typographic design for new reading spaces
About a decade ago, I addressed an audience of typographers at the Atypi conference in Lyon, France, with a question: why do type designers invest so little research and creative energy in the computer screen as a medium and in designing fonts for it? The usual answer was that the screen is not worthy of their detailed skills until it can match the high definition and resolution of printed matter – which won’t happen in their life time. While that remains to be seen, it was in my view not the only or even the most pressing problem.
The problem was – and is – that forms in ink on paper are quite different beasts than similar forms projected by electrons on the back of light-emitting screens. Ten years have passed, and although content that is meant for the screen these days often actually looks like it’s made for it rather than for paper, the typefaces we are supposed to read in this medium have not changed much. A case in point is Limited Language’s screen typeface, Monaco, a monospace font that works pretty well in fairly large sizes in print but is literally an eyesore when used for reading on screen.
But there’s more: how these typefaces behave in the versatile and interactive environment they live in has hardly been addressed in terms of typographic design. Yes, one can click on words and something will happen, type is twisting and turning in animated headlines, and you can change its size in webtexts for better reading. But that’s not exactly what I meant, although some of it helps. Designing typefaces that are tailored to the peculiarities of the screen is a growing concern for designers, and some are doing an excellent job making them work. But typographing texts in a way that addresses the actual potential of the medium they are published in is something else.
There have emerged new ‘reading spaces’, that are incomparable with the traditional paper ones, but still behave like they were made by Gutenberg. New portable ‘e-readers’ like Amazon’s Kindle or the iLiad are state-of-the-art gizmos that still mimic a paper page’s format, albeit of a one-page-fits-all kind. The notion that one can manipulate the appearance and behaviour of text on screen still has had no serious consequences in any generally distributed medium, including the web. The simple idea that text – not necessarily the content it carries, but its formal structure and the way it is accessed – can be laid-out in variable ways to be triggered situatively by the reader has been only marginally worked out in mainstream on-screen media, in what we could call ‘template culture’. What we see as ‘interactive text’ is mostly functional text, i.e. text that functions in verbal wayfinding within websites and on-screen forms and menus. You click a word, and a list of subcategories appears. You mouse over a word or an image, and an explanatory line or paragraph pops up.
Such ubiquitous functionality could be used for richer purposes than mere informational messages; it could be used as integral part of a text, and of the reading experience it offers. The standard hierarchies of text in print media – headline, chapeau, introduction, main text, footnotes, captions – can function in a totally different way in on-screen media. There, if need be, and if the author sees it as an interesting way of communicating, each letter could spawn an endless variety of text formats. A summary statement could give access to deeper layers of argumentation and reference within the same ‘page’. An image could morph into its own description – or vice-versa. A question or argument could become surrounded by answers or counter arguments. A text could give more or less detail, depending on the reader’s behaviour…
There are, of course experiments that explore such new functionality and new reading spaces. In 2003, I initiated a few of them with designer and Javascript maverick Joes Koppers. Usetext (usetext.com) was an attempt to make use of the specific potential of on-screen text: A short text is readable as such, but each line also functions as an interface into what’s, literally, behind the lines. I used the application for instance to write my introduction to an online story by Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries’, ‘View and plan of Seoul’. The introduction, ‘Starbucks with Victoria’, is both an appetizer and a critique of sorts, as well as a pastiche of Chang’s signature style in a different medium. And in the web version of my editorial for Items no.1, 2009, I used another Koppers script to realize the movement of the quotes bursting out of the main text, which could only be suggested by the lay-out of the printed magazine spread.
While such experiments remain modest in scope and design, they do, in my view, give an indication of the potential of the screen as an interesting and engaging medium for reading. Readers, of course, will have to do their part: actively ‘feeling’ a text for interactive response, rather than duly clicking links. But readers won’t move a finger until designers present them with an invitation: to explore a text’s behaviour and expect it to answer in ways that are unthinkable on paper. In other words, designers should explore the medium to find reasons for readers to not print out a text they find online. Reading on screen can be a rewarding experience in stead of an eye soaring exercise.
Max Bruinsma is Editor in Chief of Items design magazine, the
Netherlands, and Editoral Director of ExperimentaDesign, Portugal.
I have enjoyed Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries for a while. It is an interesting approach to work because it’s visually powerful. Here usual work is very didactic: Hey you! it’s the ’sit back and watch my text at my pace set to the slightly pacy beat of my music’ approach to reading which is both energising and tiring. I have also seen it at the Becks digital animation display in Trafalgar Q=Square in London where, on an ambient surround screen, it became like the visual equivalent of lounge music. So far, getting less interesting. I do think working with her is interesting because so far she brings the linear approach of print to seductive technology but nothing more. I like the idea of calling text to you to make it active. But it also makes me feel a bit epileptic-type sick.
/Alistair Johns 28/03/2009