Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.
Type designers are, at their best, the Stradivarii of literature: not merely makers of salable products, but artists who design and make the instruments that other artists use.
Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the typographer in search of special treatment....
Essay on AdamThere are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to...
An ancient metaphor: thought is a thread, and the raconteur is a spinner of yarns - but the true storyteller, the poet, is a weaver.
Essay on Adam"There are five possibilities. One: Adam fell.Two: he was pushed. Three: he jumped. Four:he only looked over the edge, and one look silenced him.Five: nothing worth mentioning happened to...
When you die, your culture takes you in, and then, if you've given enough, your place is near the centre.
In a badly designed book, the letters mill and stand like starving horses in a field. In a book designed by rote, they sit like stale bread and mutton on the page. In a well-made book, where designer,...
I think of something quite different from a snapshot. I know of a lot of poems, some very fine ones, that are like snapshots, but I'm more interested in poetry that is like an endless film, long stori...
Actually, typefaces and racing bikes are very much alike. Both are ideas as well as machines, and neither should be burdened with excess drag or baggage. Pictures of pumping feet will not make the typ...
Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
Logograms pose a more difficult question. An increasing number of persons and institutions, from archy and mehitabel to PostScript and TrueType, come to the the typographer in search of special treatm...
Wings are a constraint that makes it possible to fly.
The designer always has to leave room for the gods.
By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.
If language is lost, humanity is lost. If writing is lost, certain kinds of civilization and society are lost, but many other kinds remain - and there is no reason to think that those alternatives are...
If the poet becomes what-is, then what-is (and no one else) becomes the author of the poem.
If you divide the world into them and us, and history into ours and theirs, or if you think of history as something only you and your affiliates possess, then no matter what you know, no matter how no...
When you think intensely and beautifully, something happens. That something is called poetry. If you think that way and speak at the same time, poetry gets in your mouth. If people hear you, it gets i...
Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.
Showing 1 to 20 of 22 results