Lupton suggests that text as a body bears more integrity and stature than elements commonly found surrounding it such as pictures, banners and captions. Depending on the context and environment, coherent bodies of text can have multiple limitations and opportunities. Designers and writers break down and organise the text into visible chunks, allowing us to slip into and out of the masses of words and glyphs. Through even the simplest of indents (signalling a new idea/paragraph) the typography navigates readers through the content. The written word is an idea made visible by typography and although it is the typography’s job to execute the readability of a written word, it is a job of the designer to actually help readers avoid reading in order to deliver meaning as efficiently as possible.
Handwritten documents used to be the only means of delivering bodies of text, this used to pose problems as handwritten documents became rife with mistakes. These scripts were then copied from copies, every time producing more errors and gaps, each one continuously delivering different meaning. The arrival of the printing system and proofreaders allowed authors to deliver multiple unchanged copies, true to the meaning as he or she intended it to be delivered.
The actions of negative space within typography often get over looked; every space in the letterpress process is a result of a physical object. We perceive speech as continuous flow, however, translated to alphabetic writing spacing is crucial in order to break speech up into multiple characters. It is this notion of spacing that made text into a material object with known dimensions and fixed locations. Jacques Derrida wrote that although alphabet represents sound, it can’t function without silent marks and spaces. The history of typography is marked by the increasingly sophisticated use of space. “White space” emerged as a modernist response, uncovering that empty space on a page can have just as much physical presence as printed text. It is however argued that in order to help readers navigate and make connections throughout, a single, well organized page is often better than multiple pages with lots of blank space.
Roland Barthes presented two opposing models of writing in his essay “From Work to Text”, the closed, fixed “work” and the open, unstable “text”. The mass printing process ensured the typography (“work”) was perfectly complete, while the “text” remained uncontainable, saturated with citations, references and cultural languages. Although talking about literature, Barthes’ ideas can be translated to typography, where the ‘body’ of text has been aided by features such as; pages numbers, headings and the index etc.
Spoken word is delivered the way the speaker intends it to, through tone of voice and refrains the user from interpreting the words in a way which they may feel appropriate or comfortable with. Typography however, puts the user in a position whereby they can ‘play’ the text as a musician plays an instrument.’ It is through layout, structure and typography, (or lack of) that the user can start to interpret the meaning in whichever way they feel works.
La Cantatrice Chauve d’Eugene Ionesco (The Bold Soprano) - By Eugene Ionesko designed by Robert Massin.
This double page spread is a single selection of many that can be seen as 'decostructive' throughout the publication. It completely and utterly ignores the established rules of typography having to be fixed inside content. The words and sentences on the page start to evoke feelings of angst alongside the imagery. A complete range of pointsize and variation in typeface is a common occurence in many deconstructivist texts, but here it really adds a sense of choas, reinforcing the emotion trying to be portrayed.
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