Re: Does the Crystal Goblet apply?

It would be interesting to see a shortlist (say, 10 or less) of works 
that inform useability discussions. Proper typography is after all about 
useability and interface design.

Jakob Nielsen has been influential, obviously. Edward Tufte's thinking 
is important. Otto Neurath and his acquaintance Gerd Arntz innovated in 
communications just as Nielsen and Tufte later did. One of Nielsen's 
colleagues, Donald Norman, is as important but possibly somewhat less 
known than Nielsen: a pity, since Norman has produced some great quotes.

Norman makes the point that aesthetics ought to be a secondary point in 
user interface design: this notion clearly applies to what we are 
talking about here. One of my co-workers about 15 years ago was a 
professional graphics designer and typographer, and pressed several 
typography references on me - one of them I think was actually some 
screed by Warde. His enthusiasm for type design was every much as 
fervent as the authors listed 
here:http://www.designyourway.net/blog/resources/a-collection-of-typography-books-from-which-you-can-learn-about-this-beautiful-art/.

To speak to one of your observations, Liam, I myself think that 
publishing experts like most of you folks should be about the mechanics 
of making things possible (beautiful wording BTW), and much less about 
dictating how SMEs (content producers) have to style their content. Let 
them make the right or wrong decisions. Putting it differently, I think 
it's rarely a good idea for a handful of SMEs to narrowly prescribe how 
hundreds or thousands make their decisions....although this is commonplace.

As a related note, the UI design of programs that produce content - WP 
applications, text editors, IDEs - is as much a relevant topic to this 
group, IMO, as specs that prescribe the form of the content. A lousy 
tool makes for lousy work.

Arved

On 01/01/2014 05:42 PM, Liam R E Quin wrote:
> On Wed, 2014-01-01 at 19:58 +0000, Tony Graham wrote:
>> I received a copy of the 1937 pamphlet of "Printing Should Be
>> Invisible" by Beatrice Warde [1] yesterday.  I got it to see how well
>> it lived up to the ideals of its text.  Based on the title alone, it
>> should have been 12 blank pages.
> Hah! And a wineglass should be empty? I don't think that's the right
> idea :-)
>
>>    Based on what is says in the text, I
>> shouldn't be able to remember anything about the formatting, only the
>> words, but the placement of the page numbers struck me as odd on first
>> reading (though I've since come up with a rationalisation for their
>> position).
> Does your copy have the original formatting? The essay was widely
> reprinted. I don't remember where the page numbers were now, it's been
> too long :)
>
>> So what?  I don't think that we should recast the 'CG' in 'PPL CG' as
>> 'Crystal Gobletiers', but to what extent should we be about the
>> practice of typography rather than be just about the mechanics of
>> making it possible to practice typography?  Should be we aware of the
>> three types of window that Warde describes?
>>
>>     The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the
>>     reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author's
>>     words.
> It's useful to understand how typography fits in to graphic design, and
> how a good design takes the content and intent of the text into account.
>
> But for my part i don't see a W3C CG being a useful Style Police
> Agency :-)
>
> Emigre Magazine issue 30 (Cult of the Ugly) is a good read in the same
> vein, ranting about deconstruction in graphic design; I've used
> (misused) the term mannerist to refer to graphic design that wants to be
> noticed, like the stained glass window, wants you to see how the design
> was put together and to think about it - Carson's designes for Ray Gun
> Magazine were controversial examples. Ray Gun style had baselines at
> slight angles and overlapping text, in places to the point where no-one
> could read a paragraph, it was just a solid lump of black representing
> the teen angst of the reader.
>
> Any book typographer ought to strive to be able to format text so that
> the formatting is invisible, I think, at the very least to understand
> how the design works so they can then do something different.
>
> Any computer system for serious typography needs to support those
> designs, which seems to me to be where a CG does come into play.
>
> Liam
>

Received on Thursday, 2 January 2014 04:55:46 UTC