Design as Art - Bruno Munari
I have previously read Design as Art by the multi-talented Italian designer Bruno Munari. One of the key points of Munari's philosophy is around beauty, function and acessibility, meaning a large part of his studies links into the forms vs function debate.
Within Design as Art there is one particularly relevant chapter 'The Shape of Words' which of course is the natural place to start with context to the essay, however, I'm sure I'll drop in and out of the book throughout the next few months.
"Not only does each letter of a word have a shape of its own but all its letters taken together give shape to the word" - describing a holistic approach to type comprehension, referencing the principles of Gestalt.
"The lines and the blank spaces between one letter and the next all contribute to giving the word its overall shape. This is especially the case with words we are used to reading - or forced to read - every day: the names of newspapers, or big firms, foreign countries, film stars, the names dinned into us by assiduous advertisers, words that greet us wherever we look such as 'sport', and the 'in' words of the moment such as 'pop'. These we seize at a glance, without having to spell out each letter or syllable. That is, we recognize their overall shape, a thing we cannot do with unfamiliar words such as tetradecapodous or tryanlyonnonodont, especially when these are written in the tiniest print on a minute scrap of paper rolled round a medicine bottle, for example. Some words, such as the names of well-known firms or products, are so familiar to us that if we block out most of the letters we can still read the name correctly at first glance and only notice afterwards that something is slightly unusual. But this can only happen if we preserve the general shape of the word.
Within Design as Art there is one particularly relevant chapter 'The Shape of Words' which of course is the natural place to start with context to the essay, however, I'm sure I'll drop in and out of the book throughout the next few months.
"Not only does each letter of a word have a shape of its own but all its letters taken together give shape to the word" - describing a holistic approach to type comprehension, referencing the principles of Gestalt.
"The lines and the blank spaces between one letter and the next all contribute to giving the word its overall shape. This is especially the case with words we are used to reading - or forced to read - every day: the names of newspapers, or big firms, foreign countries, film stars, the names dinned into us by assiduous advertisers, words that greet us wherever we look such as 'sport', and the 'in' words of the moment such as 'pop'. These we seize at a glance, without having to spell out each letter or syllable. That is, we recognize their overall shape, a thing we cannot do with unfamiliar words such as tetradecapodous or tryanlyonnonodont, especially when these are written in the tiniest print on a minute scrap of paper rolled round a medicine bottle, for example. Some words, such as the names of well-known firms or products, are so familiar to us that if we block out most of the letters we can still read the name correctly at first glance and only notice afterwards that something is slightly unusual. But this can only happen if we preserve the general shape of the word.
An experiment anyone can make is to cut out the letters of a newspaper title, for example, and push these closer together until the upright stroke of one letter also does duty for the next. This gives a clearer idea of the shape of the word... Knowledge of the shape of words and the possibilities
these offer for communication can be very useful to the graphic designer when he comes to make warning signs that have to be taken in quickly, like the ones on motorways, that one cannot stop to decipher".
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