Type as Human
Letters are people too! Here’s why I think so.
I had a thought the other day, while designing a Kannada letter at work. I thought, with quite the strong impulse, “This letter looks sick.” I didn’t mean ‘cool’; I meant that it looked sickly and fragile. The letter did not seems like a healthy Kannada letter. At face value, however, this analysis did not make sense; it’s just a letter.
What was, in fact, problematic, were the proportions of the letter. A curve was raised a little too high and a little to the left of its normative proportions. Once this diagnosis was done and the appropriate surgery performed, I felt like it breathed again; it laughed.
This set me thinking—what was it that made me compare this character of a script to a human body atrophied by disease? In this blog, I collect and compile my understanding of type as it is compared to a human body.
Skeleton and flesh
Take the words ‘skeleton’ and ‘flesh’ that are used to describe the construction of a letterform. The skeleton is the underlying form that dictates and supports the form, while the flesh is the mass that bulges forth; both giving the letter its personality. (If I’m being silly: they give the character its character.)
It seems that these words have been taken from our own biological vocabulary. In the following image, it is shown that the variations in the skeleton and flesh of the letterforms impart monumentally different visual identities to the letters.
Humanist
We use the term ‘humanist’ to describe typefaces that follow traditional forms of letterforms. Such letter structures follow conventional forms and are therefore easy to read, and thus preferred for lengthy texts.
It seems to me that a good text typeface follows almost all the norms of its ancestors, in skeleton and flesh, just as the average person looks like all the humans before them. I can’t help but draw parallels between our own evolution and the mutations of letterforms. Contemporary Kannada letters, for example, look drastically different from their predecessors centuries ago. These changes in form were influenced by the tools of writing and writing surfaces that bore the letters. It’s as if the letters mutated in form according to the changing times, like we humans lost our coat of fur through the ages.
The naked human body
In ‘The Fountainhead’ by Ayn Rand, the protagonist – Howard Roark – claims that a good building is like a human body; it requires no features that do not contribute to its purpose and essence.
“Why wouldn’t you like to see a human body with a curling tail with a crest of ostrich feathers at the end? And with ears shaped like acanthus leaves? It would be ornamantal, you know, instead of the stark, bare ugliness we have now. Well, why don’t you like the idea? Because it would be useless and pointless. Because the beauty of the human body is that it hasn’t a single muscle which doesn’t serve its purpose; that there’s not a line wasted; that every detail of it fits one idea, the idea of a man and the life of a man.”
This argument was made to champion buildings that did not emulate unnecessary pillars, domes and flourishes, and it probably works equally well for type. Consider the Anu Fonts that cater to Indic scripts. In the Kannada catalog, there are fonts that carry a band of decorations across their thick bellies, like tacky festoons in a party hall. These take much more away from the letterforms than they add.
To build, or to birth
Fred Smeijers, in his book Counterpunch, says that “rational and technical typefaces might look well-designed for present-day purposes, certainly when you look at them in large sizes… But do not compose a book in such a typeface: after a few pages you will be disappointed.”
The way I interpret this statement is a comparison between Helvetica and a traditional book face. Helvetica is like a beautiful array of buildings, with the reason and precision of architecture. On the other side, a humanist text typeface carries the ‘imperfections’ and variations that our eye searches for within the monotony of a long block of text.
It seems to me, at this juncture, that I must design typefaces as if they are living, breathing beings that interact and harmonise within and without, rather than shapes with distinct black and white that shall be repeated and reused at our will.
