What's so wrong with the chirographic approach?

[jazzsammich]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

Please forgive my ignorance here, but I was reading a current thread in which Hrant was bemoaning Gerrit Noordzij's chirographic approach.

I can't say I get it. For this discussion, I'd like to set aside issues of pedagogy or influence, deserved or undeserved. Strictly from a design perspective, what's so wrong with chirography as a foundation for typeface development?

--Jim K.

[hrant]

Basically, it favors the black bodies of letters (by tying the two edges of the black, via a marking tool/metaphor) and this impedes the optimal formation of notan, which is the unity and relation of black and white. Notan being what we read. Chirography isn't going to destroy the world or anything, but it's still bad craft.

hhp

[hrant]

Wait, I forgot that I'm wielding not a spear but a trident. The other two tips:
2) Chirography wants to throw off optimal vertical proportions by making the descenders too long, mainly because chiro-structurally they need more room to properly elaborate, and secondarily because we write downward and tend to "flourish" descenders more.
3) Sensitive type designers -rightly- complain that overly geometric fonts have low readability, because they impose a grid, which is highly out of tune with our humanism. But chirography in turn imposes its own grid, it's just not a Cartesian one: it promotes a certain overt modularity among many letter structures (think of the b/d/p/q) that goes against the divergence our reading mechanism needs.

Shame - it's such a pretty fish.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

There is nothing wrong with chirography as a means of achieving good notan, in fact the flexible broad nibbed pen is a brilliant instrument for this.

Calligraphic techniques -- such as rotating the nib angle during a stroke, or varying pressure, or easing off a terminal stroke by dragging one side of the nib -- have been used from before type, to imitate the effects of other media (notably stone carving) and pen or brush lettering, as well as to create complexity and sophistication beyond the basic, consistently angled written form.

Using chirography as the organizing principle of type design has much merit. Of course, if you do it in a banal and simplistic way, you will get the kind of results that Hrant decries. But the tool (and methodologies derived from it) cannot be dismissed just because a few, or even many, practitioners use it in a naive manner.

In this example of the textus quadratus, a 14th century scribe is certainly not droning throught the alphabet with "overt modularity", but giving the reader plenty of divergence.

[hrant]

You can certainly subvert the natural tendencies of chirography
and make it less of a bad influence. But then the question becomes:
why even bother in the first place? The only answer I can think of
is a bad one: because it lets a designer arrive at results acceptable to
the lowest-common-denominator, without having to think too much.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

Exploiting the potential of a tool to the maximum is not subverting its natural tendencies.
The broad nib pen is a a great instrument, as are most analog tools, because the user can screw around with it, bend it and invent "unnatural" ways of using it.
In fact the propensity of analog tools to be used in unexpected ways is what makes them so useful.

[hrant]

I'm a big fan of the unexpected! But there's really not much unexpected left in chirography. Instead of your hand you should use your foot, your mouth; instead of a broad-nib pen you should use a rock. And if you really want to "screw around", you extract the unexpected directly from your mind into outlines, instead of through an arbitrary body-marking medium, which is inherently anti-optimal-notan.

hhp

[crossgrove]

Jim,

When Hrant says [the broad pen is] inherently anti-optimal-notan, he means that the use of the pen in type design has a limit in terms of the functionality it can impart to a typeface. It's definitely useful to learn what the limitations are. So far we haven't really heard any specific discussion of techniques in type design that reveal just what those limitations are. That might be a good topic for an advanced type design class.

[William Berkson]

In my view, Hrant you have hold of a partial truth which you generalize to the point where is at the very least misleading.

Type, especially the roman lower case, was originally based on pen-formed letters. The very formation of these letters is influenced by the broad-nibbed pen. And in a number of ways the broad pen helped produce some aspects of readability, by automatically making 'optical corrections' to shapes and joins. For example, a vertical bar appears thinner than a horizontal bar of the same width. The broad pen, held at eg 30% produces broader verticals. Also joins, such as in the 'a' are naturally narrowed by the broad pen, making them look less 'clotted'. Also it may be that serifs, that are to a certain extent natural to the hand-moved pen, help produce more balanced letters.

Now it is also true that features of hand writing oppose readability. At TypeTech in New York last month, I was sitting next to the charming Cara Di Edwardo, a calligrapher who teaches at Cooper Union. She pointed out to me that writing slanted is convenient to the hand, but not to the eye. For the eye, upright is easier to read.

The Carolingian Miniscule, the basis of lower case, is a formal hand that is slower to write, more unnatural to the hand, and more readable. It also has serifs on both sides of the bottoms of the strokes (and the tops of uvwxy), which are also slower to write, and perhaps more readable.

Overall, hand writing cannot achieve the same evenness of color that type does. This was a key advance of Jenson and Griffo, who realized that making type more evenly colored than hand writing would make it more readable. And this is why typographic letters are almost always different from pen-written letters. (I am not speaking of built up letters. of course, which can be typographic.)

The roman lower case, then, is essentially a pen-written script modified for more even color. So the truth here, I think, is as Van Krimpen put it, that type is not 'chirographic', but it always retains an underlying influence, an "underlying force" of the pen. This is why, contrary to Hrant, I think it is valuable to be aware what the pen might do and as you are designing letters when you are violating 'pen rules', which is very often.

[hrant]

> has a limit in terms of the functionality

That's another way of putting it.
And a functionality that's at the heart of text face design: readability.

More: When you focus on marking the black (whether with a broad-pen or a seashell dipped in avocado juice) the white can only be subservient. And we don't read the black, but the relationship between black and white** (which is defined by the outlines) so that's bad.

** Especially in the parafovea, which I believe accounts
for about 2/3-rds of fully immersive reading.

An entertaining way of looking at this (leading off from Nick's "unexpected") is a certain maritime analogy that I'm fond of: chirography limits any seafaring exploration to your own continent, because you have to hug the coast*. In contrast, armed with an astrolabe (an understanding of readability) you can cross the vast oceans by using the mysterious night sky, and hopefully (although not certainly) discover a new continent. It's just that adventurers are a rare breed - although sometimes they get lost at sea...

* Adding that this continent is really 99% mapped already.

> we haven’t really heard any specific discussion of techniques
> in type design that reveal just what those limitations are.

It's hard enough just to overcome the knee-jerk defense mechanisms. :-)

In fact in my experience discussing specific letterform features (like trapping, or non-ductal stroke weight distribution) generally results in a pro-chirography designer stating "hey, I can make that shape with a pen!" And you certainly can, if you manage the necessary contortions very carefully. You can also get around by crawling on your back, naked. The question is, what's the point? I think most often the point is sadly just an artistic indulgence, at the expense of the user.

hhp

[hrant]

> misleading

If that's the case, it's certainly not intentional.
I think what happens is I sometimes lose patience with the necessarily complex
ideas/expressions, and over-simplify things.* Peter quite often re-casts my ideas
in a more elaborate and balanced way (although some people then find
the statements difficult to fathom) and I'm thankful for that.

* Hey, if Emigre can do it...

> broader verticals
> serifs
> ...

Yes, those are all artifacts of chirography. But that's all. We can and should incorporate what features we think help, but any chirographic origin is simply moot, because we don't really use pens to communicate any more. When you give too much credence to chirography (by saying things like "it always retains an underlying influence" - talk about misleading) it just holds you back. It's a dysfunctional romanticism.

hhp

[david h]

> but any chirographic origin is simply moot

Font(s) with chirographic origin?

[Nick Shinn]

we don’t read the black, but the relationship between black and white

Well of course, one can't exist without the other.
But we DO read the black (unless the type is reversed), in the sense that we read a figure against a ground. This is why Bodoni can be problematic, because the vertical black strokes are similar in weight to the vertical white spaces between them, and a 50/50 figure-ground relationship makes for nasty notan, ambiguous gestalt.

The serifs that a broad nibbed pen create serve to disambiguate the relationship between figure and ground by giving the figure more "masculinity".

And the angled stress of the broad pen also serves to disambiguate positive and negative, by accentuating the differences between the "figurality" of each. Consider the potential figures in this chirographic "c":
1. The positive figure, schematized as a line running along the spine of the glyph (far right).
2. The negative outside figure -- not very apparent, and not schematized.
3. The negative counter figure, schematized as the boundary between positive and negative (centre).
It can be seen that the negative figure is more angular than the positive and differently skewed, and these qualities -- presumed to be instrumental in a notan/gestalt theory of readability -- are a direct result of chirographic structure. Functional, not romantic.

[hrant]

> one can’t exist without the other.

And rich land-owners couldn't exist without slaves.
But that's not harmonious, and that's not my point.

> we read a figure against a ground.

Not immersively.

Also, letters don't have skeletons. That's just our consciousness
desperate to impose a minimal, easier-to-control Modernism.
In contrast, reading is a feral beast.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

Not immersively.

The basic mechanics of shape recognition apply to all acts of vision, including immersive reading.
You either see the vase or the faces, not both at once.

letters don’t have skeletons.

I schematized the positive figure as the shape of its central spine, being an average of the two sides. Do letters not have shapes?

[William Berkson]

>The serifs that a broad nibbed pen create serve to disambiguate the relationship between figure and ground ...And the angled stress of the broad pen also serves to disambiguate positive and negative, by accentuating the differences

Very interesting, Nick. Is it true? I don't know. But my point about awareness is that we don't really yet understand fully what are the advantages and disadvantages of the pen-written moving front.

My basic problem with Hrant's view is that it pretends to more knowledge than any of us, including Hrant, have. So when we mess around with, eg. the pen-influenced traditional stress on the Cap A or M, we'd better be aware of it, and see whether we are making things better or worse.

It isn't a matter of romanticism, but just appropriate modesty, and appreciation of the strength of the hundreds of years' tradition of people making typographic letters, and the thousands of years before that of pen-written letters.

[hrant]

Nick, you're confusing deliberation and immersion.

> it pretends to more knowledge

Or maybe it does not pretend that fact and opinion are different.

> So when we mess around with, eg. the pen-influenced traditional
> stress on the Cap A or M, we’d better be aware of it

There is no "mess around", because the autority of the pen is spurious.
And it impedes for example the possibility that a symmetrical "A" (which
is not the same thing as a contrast-less "A") might be better. Tradition is
as often a shackle as it is a wellspring.

hhp

[Nick Shinn]

Nick, you’re confusing deliberation and immersion.

No I'm not.
I haven't been addressing that distinction.

***

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, learning to read is deliberative, but after that it's all immersive.

[enne_son]

"Notan being what we read."
"We don’t read the black, but the relationship between black and white."

I must confess, I don't know what these statements mean.
Do they mean that both the black of the letters and the white of the word have cue value, so that inside the bounded map it is wrong to talk about which is figure and which is ground, because both the shapes of the whites inside the bounded map and the aggregate pattern of the strokes are active in the making of the perceptual decision about the identity of the word?

[William Berkson]

>it does not pretend that fact and opinion are different.

The reality does not bend to suit our opinion, but remains stubbornly what it is. A person may have the opinion that he can jump off the roof and fly if he flaps his arms. But if he tries it he will find out too late that the facts are different.

What do you mean by "optimal formation of notan, which is the unity and relation of black and white"? I never see you give specifics on what makes for good and bad notan. Without at least some examples and better yet some principles, your invective about written characters hurting notan seems to me to be too vague to address meaningfully.

I am not questioning that a good relationship between black and white is important, but I personally don't have a general theory about the relationship that tell me by a principle, rather than eye, 'this is good, this is not good'. Do you have any such theory?

[david h]

Too much theory. Font(s) with/without chirographic origin?

[William Berkson]

David, as I said, all fonts have chirographic origin in the sense that our letters are a modification of hand written letters. How far they are from these origins is indeed a matter of theory--what you count as indicators of the 'hand' or not.

Certainly Adobe Jenson would normally be regarded as having more of the hand in it than Futura. But even Futura thins the joins of round to stem severely. Is this 'chirographic'? I don't know. That is why I was asking for specifics from Hrant, which I guess you are also.

[Maurice Meilleur]

Hrant, not to even pretend to expertise on this topic, but what can you possibly mean by writing that "the authority of the pen is spurious"?

It doesn't at all contradict the idea that we need both figure and ground to read to state what seems to me to be obvious: One of the stubborn realities of the world is that it is easier to use something smaller to make marks on something larger.

The way you're arguing, it's as if there were at some period in human history a live choice between filling in the small "positive" spaces and filling in the large "negative" spaces to make writing shapes, and that the chirographists (chirophants?) won out and then proceeded to marginalize the other option, much as did the manufacturers of internal-combustion automobiles over the electric-car manufacturers at the start of the twentieth century. Is this your position?

[Chris Keegan]

Are there any other types designed by Gerrit Noordzij besides Caecilia? I belive that Lucas de Groot was a student of his also, and his Thesis type family is one of my all-time favorites. If these types are the result of a chirographic inspired design process, then they are very pleasing to my eyes anyway. Theory is fine, but at the end of the day unless it's applied it's just.. theory.

[William Berkson]

Caecilia was designed by G. Noordzij's son. Many outstanding type designers were inspired by G. Noordzij, as I understand.