by Jan White
If it deals with land routes, cut up the oceans and show the dry land.
If it deals with transportation by ship, use the map that sacrifices landmasses and keeps the oceans unsliced.
If it deals with air traffic over the northern hemisphere, use the north-polar projection that shows the relationship of the continents, but at the cost of cutting the south pole into three.
If you just need recognizeable land masses, you can use the north polar projection and edit out the globe altogether.
If the globe needs to retain its circular shape, then this north-polar projection is fine, but the shape of the land masses are compromised.
In these projections the landmasses look similar, but the latitude/longitude lines add interesting curvature variations.
Mollweide’s projection squashes the globe into an oval. Landmasses are recognizeable, but the oceans at the far edges are exaggerated.
Goode’s “Interrupted” projection gives the landmasses reasonably recognizeable shapes, but the oceans are cut up.
By viewing the globe from a point further north (so the equator is curved) the landmasses are more accurately delineated.
The geometry of the latitude and longitude lines is stylized and the hemispheres are flattened. The stark black and white are visually powerful and look accurate—but there is nothing accurate in any of this.
The USA
Look what you can do with the Lower 48.
Looking at the map from a fresh angle is often refreshing. It can also be helpful in focusing the viewer’s attention onto the area in question, while retaining the sense of scale as well as where the focal area belongs in the big picture.
Maps plus imagination result in more than a description of a shape or place somewhere. They dramatize the idea. It can be a literal depiction of statistics superimposed onto the globe (above); or the comparative economies of Canada, United States, and Mexico shown by bars (below). More interesting: it can be a jaundiced political comment on Arkansas (right) by Francois Colos, or a surreal view of the U.S. by Martim Avillez.
Ideas in type
Word pictures
Fonts
Numerals
Punctuation
The miracle of giving visible shape to MEANINGFUL NOISES, (words as speech), in the form of MEANINGFUL MARKS, (words as type), with a few pictorial images thrown in for good measure. Its charm and power lie in its pure, innocent, unspoiled, directness.
Word pictures
Stop, look, and listen. Type translates the human voice into visual marks. Listen to it. It can sound loud or soft, gentle or aggressive, important or by-the-way. It can insist that you pay attention, or just slide by. When you think of type as a visual medium (i.e., not just “text” to which you add pictorial illustrations to “make the page more interesting”), you discover a whole world of possibilities inherent in the words themselves.
Each typeface (“font”) has its own character. See it as variations of sound: an accent or dialect.
Drawing with words, figurative typography, concrete poetry, calligrams…a time-honored technique that melds thoughts-in-words with visual shapes.
“Mouse’s tale” Alice in Wonderland Lewis Carroll 1865.
From “Winnie the Pooh,” A. A. Milne, England, 1926.
“A chalice” Aldus Manutius Venice c.1490.
Typogram Václav Havel Czech 1966.
“Il Pleut” (It is raining) Apollinaire French, 1916.
Mere placement can enable the word to become a “picture.” All that is needed is a horizontal, vertical, or pivotal datum against which the word is observed. Above, the words are shown related to a one-point rule, but it need not be an actual line. It can be implied by position, as in the headline at right.
The darkness is the datum
Direction lines easily indicate motion or action. But beware of curved ones, because they can be misinterpreted as whiskers growing out of the word rather than “lines of force.”
If the word is a bit unusual, setting it in a weird typeface is enough.
Words-in-type embody both meaning and image, and if the shape of the word can be combined with its meaning, startling effects can be achieved. They do not have to be funny or cute, though it is more enjoyable here to illustrate the technique and make the principle vivid with a bit of humor.
There is an endless variety of words that we all recognize as images and understand immediately. Use them if they make sense with the message, even if they are obvious clichés. Anything that connects with the viewer/reader’s imagination and person, no matter how silly, is another bit of bait with which to hook them in to become readers.
When the word becomes a picture of what it means, it achieves the status of pictograph. Visual puns speak for themselves.
Add an illustration to the word, interwoven among the letters or within the stroke of the letter itself, if it is wide enough.
Insert the picture inside the “counter” (the open space inside the letter).
Overlap a silhouetted image over an appropriate word in the background.
Cut the word out of a picture.
Or “drop the word out” in white from the background picture if the background is dark and smooth enough to make the word legible. (“Surprint the word” in black or color on top of a light background.)
Substitute a picture for a letter in the word. As long as the word/image association is clear, the technique will work, even if the shape of the picture is not like the shape of the missing letter.
Open your eyes and listen
Type is that wonderful invention that makes noises visible. Words have both intellectual meaning and physical shape. Both must be handled together, in order to make the idea vivid. The right typeface looks and sounds like the right dialect.
Why is the D backwards? Trilogium Animae, Albrecht Dürer, Nürnberg, 1498.
Typesetter holds the “stick” in the left hand, fills it letter by letter to compose “handset” words out of the individual characters stored in the compartments in front of him.
Capital Letters in the upper case, lowercase letters in the lower case. Green eyeshade and apron essential equipment. Early 1900s.
California Type Case, introduced in San Francisco in 1867 by Octavius Dearing. “The only case made that will hold an ordinary font of job letters larger than a pica, without overrunning the boxes” because the boxes varied in size according to the number of letters they had to contain. Now the cases are used to show off cute knicknacks. How did they remember which letter goes where?
Bad Children Don’t Eat
Lame Men Never Hop
Vat U Tink
I See Fat Geese
Oh, You Poor Woman
ALL Right
Johan Gutenberg’s moveable type has moved a long way from the printed page. We can’t escape words—wherever we look, in every conceivable medium, solid or virtual. Why not bring these unexpected versions of “typography” back onto the printed page?
Several versions of the same characters are available in some faces. Such flexibility yields greater variety in the way thoughts, ideas—and atmospherics—are given visual form. The more flamboyant ones, called swash characters, need to be handled with circumspection and care. Cool it. Less is more.
Like many Renaissance artists, Albrecht Dürer explored the mathematics and proportions of letters. In a 1535 book, he based their shape on subdivisions of a square. Yet, after establishing a satisfactory structure, he still suggested three subtly different alternatives.
Bookman is richly endowed with alternate characters.
Avant Garde was designed as a display face for Avant Garde Magazine in the mid-1960s. It was a display face, never intended to be used for text, where its formalized geometric shape is hard to read. The alternate characters retain the pure shapes on which the design is based, varying by tipping the letters, overlapping them, or tucking them in the voids between characters.
Kerning
Kerning is the tight spa
cing between selected characters, like the “T” with the “y” tucked under and into it. The result is not a ligature (latin, ligare, to connect), because the “T” and “y” remain independent, though they look as though they were one.
Ligatures
Ligatures are one or more letters tied together as in monograms. Achieving perfection (the scribes’ goal) when handwriting a manuscript required making sure that all the lines ended at the same point at far right in justified columns. Such effort and beauty were deemed to increase the religious value of their work. Gutenberg, whose mechanized process had to simulate perfect handwriting in order to sell his books, solved the problem by designing and casting a number of doubled-up characters: ligatures. (Word-spacing or letter-spacing destroys texture and color. Besides, it’s cheating.)
Most fonts contain two of the seven f-ligatures. Look how graceful they are and how much better they read, though you seldom find them except in carefully set type nowadays.
The “Black Letter” or “Old English” face is called Fraktur (Fractus: Latin: broken) in German, because scribes had to lift their quills to letter these “broken” strokes, by contrast to simple continuous handwriting. It remained in use till the early 20th century in Germany.
Many faces have ligatures like these in Garamond, especially those italics that simulate elegant handwriting. Elegance.
Accents
Also called diacritical marks (Greek: to distinguish) accents are used to represent specialized sounds in various languages that use the Roman alphabet. They carry meaning, so never use them indiscriminately just because they look cool or different.
Ancient alphabets
Runes. 2nd century Gothic adaptations of Greek letter forms, endowed with secret magical properties. Rectilinear in form because they were scratched or carved onto stone or wood panels. The Runic alphabet is named futhark after the first 6 letters (like alphabet is named after the first 2 letters alpha, beta) Used for memorial inscriptions well into the 19th century.
Ogham (pronounced Owam) carved onto corners of stones like this one from Coolmagort, Co. Kerry, Ireland. Earliest Celtic inscription alphabet 4th century AD.
Runic letters on sticks describe exact influences of the moon, sun, and heavenly bodies; History of the Nordic Peoples, Olaus Magnus, 1555.
Inscription Greek
Modern Greek in uppercase and lowercase
Cyrillic alphabet. In the 9th century, the Byzantine monks St. Cyril and his brother St. Methodius left to proselytize among the Slavic tribes of Eastern Europe. They adapted the Greek alphabet to Slavic tongues.
Arabic reads from left to right. This is a very oversimplified showing of the alphabet, which has numerous alternate characters used depending on whether the letter stands alone or on its relationship to the neighbor preceding or following it.
Non-alphabetic alphabets
Signal flag: international code
Braille alphabet based on the 6-dot key. Louis Braille, 1809-1852.
Semaphore alphabet: mechanical arms on posts on top of hills, or waggled as flags by sailors or boy scouts.
Morse Code: Alfa, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, Golf, Hotel, India, Juliet, Kilo, Lima, Mike, November, Oscar, Papa Quebec Romeo Sierra, Tango, Uniform, Victor, Whiskey, X-ray, Yankee, Zulu.
Single-hand manual alphabet by Abbé de I’Epée, 1712-1789.
Handwriting
Surprise…personal involvement…asides… editorializing comments…highlighting…special effects… wonderful raw material. Why is handwriting so seldom used in the formal setting of “serious printed matter” despite the fact that it increases readership? Because it is a cliché and therefore rejected out of hand? (Pun intended.)
It costs nothing—in fact, nothing could be cheaper—and it is always right there at the end of your arm, ready to be scribbled down, scanned, and imported into the page. Then it can be printed in black, like the rest of the page, or if you have color, in bluish, greyish, brownish, greenish, to make it look more authentic. If it is in red, it pops out and becomes the first thing the viewer looks at because it is so unexpected. And if it looks like genuine handwriting, you create the illusion of actually having written on the page and everybody’s curiosity pulls them in. Having access to someone else’s secrets perhaps panders a bit to voyeurism. Is that bad or unethical? Of course not. It is just a communication trick and like all tricks, must be used with discretion and discrimination.
In order to work, it ought not to look artificial, like some beautifully engrossed calligraphy used on certificates of merit. The aim is to make it real, and most peoples’ handwriting is not Spencerian, like it used to be a few decades ago. As long as it is legible, anything goes; the wilder the better.
What an opportunity to deliver a second message on the same page, parallel to the main one, commenting, adding asides, pointing out inconsistencies. Most valuable of all is the chance to speak in a more personal voice and establish a more involving contact with fd the audience.
Numerals
Even more effective than letters, they lend themselves to graphic manipulation and can be given implied meanings. Don’t restrict them to mere mathematical symbols, but imagine them to be objects that represent a number—but in a certain context. They can be flat or three-dimensional, tiny or huge, impressive or wimpy. The message dictates what (if anything) you choose to do with them.
Realistic depictions: dominoes, dice, playing cards, coins are obvious examples. Street signs, cans of V8, sergeants’ stripes, golf hole flags… there are numbers wherever you look. Use them.
Roman nvmerals
There was no U in the Roman alphabet. They used V instead. They did not have J or W either.
Arabic numerals
They are called Arabic because Arab mathematicians devised them, and invented the zero. Numerals are in two forms:
1. Lining figures (or MODERN) are the same height as capitals. Used for tabular matter, mathematical setting, formulas, technical matter. 123456 stands out too strongly in text, like ALLCAP words.
2. Non-aligning figures (or OLDSTYLE) fit with lowercase. Used for numbers set in text to prevent them from standing out excessively, 123456, like words set in SMALLCAPS.
Other ciphers and numerals
Greek. Apostrophe preceding a letter indicates it is a number
Hebrew
Babylonian cuneiform
Egyptian hieroglyphic
Maya (based on 19 days of the month). Alternate Maya system uses masks for 1 to 13, then adds jaw to reach 19.
The simplest system of all:
Numeral sign Braille
Numeral sign Semaphore
Signal flag
Morse code
Single-hand
Fingers and math have a natural connection. The word digits is used both as the word for fingers and toes as well as numerals. The ten fingers naturally result in grouping by tens. The words eleven and twelve come from Old English: “one-left” and “two-left” (after the first ten). The additional digits—the toes—give us twenty to work with: a score. Score groups by twenties—“fourscore and ten.” French for eighty is “quatre vingt,” four-twenties.
Native American finger counting widely used by Plains tribes.
Mediæval finger counting based on the Venerable Bede’s 8th century system.
Music
Musical notation is a complete and separate visual language. Yet anyone reading these and the many other “marks“can reproduce the composer’s ideas about sounds, rhythms, melody, pitch. Come to think of it, this language is even more miraculous than the alphabet.
Mediæval signs
Scribes invented and developed many more signs and symbols than punctuation and the mathematical ones. Rudolf Koch collected them and Fritz Kredel made the woodcuts. Here are just a few, large enough to discern their simple elegance. What a treasure trove of symbols for various chemical substances, constellations, religious meanings, monograms, etc., etc.
Alchemists’
four elements, in two versions:
Astrological signs
Koch and Kredel, Book of Signs. First English translation by First Edition Club, London, 1930; Dover.
Punctuation
Hard to decipher? Try to read it: it does make sense, once you have figured it out. The Hittites started this system 5000 years ago, but then even the Greeks found it frustrating. That’s why they decided to give up on the old “boustrophedon” and write all lines from left to right.
It took ancient scribes years to discover how useful it would be to separate words. Lowercase is a bit easier than allcaps, but still…See how word spaces help? Even without capitals to signal the start of sentences! SentencesI Hey, that’s a great idea! And how about using capitals also to denote Proper Names? Then along came the geniuses who figured out that a variety of little marks between the words might help make reading aloud in church easier, and—more importantly—help explain meaning. Aldus Manutius, Venetian printer, was the first to break up book text with punctuation. Before 1500.