woes of a typographer in the digital age

To start, I’ll say that as of 2016, typography is once again a thing of beauty, executed with great skill on sites, in apps and across all kinds of screens.

But I lived through the dark times of the early internet, when type was taken away from designers and reduced to mere code. All the love and passion for a well-crafted headline or elegantly spaced body copy was lost to raw RSS feeds and system fonts.

We have seen this all before, from monks writing by candlelight to Gutenberg’s movable type. The first typefaces were cut by hand by punch cutters and early type foundries, the era that gave us many of the typefaces we still know: hand-crafted pieces of metal, wood or ceramic with names like Garamond and Baskerville that are still on our computers today.

Industrialisation gave way to the digital age, bringing new challenges and opportunities. For the printed word, much of what was created and tried in that time grew the typographer’s role in shaping our modern world.

In the computer age the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.

Massimo Vignelli

It was largely the rise of Adobe PostScript and the first Apple computers that put typography in the hands of every designer. Those were heady days, when type could be pushed and pulled beyond reasonable limits. I remember well publications like Ray Gun breaking the accepted norms of type and readability to see just how far they could go. I remember sitting with a headline and kerning every letter so the whole thing captured the feeling of the words, or massaging a paragraph to push one word onto the next line for page balance.

Google Fonts has done a lot since then, but most typefaces still sit outside the lowest-common-denominator set of safe fonts, so designers generally need a fallback.

Venture into the still-archaic world of email and it’s even worse. You’re at the mercy of email clients’ foibles and their lack of consistency, around five years behind the web.

So where does that leave the typographer? You can no longer prescribe exactly how the viewer experiences the content. Instead, typography has to be about what looks best and feels right, not about specific typefaces. Communicating the message is the essence.

Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts.

El Lissitzky

Typographic perfection on the printed page was an admirable pursuit, but in the age of Apple Watches and screens from 320 pixels to 5K it’s altogether impossible. Human beings aren’t perfect, and perfection will always elude us.

Craftsmanship will always remain, though. When it’s headline news that San Francisco will replace Helvetica, we as typographers are at the forefront of how humans interact with the digital world.

Footnote: much of this article was inspired by the work of Matej Latin, who can be found at medium.com/design-notes and matejlatin.co.uk.