Intro to Hyper-typography

Have you ever had an Emperor's New Clothes moment?

A moment when you felt you could see something that was so obvious, plain as day, that no one else seems to notice? It's a strange position to be in. Either you're wrong, oblivious, missing something fundamental, or everyone else is. In both cases you wind up questioning your own sanity.

This is how I feel about typography today, specifically on the web. It makes me question my sanity. There's this giant gap in knowledge apparent almost everywhere I look. I've been getting deeper and deeper into researching and documenting my findings and my office is starting to look like that Conspiracy Theorist trope, a million scraps of paper taped to every wall. Speaking of which, I should go buy some red thread.

Hypertypographic precepts

All graphic design is typography
This is a grandiose claim, and I invite your full skepticism on the matter. It's not important that I convince you of the truth of this claim however, but rather that I convince you of its utility. It's a useful idea. Because typography is useful. This is the central theme of my thesis and manifesto.

Typography is not fonts
Fonts aren't even fonts. The thing most people call a "font" is actually a "typeface", and a font is actually a typeface at a given size and weight. But that's not my point. My point is that most people think typography is fonts, but that's like saying movies consist solely of actors, ice cream sundaes consist of cherries-on-top, and icebergs are nothing but tip.

Confused already?
Great. We'll fix that. It doesn't matter what you call them, typefaces are only one part of the craft of typography. You can make beautiful typographic designs with the commonplace fonts, and adding a fancy font to an otherwise sloppy design will not improve it. Typography is much more than fonts.

Typography is invisible

Nobody sees typography
Typography is the art of making text invisible. When done well, the text is transferred so smoothly to the mind of the reader that they don't even notice it. It slides right in – or bashes and booms, or dances, or marches – the character of the typography assists the communication of the message. Nobody realizes that all design is typography because, when it's done well, you can't tell.

Nobody knows typography
Over the past few decades the number of people with access to typographic tools has exploded. Everyone has a word-processor in their pocket, connected to a distribution network, ready to publish anything at a moment's notice. And yet I'd bet the percentage of people who know what a "measure" is in typography is nearly zero. (Measure is the length of a line.)

The internet is mostly text
Another counter-intuitive claim. What you remember of your online experiences is likely not the text. We're impressed by multimedia; videos photos, music and memes; and social media, our interactions with others. But this all happens over text. The images and videos are all displayed within text-based websites. And even the images themselves often contain a lot of text

The internet is 100% text
There are lots of parts to "the internet" outside of HTML but most of what you see online is rendered hypertext, which is an extension of text. This fact stengthens my case that the entirety of web design can be considered a subdomain of typography and not the other way around.

We need a new typography

These points above: the unknown format, content, and overloading of functionality; all contribute to occlude the value of typographic approaches in the context of web design. If you look up "web typography" you're going to find a lot of articles about fonts.

Typography is a team sport
I've got this image in my mind of the typical typography lover; someone with an art degree who cares a disproportionate amount about the typeface selection on the lunch menu. I think that people think that people who care about typography are silly, fussing over minute details that most people can't even perceive. I would guess that most people on a web development team believe they have nothing to do with typography. But it's not the case. Whether you're doing front-end dev or back-end dev or content strategy or project management or just about anything else in the information industry you not only use typography, you also affect its use.

No format, no content
In typography you begin with a text and a format and you endeavour to craft the layout and display of the text on the page in such a way that best favours the message and intent of the work.

In web design, the problem is more abstract. You usually don't know what the text will be, and you almost never know the precise format of the page.

UI overload
Also, in web, there tends to be a large number of demands on the user interface that don't have direct equivalents in print. An obvious example is the omnipresent global nav bar that spans the top of so many websites: books might have a table of contents, or an appendix, or footnotes, or other affordances for navigating the text and related resources, but these things aren't displayed on every single page. In englineering terms, web UI is overloaded.

The web is failing at typography
I can give lots of examples. The brand guidelines look excellent. The style guide is clear. Every element of the design system is specified and communicated and published. And yet, the implementation is wrong, or the design was ill considered, or everyone is blindly following common practices that are far from best practices.

Typography as a technology
If we treat typography as the base technology that underlies graphic design, it helps us approach the problem of how to use it. Design is vaguely creative. Typography comes with clear goals and guides.

Hypertypography : the typography of hypertext

We need a typography that people will learn, engage with, understand, use, and improve upon.

Why not just use the existing version of typography that we already have? That's an excellent fucking question. That's what I want to know.

Why is no one using typography? First, people don't think it's relevant, they don't see the value in it. Second, in some ways, traditional typography fails to provide a useful framework for thinking about text in the abstract – we need to extend typography, not for the screen, but to accomodate the non-physical nature of digital content.