Typographers on Type

"This is a lovely book because it’s the sort of thing you can dip into without having to have a huge grounding in typography. A biographical and philosophical survey of famous type designers – mostly 20th century. The biographies are brief, and are then followed by texts the type designers wrote about their work, or about type design and its purpose. The most famous one is by Beatrice Ward – ‘Printing Should Be Invisible’. She means that the best type is type you don’t know is there. It’s better known by its other title ‘The Crystal Goblet’, the idea being that if you’re drinking beautiful wine you want to notice the wine and not what you’re drinking from. So, if you’re reading a novel you don’t want to be thinking, ‘That’s a weird font,’ you just want to live in the tale. There are lots of theories about text, and obviously this one doesn’t apply to display advertising when you want the text to arrest you on a tube platform. You also get observations by Edward Johnston, who designed the London Underground typeface, and then Adrian Frutiger, who designed a typeface called Univers which is everywhere. There’s a little bit from Eric Gill. It’s almost a beginners’ guide, a fantastic book if you’re interested in type and want to dip into what the great designers thought about their world. Most of these people are conservative, pre-computers, so they now come across as fairly traditional, though what they said may have been radical at the time."