White spaces

[Jean-David]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I have often heard that typography is more about the white spaces.
I've been practicing in graphic design for around ten years and consider myself a pretty decent typographer, certainly not a typography superhero but decent. Yet I still have a hard time grasping the "white spaces" concept.
Contributions anyone?

[daverowland]

http://insideparagraphs.com/

[kentlew]

In case it’s not clear just from the site that Dave linked above, Cyrus Highsmith’s approach in his Inside Paragraphs book is all about identifying and understanding the different kinds of white space, their hierarchy, and their interactions.

[typerror]

The typeface was Gavotte. What a beauty!

[typerror]

Some say that the clinking of the glasses during a toast was meant to involve the "final/fifth sense"... hearing.
Using pens, as a first resort, has provided me with spacing skills that I would have missed out on otherwise. I find white spaces, spacing, etc. to be a lot like the rhythm and meter found in music. I find I am more interested, as I age, in the spaces/time between the notes.
Much like one's inability to pull apart a thread of music, without disrupting the flow, one must look at the paragraph in toto. One of the first books that gave me an "Aha" was a little book by Rudo Spemann, it took me a year to see the "white" but what a revelation it was.
The book by Cyrus is wonderful and augments what I have learned by doing.

[hrant]

Whitespace is instinctively hard to grasp (probably mostly because we're taught to mark the black, because that's what's practical) which is probably why it generally gets short shrift, but it's also possible to give it too much relevance (perhaps as an over-reaction to the established "injustice"). Because really, the important thing is notan: the unity and relationship of black and white. Practically speaking, this means we should ideally design their border, not one or the other. Which is easier said than done!

hhp

[5star]

"Music is the space between the notes." Claude Debussy

n.

[Nick Shinn]

“Drawing is taking a line for a walk.” —Paul Klee

It seems to me that there are three kinds of typeface:

1. Thin lines
2. Thick lines (both slab and sans)
3. Varied line

[hrant]

The only real lines are the invisible ones between black and white; seeing black bodies as being made of lines is a limiting illusion.

hhp

[typerror]

Thank you 5star!

Hrant, that is a limiting perspective, you are in essence saying the white, as well as the black, do not exist. It takes both to create texture... Notan IS that very relationship!

[hrant]

Black and white certainly exist, but only because the other does. The most important thing in black and white is that "and". :-)

You can render the black and ignore the white; you can render the black and keep an eye on the white; or if you're an idealist you can try to render notan, which can only be done through what I've come to call "liminography", the drawing of the border.

hhp

[dberlowgone]

"...which can only be done through what I've come to call "liminography", the drawing of the border."

...and must be done at the bottom of a lake. Other people may feel free to call liminographic notanocentric border-drawing, "letter drawing" for short.

[hrant]

Isolation can indeed be beneficial. :-)

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

The three qualities of positive mark which types may possess are:

One-dimensional: line with no thickness, with an equivalence between letter as line and letter as counter.
Two-dimensional: line as area, emphasizing the graphic flatness of the surface upon which the mark rests.
Three-dimensional: complex shapes suggesting natural objects with depth, and/or a depth to the substrate.

Counter shapes and spaces between letters have a different relationship with each of these, and consequently with the document surface as a whole, of which they are putatively a part.

[5star]

You're most welcome typerror !

Perhaps Debussy ( as did Frank Lloyd Wright et al) was simply using Lao Tzu's "Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the usefulness of what is not.", to own his benefit ... and there's no shame in that.

n.

[Jean-David]

thanks daverowland
Finally got it and read it. Nice and down to earth, exactly the kind of thing I was looking for, and i got my ahah moment...
On my side I'm afraid I was looking in a way to complicated direction...

[Jean-David]

BTW, Anyone knows the paper it's printed on, pretty nice as well

[Nick Shinn]

White spaces, sometimes known as notan spaces…

[Joshua Langman]

Playing around with metal or wood type is great for thinking about space as a typographer. Suddenly, all your spaces are physical things that have to fit together just right.

[hrant]

But that's now an arbitrary constraints, so cannot lead to optimal design.

hhp

[rs_donsata]

White space out of the realm of type design is the main resource to establish the visual hierarchy of graphic elements and rythm. Rythm is not about the sounds but the spaces between the sounds. Rythm is a way to work with human perception, you set a rythm and an expectation, then you play with it by bending or breaking the rithm.

[hrant]

There is no rhythm is text face design.

hhp

[kentlew]

BTW, Anyone knows the paper it's printed on, pretty nice as well

The first edition of Inside Paragraphs was printed on Glatfelter 60# Spring Forge Antique.

[William Berkson]

>no rhythm

The Fourier transforms on blocks of text show a periodicity in text faces, bands of black and white. Another way of saying this is that in a the vertical strokes in a word tend to fall near vertical lines a set distance apart, namely half the width of the n.

As Héctor says, deviation from the exact periodicity is part of what we 'read'. It is analogous to the regular beat in music, and the varied rhythm over the beat. When the typeface doesn't have that periodicity is like a dancer who 'loses the beat,' and can't dance to the music.

One feature of good handling of white space is to get the widths of the characters and the side bearings in a font to relate to each other so there is that strong, but not totally regular periodicity. I think failing on rhythm, harmonious widths and sidebearings, is the most common failing in type design.

Because our eyes do not move continuously across the page, but in jumps, saccades, the analogy with music is not complete, but the periodicity, with regular beat and varied rhythm is analogous.

[hrant]

Better than deviating from an illusion is ignoring it.

hhp