Written In Stone

As I read Jean Baptist Piggin’s style guide on Macro-Typography my mind hyper-linked to mental images of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France. Those familiar Paleolithic pictures of animals, humans, and designs which were painted and etched over 16,000 years ago offer an early view into communicating through symbols. Just as macro-typography concerns itself with the “role of presentation” with focus on “patterns: distributing blank space, choosing colours [sic] and conveying meaning by proper arrangement” I saw similarity in the Lascaux drawings; bison arranged in herds, hunters moving in groups, all carefully placed and colored to tell a tale. Archaeologists have applied an ‘iconographic method’ in their analysis of the images spending time studying aspects such as placement of objects and relative sizes and have come to understand the inherent deliberateness of the artists. This seems very similar in its application to the deliberate placement and manipulation of type which as Erin Kissane notes in Typography Matters, “is all about providing as many helpful cues for the reader’s eye as possible.” The Paleolithic pictographs effectively communicated their message just as with a skillful eye and an understanding of best practices we as designers can create a suitable environment on the web tablet that not only communicates information but does it in a manner that is easy to interpret and digest. Effective use of type is one vehicle to accomplish this.

 

Nested in an understanding of typography is that of text-sizing and creating footnotes. As a novitiate I took for granted the power of the browser to make all the necessary adjustments for text-sizing and have since discovered my mistake. New management rules in my toolkit should now remedy that. The challenge for me will be in the proper application. Theory always seems easy, it’s the mechanics that make things run which are more difficult. Similarly the debate on footnotes appears to have generated several solutions to their emplacement on digital pages. The solutions neatly outlined in Professor Petrik’s essay on managing footnotes seem to hold the key for doing this properly though implementation is still the greatest challenge. As with text-size I can understand that managing the typography of the page to provide the greatest advantage to the user and reader will allow them to make better sense out of those grazing herds of footnotes and endnotes. But while there are many techniques we can employ I am coming to realize no specific one is written in stone.

Comments

[Rwany Sibaja]

John,
Your associations with cave paintings is quite interesting in terms of the history of standardization in written communication. My mind immediately jumped to cuneiform and hieroglyphs, especially the Mayan & Egyptian codices. Although all three are drawing that reflect certain ideas, the patterns, regularity, and standardization was key for everyone to understand. For Mesopotamians, Egyptians, and Mayans, anyone could recognize the symbolism and understand the purpose behind the writing. Such standardization is what permits scholars today to decipher them. Imagine if multiple forms of transcriptions were used!

Today, as you point out, the creators have a large control, but users do as well. As Americans, we take for granted that many of the commands in CSS and XHTML are English-based. I am sure that non-English speakers are not as thrilled. I would like to see a universal language, perhaps numeric or wingdings/hieroglyph based, used for coding in the future. Instead of .

[Rwany Sibaja]

Instead of "a href", or "em", we could use &^" OR @!