Reading: Typography and Culture
Originally published/posted by Anna Savina (Summer 2017)
In Savina’s personal newsletter (in Russian), she regularly chooses the best longreads about tech, media, and design. Recently, she’s started a new section where she publishes lists of articles worth reading created by different interesting people from all over the world. Since her newsletter is in Russian, she’s decided to post these lists in English on Medium, too. The sixth selection of good reads is created by Ksenya Samarskaya — a creative practitioner, brand consultant, and AIGA/NY board member. Samarskaya worked with Apple, Google, Font Bureau, IDEO and many other companies.
“Engaging with types as cultural signifiers — connotations for region, history, point-of-view — is my practice, so when asked to pull together readings it was assumed they’d be about the subtleties of multilingual typography. But, now I’m on break, typing this amidst arid badlands where I’ve been focusing on zooming out and rebooting my perspectives.
There’s a handful of articles that address the nuance of culture and type, but in practical terms there’s no direct shortcut. Each design and each new system contain hours (days, weeks) of primary research and prospective solutions. The most important data points I’ve encountered have always come from the street: conversations in Serbia about the different political connotations of Cyrillic forms, scribbled farm-signs in rural Greece that reveal clues of how they approach the letterform, observing my grandmother’s precisely mapped-out notes.
While I engage in writ instructionals, to a new reader they can be misinterpreted as rules. The assumption of ‘wrong’ isn’t all subjective, but it’s not cut-and-dried. Type is alive, just as language is alive. The play and fascination happens at the edges — at the almost-wrong — with the creation of new meaning or the giving voice to the previously silent.”
Understanding the terrain is vital for any serious adventuring. History, neuroscience, and anthropology all help explore possible reasons why patterns have landed where they have, and are a solid foundation to start building upon.
- The Structures of Letters and Symbols Throughout Human History are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes by Mark Changizi / Changizi Blog / 14 minutes
- The Uncanny Correlation Between Altitude and Language Development with Caleb Everett by Mike Vuolo / Slate / 19 minutes
Culture is a human creation, and its rules are in constant flux. With everything a negotiation, it’s vital to take note of who’s lecturing. Just as literature or media forms our understanding of who we are, typography gets embedded in our identity. Expertise needs to go hand-in-hand with a diversity of opinions and backgrounds.
- A short history of the current rules of pronunciation by Nick Kapur / Twitter / 3 minutes
- Ways of Seeing by John Berger / Amazon / 176 pages
Inspiration comes from everywhere. The concept of what an alphabet is, what it can do, or what its purpose is, is vast. There’re already fonts and unicode-points for math symbols, historic languages, braille, box-drawing symbols, and emoji, with many other uses still unwritten.
