Designed Literature (Part One)

Everything is designed. The keyboard I type on, the clothes I wear, the interface I toggle, the desk, the fridge magnets, the storebrand tea, etc etc. All designed. Humans, like all creatures, are always adjusting their environment to make survival more convenient.

Since the industrial revolution, the mass production of industrial designs has changed our landscape so much that neo-luddites (who prefer the term "environmentalists") call for an end to all industrialization, for the sake of "recovering the environment". But it's obvious that man has not destroyed "the environment"; he has made a new environment better suited to his needs.

The new landscape is here to stay, and it will only grow. We ought to accept design, and try to be discerning about it, rather than ignore or reject it, because it democratizes discovery, improving quality of life for everyone.

So, to focus on a field of design chronically behind the rest: literature. Any designed text is a work of typography, which is usually taught with graphic design. People who study typography may work printing posters, designing typefaces, or printing books. So, now that the connection's established, let's look at designed literature as a continuum.

It started with scribes. Tablets were chiseled to be both legible and beautiful. We remember the forms of Roman numerals because they were so aptly styled. Scrolls were scribed in calligraphy, handwriting designed to beautify and illuminate the text. Some of these ancient texts (eg, The Book of Kells) were crafted so carefully they are considered art books (books viewed both as visual art and literature because the printing techniques are so integral to the presentation).

Because it was so tedious to write these texts, they were sometimes customized for their audience (eg, a book of hours), something made impractical by the printing press.

When the printing press came about, it not only made books more available, democratizing information; it democratized design. Books were no longer hand-written; they were set in typefaces, which, at first, were modeled after the handwriting of famous calligraphers (eg, Jenson's creation of the Roman). Also, page layouts could be standardized, and designers began printing books with proportions found in visual art (golden ratio, 2:3, 5:8, etc).

Though ideas evolved more quickly after the printing press, the art of printing itself was slower to change. Materials improved; kerning and leading were made progressively easier, but these were very small changes (measured in picas and points). It was not until the early nineteenth century that lithography made printing page-spreads practical, and it was almost one hundred years more before Linotype and Monotype made the printing process portable.

But, as these cheaper, easier technologies came about, design suffered. Italic fs had their edges chopped by the standard size of the Linotype machine, and true proportions were subverted by the standard em divisions of the two machines.

A poster created by Wim Crouwel, a designer associated with the International Style

In the 1950s, photoprinting led to even greater typographic distortion with errors in proportion and the abolition of ligatures. But for all its demerits, photoprinting was also the immediate precursor to present typography. Practitioners of the International Style began printing posters with exciting new layouts and egalitarian characters. Many of the Helvetica-clad, primary-color-splashed, Swiss posters (like the one above) resemble works by Dick Higgins, who was experimenting with visual poetry in the U.S. a decade or so after the Swiss modernists carved their gridded Grotesks.

The development of visual poetry intersects lithography's obsolescence at digital design, in Part Two.