Alphabet Reform and Dwiggins
On October 8th at the ATypI Conference, we had a lecture by Hrant Papazian on his notion of Alphabet Reform, in which he made the assertion that there was ambiguity in the shapes of related letters which tended to cause the reader to have confusion in the recognition of word shapes. While I had never given any thought to this, as a believer in the near perfection of the alphabetic forms we use in the West, after listening to him one could start to see his point.
It is possible to appeciate the idea that if all ascenders are the same, and all curves are the same, there could be confusion in their interpretation. I've always felt that letter shapes should not be treated as identical, something that computer programs can seem to encourage. The "cut and paste" approach to design tends to produce typefaces that are bland and lifeless, and in a digital world do not recover variation through printing as letterpress did.
The related shapes of letters are not identical; the top of the capital C and the top of the capital S are, in fact, shapes with entirely different vectors and dynamics. Similarly, the bottom curved bowl of a lower case c and the lower case e should be seen as only mildly related, because of the importance of balancing the bottom counter of the e with its top, and with the rhythm and degree of openness of the rest of the enclosed letters in the alphabet. For this reason one can agree that the differences of these related lettershapes do make a major contribution to readability of the wordshapes.
Papazian's theory seemed to lose validity, however, when he showed the shapes he had derived from Lucida. The design of typefaces is above all an art and craft of subtlety, and in the exercise of theory he introduced gross distortions of the letter shapes which, instead of adding to readability in the example he showed, rather drew attention to themselves and their dissonance. I came away unconvinced of the idea - or at least, of the application he showed of the idea.
On The 9th, we saw the lecture about Willam A. Dwiggins by Gerard Unger. In the course of the lecture, Unger showed a number of Dwiggins' type designs. One was an experimental typeface design in which Dwiggins had proposed an idea that seemed similar to that theorized by Papazian. Dwiggins introduced quite uncharacteristic angles into the curved shapes of letters, which seemed to anticipate the notion that adding contrast to the shapes of letters could improve the readability.
This experimental face had no name, but later in his career Dwiggins designed New Caledonia, which also embodied this idea of contrasting angles in the counters of letters, creating strong contrasts in the curves and adding distinctiveness and uniqueness to each letter. Perhaps more than most designers, Dwiggins tended to introduce variables in his letters, crafting the ear on the g to have a unique shape, unrelated to other parts (like the top overhang of the a, or f, for instance), having a round bracket on the bottom left serif of the r but no bracket on the right side of the serif, or adding a fat serif to the bottom of the a which does not appear on other letters.
In this way, treating each letter as a unique expression, Dwiggins seems to have achieved the stated objective described by Papazian, of maximizing the uniqueness of each letter, thus contributing to both the overall readability of the typeface in words, and the vitality of the type mass on the page. New Caledonia is one of the great book typefaces of the 20th century - perhaps because in his subtle way, Dwiggins understood and applied the principles of the uniqueness of letters. It's an idea we should keep in mind.
Cynthia Hollandsworth
