Typography Quotes

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. ~ Steve Jobs

The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer's task with the help of this black to capture space, to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them. ~ Adrian Frutiger

Designers provide ways into - and out of - the flood of words by breaking up text into pieces and offering shortcuts and alternate routes through masses of information. ( ... ) Although many books define the purpose of typography as enhancing the readability of the written word, one of design's most humane functions is, in actuality, to help readers avoid reading. ~ Ellen Lupton

Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography. ~ Tristan Tzara

I was never really satisfied with writing only text or with the way my texts looked when they were published. Most online journals have a pretty lame sense of typography - bad font, counter-intuitive margins and line spacing - that it makes me sour on my writing. ~ Masha Tupitsyn

The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography. ~ Isabel Allende

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, compositor and printer have all done their jobs, no matter how many thousands of lines and pages, the letters are alive. They dance in their seats. Sometimes they rise and dance in the margins and aisles. ~ Robert Bringhurst

What makes Helvetica more beautiful is the word "Helvetica" as a logotype in its typeface. It just makes the rest of the alphabets effective. ~ Shawn Lukas

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart. ~ H.G.Wells

It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal. ~ Eric Gill

Type and typography - what you do and how you do it - are both science and art. ~ James Felici

It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read the New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with the New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: the New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps attacking, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. ~ Zadie Smith

Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages. ~ Steven Heller

All the old fellows stole our best ideas. ~ Frederic Goudy

In the eighties, I was fortunate to be one of the young art directors that Jerry Roach, creative director at JWT New York, took under his wing. He taught me how to use typography more visually, to push against design norms and not to rely on preconceived notions of what something should look like. I learned that nuance is everything and to agonize over the details. I have Jerry to thank for driving plenty of people crazy over the years! ~ John Butler

Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, edu- cate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art. ~ James Felici

Architecture is art. I don't think you should say that too much, but it is art. I mean, architecture is many, many things. Architecture is science, is technology, is geography, is typography, is anthropology, is sociology, is art, is history. You know all this comes together. Architecture is a kind of bouillabaisse, an incredible bouillabaisse. And, by the way, architecture is also a very polluted art in the sense that it's polluted by life, and by the complexity of things. ~ Renzo Piano

For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique. ~ Wolfgang Weingart

When typography is on point, words become images. ~ Shawn Lukas

There's a simplicity in typography that demands absolute accuracy ... the only way you can experience it is by doing it, and you can't do it on a screen because a screen never gives you the entire picture. ~ Bruno Maag

You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography. ~ Herb Lubalin

The Ardent Hymn that Unites Peoples. ~ Pablo Neruda

Typography exists to honor content. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image. ~ Herbert Bayer

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. ~ Robert Bringhurst

There were voices on the other side - eldritch voices, the sort of voices that mere typography will remain totally unable to convey until someone can make a linotype machine with echo-reverb and, possibly, a typeface that looks like something said by a slug. ~ Terry Pratchett

You can say, "I love you," in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it's really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work. ~ Massimo Vignelli

Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Simplicity, wit, and good typography. ~ Michael Bierut

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.In earlier days it was kings and deities whose agents demanded that their names be written in a larger size or set in a specially ornate typeface; not it is business firms and mass-market products demanding an extra helping of capitals, or a proprietary face, and poets pleading, by contrast, to be left entirely in the vernacular lower case. But type is visible speech, in which gods and men, saints and sinners, poets and business executives are treated fundamentally alike . Typographers, in keeping with the virtue of their trade, honor the stewardship of texts and implicitly oppose private ownership of words. ~ Robert Bringhurst

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration ~ Neil Postman

If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying ... ~ Michael Bierut

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

Typomania is curable but not fatal. Unfortunately. ~ Erik Spiekermann

Someday I'll design a typeface without a K in it, and then let's see the bastards misspell my name. ~ Frederic Goudy

To muse for long unwearied hours with my attention riveted to some frivolous device upon the margin, or in the typography of a book - to become absorbed for the better part of a summer's day in a quaint shadow falling aslant upon the tapestry, or upon the floor - to lose myself for an entire night in watching the steady flame of a lamp, or the embers of a fire - to dream away whole days over the perfume of a flower - to repeat monotonously some common word, until the sound, by dint of frequent repetition, ceased to convey any idea whatever to the mind - to lose all sense of motion or physical existence in a state of absolute bodily quiescence long and obstinately persevered in - Such were a few of the most common and least pernicious vagaries induced by a condition of the mental faculties, not, indeed, altogether unparalleled, but certainly bidding defiance to any thing like analysis or explanation. ~ Edgar Allan Poe

The seventies were my fattest decade. Overall I think the seventies were distinctly bulbous. People looked chunky, typefaces were rounded, writing implements penile. ~ Will Self

Of all the achievements of the human mind, the birth of the alphabet is the most momentous. ~ Frederic Goudy

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time. ~ Robert Bringhurst

By the year 2000 every secretary will have a favorite typeface. ~ Roger Black

Helvetica is good for typographers who do not know what to say. ~ Thomas Bohm

Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry. ~ Kenneth Goldsmith

As we say in Berlin, there are many ways to bake a parrot. ~ Erik Spiekermann

Men who would letterspace lower case would shag sheep. ~ Frederic Goudy

Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar ~ Marshall McLuhan

This torn typography

of healed glyphs

a stuttered ancient

alphabet in skin

spells warrior tales

of battles lost

and gained

and homecomings

hard won

their meaning

barely touched

with fingertips

and gentle lips

to give them honor due

survivors

home to hearth

and loving arms

far-eyed survivors

who hear yet

the clash of arms

from distant corners

of the sky. ~ Munro Sickafoose

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing. ~ James Fenton

Did I read The New Yorker? This question had a dangerous urgency. It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font. The meaning embedded, at a preconscious level, by the look of the magazine; the seal, as he described it, that the typography and layout put on dialectical thought. According to Perkus, to read The New Yorker was to find that you always already agreed, not with The New Yorker but, much more dismayingly, with yourself. I tried hard to understand. Apparently here was the paranoia Susan Eldred had warned me of: The New Yorker's font was controlling, perhaps assailing, Perkus Tooth's mind. To defend himself he frequently retyped their articles and printed them out in simple Courier, an attempt to dissolve the magazine's oppressive context. Once I'd enter his apartment to find him on his carpet with a pair of scissors, furiously slicing up and rearranging an issue of the magazine, trying to shatter its spell on his brain. ~ Jonathan Lethem

Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy's habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product. ~ Ellen Lupton

The book, that stubbornly unelectric artifact of pure typography, possesses resources conducive to the flourishing of the soul. A thoughtful reading of the printed text orients one to a world of order, meaning, and the possibility of knowing truth. ~ Douglas Groothuis

What a graphic designer tries to do is make sure the typography is emotionally consistent with the brand. ~ Michael Ian Kaye

Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability. ~ Hermann Zapf

The whole point with type is for you not to be aware it is there. If you remember the shape of a spoon with which you just ate some soup, then the spoon had a poor shape. ~ Adrian Frutiger

I remember a time at Yale when my work was being critiqued by Paul Rand. Mr. Rand told me only to use Helvetica as a display face never in text, then he squinted, leaned in, and whispered in my ear, "because Helvetica looks like dogshit in text". ~ Kyle Cooper

Typography can be as exciting as illustration and photography. ~ Herb Lubalin

People who love ideas must have a love of words. They will take a vivid interest in the clothes that words wear. ~ Beatrice Warde

I love bookshelves, and stacks of books, spines, typography, and the feel of pages between my fingertips. I love bookmarks, and old bindings, and stars in margins next to beautiful passages. I love exuberant underlinings that recall to me a swoon of language-love from a long-ago reading, something I hoped to remember. I love book plates, and inscriptions in gifts from loved ones, I love author signatures, and I love books sitting around reminding me of them, being present in my life, being. I love books. Not just for what they contain. I love them as objects too, as ever-present reminders of what they contain, and because they are beautiful. They are one of my favorite things in life, really at the tiptop of the list, easily my favorite inanimate things in existence, and ... I am just not cottoning on to this idea of making them ... not exist anymore. Making them cease to take up space in the world, in my life? No, please do not take away the physical reality of my books. ~ Laini Taylor

Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy. ~ Jan Tschichold

They should make new ways to better design buildings and books. The computer was the end of Swiss typography! ~ Emil Ruder

All typefaces are historical. ~ Jonathan Hoefler

Set a page in Fournier against another in Caslon and another in Plantin and it is as if you heard three different people delivering the same discourse - each with impeccable pronunciation and clarity, yet each through the medium of a different personality. ~ Beatrice Warde

The contributions that one makes in typography, design, and art in general cannot be, and must not be measured on how much money is involved. That would lead to total chaos. The word itself (contribution) is to give to a common purpose. ~ Ed Benguiat

If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won't help, ~ Edward Tufte

There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. ~ Beatrice Warde

The first thing one learns about typography & type design is that these rules are made to be broken. ~ Jeffery Keedy

I wanted to make people aware of libraries as an ecosystem that are threatened in the same way as coral reefs. There's a kind of serendipity that occurs in a library that never happens online. Browsing a stack is a unique experience: that feeling of being attracted by a book, by its cover or typography. What makes me melancholy is the thought of books disappearing from libraries. ~ Phyllis Rose

Perfect typography is more a science than an art. ~ Jan Tschichold

Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
patterns of communal interdependence. ~ Marshall McLuhan

There are bad types and good types, and the whole science and art of typography begins after the first category has been set aside. ~ Beatrice Warde

One of my colleagues is convinced that having a wide range of types to choose from is a complete waste of time. He swears by two typefaces: Gill (1928) and Frutiger (1975), which he uses for road signs (among other things). ( ... ) [U]ntil 1975, the year in which Adrian Frutiger's eponymous typeface came onto the market, my colleague could only have made half of his selection. It seems to me that this proves the case for continuing to design new typefaces. ~ Gerard Unger

The other one, the one called Borges, is the one things happen to. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and stop for a moment, perhaps mechanically now, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate. I know of Borges from the mail and see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth-century typography, the taste of coffee and the prose of Stevenson; he shares these preferences, but in a vain way that turns them into the attributes of an actor. It would be an exaggeration to say that ours is a hostile relationship. I live, let myself go on living, so that Borges may contrive his literature, and this literature justifies me. It is no effort for me to confess that he has achieved some valid pages, but those pages cannot save me, perhaps because what is good belongs to no one, not even to him, but rather to the language and to tradition. Besides I am destined to perish, definitively, and only some instant of myself can survive in him. Little by little, I am giving over everything to him, though I am quite aware of his perverse custom of falsifying and magnifying things. Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone, and the tiger a tiger. I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I don't think that success is the premise to what is good or bad. ~ Ed Benguiat

Good typography can help your reader devote less attention to the mechanics of reading and more attention to your message. Conversely, bad typography can distract your reader and undermine your message. ~ Matthew Butterick