+ 4 To write without a pen
The printed letter, for
example 'e', is fixed both in the sense that it travels time
and space unaltered and in its repeated and unchanging
appearance (eeeeeeee). McLuhan calls print "a ditto device".
18 Once a design is chosen that letter e will
forever repeat itself. In relation to speech, print is like
a tape recording of someone's voice. It can be repeated over
and over, in different places and at different times, and it
will not alter. The hand written letter e, on the other
hand, is comparative to 'live' speech. It too is fixed to
some extent, and can travel space and time once it is devoid
of its writer, but handwritten individual letters are
forever changing. Like speech they are affected by what is
being communicated, time and space and the surrounding
letters. A hand drawn letter e will linger after its author
has gone but can be seen as fleeting, in that it may never
be drawn the same again.
Letterror's 'Beowulf' and 'Kosmik' typefaces evoke a sense
of the transience of the written and the spoken word, as
their individual characters are forever changing in
appearance. Tobias Frere Jones' typeface 'Reactor', for Fuse
7, degrades as text is typed, the more you type the more
illegibly the text becomes. Perhaps this can be seen as a
metaphor for spoken words and the human memory.
Like typography, the majority of books that deal with the
subject of handwriting read like manuals. There seems to be
a right and wrong way and a set of rules that if obeyed will
enable the reader to produce a proper handwritten page.
Today handwriting is judged purely on its legibility. The
need for 'good' handwriting is on the decline and the
teaching of penmanship has been forced to stop trying to set
a standard and now exists as calligraphy which is seen as an
art or craft. "Seemingly the aim (of the quill in
handwriting) was to imitate the strokes the engraving tool
produced." 19
For centuries hand drawn letters took as
their model letters that had been conceived to be indents in
stone. But the battle for good penmanship has been lost and
todays models are just as likely to be taken, consciously or
unconsciously, from printed typefaces, shop signs or the
white painted letters of instruction on tarmac. This can be
illustrated by looking at the huge variety of writing styles
and also by how people draw the same character in completely
different ways, but which are still recognizable.
We will never go back to a written standard because more and
more people have access to personal computers and word
processors and can now produce their own printed page.
Perhaps in the future, when writing on paper will be a
novelty, we will look at the choice of typeface on the same
level as we now look at handwriting. Everyone will have
their own face and its form will have evolved from the
letterforms we have already personally selected. This
process has already begun. If we compare samples of
handwriting from twenty years ago with some from todays
technological community we would find a marked difference;
today there is an abundance of printed (as opposed to
cursive) letterforms and perhaps an overuse of capital
letters. Today lettershapes are beginning to occupy their
own individual spaces. They are unchanged by, and almost
oblivious to, the letters that surround them. Perhaps the
reason for this shift from producing letterforms as part of
a larger, flowing, whole (the word) to now seeing them as
individual pieces of a fragmented whole, has to do with the
widespread use of typewriters, word processors and other
keyboards and the ease of access to typefaces.
Fernand Baudin calls this "The Gutenberg effect." which he
believed, "disrupted the age-old Western methods for making
and shaping written words by hand. How? By boldly separating
those who make the letterforms from those who shape them
into a text as printed matter"
20
Designers who have aimed to achieve maximum legibility in
their typefaces seem to have turned, perhaps subconsciously,
to handwriting as a model. Meta, Rotis and Frutiger are all
the result of experiments in both legibility and
readability. "Readability is the quality of being able to
read extended quantities of text without undue difficulty,
whereas legibility applies to being able to read a short
message quickly." 21.
Erik Spiekermann's 'Meta' was originally
designed for use on the official forms of the German Post
Office (Bunderspost), but was never used by them. It was
later reworked and released and has been widely accepted as
a highly legible typeface both in print and digitally
displayed. Otl Aicher's aim when designing 'Rotis' was to
aid the reader in coping with large blocks of text. Whereas
Adrian Frutiger's 'Frutiger' was designed for the signage
system at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, which required
both readability and legibility at distance.
These three typefaces seem almost to be related. They all
contain cursive-like strokes and loops and other
characteristics associated with the handwritten letter. I
cannot say for sure if the designers where consciously
referring to writing, but if we compare these
characteristics to the research findings, and subsequent
typeface (Sassoon Primary), of Rosemary Sassoon we can see
striking similarities. Sassoon's research investigated the
typefaces used in children's literature and their
differences from the models used when children are learning
to write. She found that children were learning to write
using one model and learning to read with countless other
models (typefaces). Sassoon's typeface was an attempt to
unify these two areas, taking its basic forms from
handwriting, so as children could learn to write the same
letters they where learning to read. Like Sassoon Primary,
the letterforms of Meta, Rotis and Frutiger have within them
cursive elements that push the eye along the baseline to the
next letter. Rosemary Sassoon calls these the 'exit stroke'
or 'kick up' and they can clearly be seen in Rotis's e, c
and Q, Meta's a, u and l and Frutiger's c, t and e. Sassoon
also discusses the smooth rightward flowing arches and the
simple counters of writing, which can also be observed.
Gerard Noordzij, a tutor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts
in The Hague believes that "Handwriting is the origin of all
typographic communication." 22
The Greek word typography, itself,
developed from the Latin phrase "Absque calami ulla
exaracione," or "to write without a pen". Handwriting
pre-dates, and has survived, the printed culture. And
perhaps in our search for the typography of our time we
should look to the organic forms within todays writing, that
have evolved through our exposure to other letterforms, to
ensure that tomorrows typography contains some of the
idiosyncrasies of spoken communication.
18
Marshall McLuhan; The Medium is the Massage (1967)
19
Alfred Fairbank; A book of Scripts (1949)
20
Fernaud Baudin; Computers and Typography (1993)
21
Hugh Aldersey; Creative Review (May 1989)
22
Emily King; Frieze (1994)