I think. What you need is a technology that bypasses the eye as the sensory input machine. But then you start bumping into all the non verbal information that is not keyed to letter and word shapes. So then maybe a technology that would bypass the optic nerve and visual data to simulate the visual data. Somehow I would think that if we beat the whole language virus and started working and communicating in pre-verbal thought the whole system of language would go away and no one would be interested in letter forms as communication.

tangentially speaking

So look at your premise, that written language is how we store information. Maybe written language is a very small part of this information exchange.

http://metaversed.com/27-jun-2007/bran-jack-virtual-reality-reality

In the future, everyone will use Data ’70. You know I’m right.

Eben Sorkin - Yes! Very much so along those lines.

All human knowledge is represented in glyph form via books. The internet is a giant book. It doesn’t have to be that way, but its easy. There is nothing “better” to speak of.

—

jupiterboy - “What ever happened to virtual reality?”

A good question that came to mind when I read that article. I’m sure the answer has to do with pancapitalism... or something. More tangential goodness - What would affordable virtual reality that is indistinguishable from our perceived reality do the the world economy?

Regardless, I think that you are right. Written language and type are only a fraction of the bigger picture here.

My font isn’t going to look like a recognizable alphabet at all. Its going to appear as electrical activity in the brain - my brain. I somehow doubt this is going to get me a passing grade.

I set the bar too high for this assignment. I should just do what everyone else in the class is doing... Pretty typefaces. [sigh]

Joshcrates

I don’t know what the bigger picture is. I doubt anyone does. But maybe a doubtful passing grade is better than a pretty face. Refer your instructor to the thread.

Gerald

I saw some primitive sensor to brain stuff that was happening in order to try to give vision back to people who had lost it. It was on a Scientific American TV show I think.. It was a sensor> electrode> brain model. It worked up to a point. The brain had to built up by practice and probably neural/brain growth to the point where it could interpret signals - but apparently that actually started happening. Resolution wasn’t that great ( 80x80 pixels? ) but after a while a limited sense of vision was achieved. You might want to see what kind of wetware-jacking is the most up to date now and extrapolate from there. Maybe talk to a builder of the equipment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetware
http://www.cbc.ca/sunday/sight/procedure.html
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2005/08/23/fda_gives_firm_...

Perhaps I will have my professor journey here and take a gander when I complete the assignment. I’m going to print and include this thread as a part of the process book documenting my work. I don’t want to jinx myself!

I agree that a doubtful passing grade is more important than a sexy font... But I have grad school to worry about, specifically paying for it. The more high marks, the better, right? Maybe I am being too cautious, but I’m always afraid of running out of “funding.” Especially considering the types of employment and crappy wages currently endured... A waste of intelligence and ability. <— Tangential vomit.

The concepts I’m addressing, both theoretical and otherwise, are going to be a great focus for the rest of my undergrad career. They’d make for a strong thesis or research proposal. Given the time constraints (the project is due in about one month) and the workload I have in other classes, I think I will “dumb down” my approach. If I can commit myself to one concept, I think my project will be successful.

That being said, I have narrowed down to a couple of concepts: dimensional typography and bouma shapes.

I know these are nothing new (80s-90s?), but they could be a stepping stone for the future of the craft. It would be nice to leave the current flatness of the Web behind for a more engaging, interactive “environment” in more dimensions than two. Perhaps I can create a typeface that is legible from any angle which can function in a fluid, ever-changing 3D environment. Or maybe I can work on simplifying type into only bouma word-shapes (word shape recognition being the key to speed reading, and therefore, a faster way to assimilate knowledge and information into our hungry minds). If I used bouma shapes, the stress would not be on the invidual characters, so I would have to somehow prove that it is applicable to any word combination.

Someone is going to scold me for changing my mind... I just know it. My professor (Fo Wilson) supports this move. I feel much more confident in choosing one of the theories from the last paragraph, and they do spark my interest. I am not dismissing any ideas I discussed earlier, I am merely saving for a time when I can do them more justice. I still have a lot to learn about our beloved typographical heritage. I will find my way to the avant-garde in this craft someday. I won’t rest until I have contributed something to the world.

The concepts I’m addressing, both theoretical and otherwise, are going to be a great focus for the rest of my undergrad career.

Don’t try to obsess over a few topics or concepts during your undergrad work. That’s what advanced degrees are for. Sometimes you need to shut away some of your own intellect and focus on just learning and doing what you’re supposed to be doing. Getting into avant-garde stuff can be nice, but make sure you can pay the bills along the way.

I’m not deciding the rest of my life right here, I should have chosen my words more carefully. I understand what you’re saying.

As for bouma shapes, I think parallel letter recognition is the theory currently normal among researchers. So it might depends what you mean by bouma that partially determines the usefulness of your research; on the other hand, concern for bouma and concern for parallel recognition might have similar influences on type design for readability. Perhaps the real questions are: what kinds of divergence, and to what degree at the levels both of the glyph and of the alphabet, assist readability? And what kinds and degrees of divergence harm readability by attracting the reader’s attention? Any answers must be largely empirical, though the research will need to be based upon a good understanding of type and typography if it’s to arrive at useful results. Kevin Larson at Microsoft is, as far as I know, the most important guy doing this kind of work at the moment. He’s posted here before.