2pt Type

I’m a typographer. But wait — I do more than obsess over details!

Yes, it bugs me that most apostrophes we encounter today are actually single “dumb” quotes, and yes, I occasionally fail to read road signs’ text because I become more captivated by their kerning blunders than their oft-crucial messages. The latest thing that caught my attention was an email I received and viewed on my iPhone. The text hadn’t scaled properly for the device, so I was left reading 2pt type. 2pt! That’s smaller than the fine-print most shifty contracts abuse!

However — as crazy as that is — I get that typography is more than that stuff.

Typography is very much about making words beautiful, but what really makes words beautiful is their function as communicators. Ergo, if the communication is unhindered the æsthetic beauty can be derived from appreciating the type’s functional efficiency. E.g., a concise, clean paragraph keeps distractions to a minimum and allows you to enter almost passively into the text’s meaning.

Lately I’ve been meandering my way through An Essay on Typography, by Eric Gill. Even before diving into type, Gill addresses the divide between mechanical, cold industrialism and organic, soulful humanity:

“There are, then, two worlds & these twain can never be one flesh. They are not complementary to one another; they are, in the liveliest sense of the words, mortal enemies.”

He presents this dichotomy because he realizes that the type’s humanist form is only a part of the whole, and that the remaining part is industrial in nature: conveyance of content. Because the content is the object we’re after, it makes sense why very few seem to care about apostrophes, poor kerning, or terrifically tiny type!

As an æsthetic typographer, of course, these things still bug me. But to purposefully put their importance above that of conveying a message is to throw the form before the function; the cart before the horse; the baby out with the bathwater. Getting caught up in the details is easy, but getting past them frees you up to focus on things that matter more.

Yes — I’m a typographer. And sometimes I just have to endure 2pt type.