Famous Quotes from Type Designers

[dezcom]

Si,
Don't you remember? It only came in a medium weight, I think itwas called Message :-)

ChrisL

[Si_Daniels]

Chris, you know I threw you that pitch so you could hit a home run. Well done! I think it was actually "Massage Medium" - but that's always been disputed.

[dezcom]

I would rather get a massage than a message any day :-)
But I will take that lying down.

ChrisL

[Florian Hardwig]

Andi Emery said:
“Typomania is curable but not fatal. Unfortunately.”
— Erik Spiekermann, TypeCon2005

The Helvetica movie features a variation of that by Erik himself:
“I’m obviously a typomaniac—which is an incurable if not mortal disease.”
Aggravation?

[Renaissance Man]

THIS IS
A PRINTING OFFICE

CROSSROADS OF CIVILISATION
REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS
AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME
ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH
AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR
INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE

FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD
NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND
NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER'S HAND
BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF
FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND
THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

Beatrice Warde (1932)

http://www.nenne.com/typography/bw3.html

[Jackie Frant]

I've always heard that quote as:
"The bad news is you are a ______-phile; the good news is it's incurable."

Fill in the hobby of your choice. Used as an opening line for bad speech makers... Normally the rest of the speech goes downhill from that point -- along with the bad chicken dinner that goes with it.

[Sofie B]

I can’t seem to locate the quote: "Typography is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters" in any of Tracy’s writings, can someone please help me with a title and a page number?

[William Berkson]

Googling, I see it in several places attributed to "Steve Byers", but I don't know who that is. I looked in Tracy and then gave up. I can't remember where I first read or heard it. Good luck, I'd like to know the source also.

[Sofie B]

I did the same, and went for a look at the Steve Byers article, in ‘The Art of Looking Sideways’ by Allan Fletcher.

The article itself is mostly a list of quotes on typography. The title of the article is ‘Typography is a beautiful group of letters, not a group of beautiful letters’ (with quotation marks), but with no reference to the origin of this specific quotation…

[Norbert Florendo]

Steve Byers was one of the type development/marketing managers at Linotype, I think out of Hauppauge, NY during the mid-to-late eighties.

[fontplayer]

"This font didn't take much to make. About 30 hours altogether." --Fred Nader, speaking of 'Miltown', a font made from the Matrix movie title.

Thirty hours for a quick display font? Makes me wonder what kind of spread it took to make different kinds of fonts and font sets.

[dezcom]

Steve Byers was a classmate of mine at Carnegie Mellon in the mid 60s. He majored in Graphic Arts Management. He went on to a bright career as Norbert mentioned.

ChrisL

[William Berkson]

Doing a little digging I see that Steve Byers was on the board of the Type Directors Club fairly recently. You might contact him through them, and find out where he got the quote.

[Norbert Florendo]

He probably got the quote from me during a drunken stupor at ATypI in the eighties ;^)

[russellm]

well, I didn't see this one yet:
“Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to”. Eric Gill

and another Gill (Dr. John):
"It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal."

[Wynnefield]

“In the fields of Printing & Graphic Design, it is generally agreed that the poet in our midst is the type designer.”
— Noel Martin

Wynne Hunkler
Principal | Wynnefields Creative
Web Design & Visual Communications

[will powers]

Talbot Baines Reed, author of "A History of the Old English Letter Foundries," wrote:

"Egotism has been and remains responsible for many defects of modern typography."

Originally in "Ars Typographica," winter 1920. Reprinted, with the title "Old and New Fashions in Typography," in Heller & Meggs "Texts on Type."

So, maybe he wasn't a type designer. Still . . . . .

powers

[PublishingMojo]

@Jim: Frederic Goudy was almost as prolific a creator of bon mots as of typefaces. My personal favorite is:

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

[Simon Robertson]

heehee

[quadibloc]

I am surprised that a direct recollection confirms the saltier version of the Frederic W. Goudy quote on letterspacing blackletter (or lower-case). After all, he is an American type designer, not a British one, and the quote dates from a time prior to the release of the Austin Powers movies.

Reading the posts here led me to search out this page:

http://berlinbooks.org/brb/2009/11/typocalyse-now-the-legacy-of-jan-tsch...

When I was a child, I naïvely thought that serifs were an unnecessary and old-fashioned complication to the forms of letters. Thus, Jan Tschihold's youthful folly is entirely understandable. I propose that it was shared, in a different form, more widely than may have been recognized.

When printing began, printed books imitated manuscripts. Since the letters were formed at one point, when the matrices were made, why not use the form of letter that is esteemed as the best one - the one that is the most elaborate, that requires the most effort to make?

Despite habit, I suspect that the issues of readability with regard to blackletter were noticed by some even at the very beginning. The rapid emergence of rotunda and bastarda typefaces would seem to confirm this.

Incidentally, because rotunda and bastarda were very readable, I think it regrettable that this line of development did not continue to be followed in the creation of text types. While Lydian is readable, it is still unlikely to be used for text, and, while Optima could be said to be related, it is derived from Roman and sans-serif typefaces, and does not belong to this line of evolution at all.

The fact that Roman types were used for Latin text might be put down to authenticity alone. But the fact that blackletter was suitable for the vernacular - the reader's native language - while Roman was used for texts that are in an ancient language which the reader had learned as a second language seems to me another indication that Roman was regarded as more legible all along.

Also, in the early days of printing, it was difficult enough for printers to cast their own blackletter and roman fonts in a range of sizes. The Roman of Aldus Manutilus closely resembled that of Nicholas Jenson, and the Roman of Claude Garamond was patterned after that of Aldus Manutilus. Printers tended to use one style of roman face and stick to it.

Obviously, if one is only using one roman face, and one is cutting one's own punches, there will be motivation to make the best ones possible, and one's own personality and limitations and handwriting will all be reflected. So there will be change over time. Thus, Caslon, Baskerville, and Bell all emerged from this type of evolution, as well as Bodoni.

Given, then, that the world was emerging from a period when printing shops only had a very limited set of typefaces, it's not surprising that Jenson, Poliphilus, Bembo and Garamond all had to be revived. With only Caslon - and, later, oldstyle faces based on the one by Alexander Phemister - as competition, it's also not surprising that Scotch Roman faces - which attempted to soften the characteristics of Bodoni much as Gill Sans, later, was considered a humanist sans-serif - became the fashion.

In this earlier day, their unbracketed serifs were seen, like the lack of serifs on Helvetica, to be an abandonment of useless, unnecessary ornament. But everything needful for legibility - serifs of some sort, classical proportion - was retained.

I see Times Roman as being like Caslon - a "sweet spot" that will stay popular for a long time. When in doubt, set it in Times... is, in effect, already the maxim that the same thing, said about Caslon, once was. In the area of sans-serif, Stone and Lucida seem to be today's fashion.

When Caslon fell, the earlier oldstyle types not being available, it led to the Scotch Roman epoch which looks so dismal to today's eyes.

When Times Roman falls, though, technical factors will not pressure us to use overly condensed letters. Nor will the designs of Baskerville or Bembo be hidden and unavailable. So there is no reason for the fashions of the future to give us a long, depressing era dominated by typefaces which, to their posterity (as well as our eyes, if we could see them) look awful and thus make their popularity inexplicable.

[Renaissance Man]

Type is like music in having its own beauty, and in being beautiful as an accompaniment and interpretation; and typography can be used to express a state of the soul, like the other arts and crafts. But like them it is too often used mechanically, and so the full expressiveness of this medium is unrealized. If it is used according to a rule or recipe, it becomes dull and loses vividness. Type appears at first to be a rigid medium; but like other rigid media, it is plastic to the living spirit of a craftsman.
—J.H. Mason

[Chris Dean]

"Perfect typography is more a science than an art."

Tschichold, J. (1962). Consistent correlation between book page and type area (as cited by Tschichold, J. 1975/1991). The form of the book. Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc. Washington, United States.

[Chris Dean]

"Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments."

Warde, B. (1955). The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography.

(There are multiple references, I am not sure which is most accurate)

[Terrence Chouinard]

The Goudy letter spacing quote? I believe the truth is the old man said that line so many times, that it is pointless to argue a definitive version exists. Just credit a source, that'll give your citation value.

But certainly, there's no k at the end of Frederic.

[Terrence Chouinard]

Typography is the most influential of all the arts:
it sends knowledge abroad as heaven sends the rain.
One fructifies the soul; the other man’s intelligence.

1923 ATF SPECIMEN BOOK