Jackson West’s Obsessive Compulsion

Looking through my bookshelf for something I hadn’t read a few weeks ago, I stumbled across Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style. I have to say that as someone who has played writer and designer on the Web, it’s a life-changer I only wish I’d discovered earlier. The edition that ended up on my shelves (from where or whom I know not) is the 1997 printing. But it’s at least as timeless as Strunk and White, and Bringhurst’s poetic prose measuring considerations of reading on, and writing or designing for, computer displays are still quite apt. An excerpt, emphasis mine:

“The screen mimics the sky, not the earth. It bombards the eye with light instead of waiting to repay the gift of vision. It is not simultaneously restful and lively, like a field full of flowers, or the face of a thinking human being, or a well-made typographic page. And we read the screen the way we read the sky: in quick sweeps, guessing at the weather from the changing shapes of clouds, or like astronomers, in magnified small bits, examining details. We look to it for clues and revelations more than wisdom. This makes it an attractive place for advertizing [sic] and dogmatizing, but not so good a place for thoughtful text.

“The screen, in other words, is a reading environment even more fugitive than the newspaper. Intricate, long sentences full of unfamiliar words stand little chance. At text size, subtle and delicate letterforms stand little chance as well. Superscripts and subscripts, footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes disappear. In the harsh light and coarse resolution of the screen, such literate accessories are difficult to see; what is worse, they dispel the essential illusion of speed. So the links and jumps of hypertext replace them. All the subtexts then can be the same size, and readers are at liberty to skip from text to text like children switching channels on TV. When reading takes this form, both sentences and letterforms retreat to blunt simplicity. Forms bred on newsprint and signage are most likely to survive. Good text faces for the screen are therefore as a rule faces with low contrast, a large torso, open counters, sturdy terminals, and slab serifs or no serifs at all.”

If you’ve ever designed anything, from pages to packages, web sites to billboards, it behooves you to pick up this book. If you’ve ever written anything, and are curious about the history and the future of text, it behooves you to pick up this book. And if you’re just curious and want to read a master discourse deeply on a rich topic, it behooves you to pick up this book.