Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Continued experiment with dog today.
Type should be beautiful — Screw readable!
Art is skill, that is the first meaning of the word.
I don't think that success is the premise to what is good or bad.
If you look after truth and goodness, beauty looks after herself.
The only place Avant Garde looks good is in the words Avant Garde.
Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.
If you look after goodness and truth, beauty will take care of itself.
Man cannot live on the human plane, he must be either above or below it.
Helvetica is the jeans, and Univers the dinner jacket. Helvetica is here to stay.
I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.
Without philosophy man cannot know what he makes; without religion he cannot know why.
The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist.
To me designing has never been a job or profession. It's a way of life, like a priest or rabbi.
Doing something a long time does not mean you're good. It only means you've done it a long time.
There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools.
It is freely admitted that this "testing" is far from ideal and could even be described as anecdotal.
I am sure in some years from now you will see new posters with just white space and four lines in Garamond.
That state is a state of slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him.
The value of the creative faculty derives from the fact that faculty is the primary mark of man. To deprive man of its exercise is to reduce him to subhumanity.
Typography must be as beautiful as a forest, not like the concrete jungle of the tenements It gives distance between the trees, the room to breathe and allow for life.
The whole point with type is for you not to be aware it is there. If you remember the shape of a spoon with which you just ate some soup, then the spoon had a poor shape.
Science is analytical, descriptive, informative. Man does not live by bread alone, but by science he attempts to do so. Hence the deadliness of all that is purely scientific.
Art itself has become an extraordinary thing - the activity of peculiar people - people who become more and more peculiar as their activity becomes more and more extraordinary.
The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer’s task with the help of this black to capture space, to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them.
When I put my pen to a blank sheet, black isn’t added but rather the white sheet is deprived of light. [] Thus I also grasped that the empty spaces are the most important aspect of a typeface.
Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.
From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.
Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it -- that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and Mammon.
The contributions that one makes in typography, design, and art in general cannot be, and must not be measured on how much money is involved. That would lead to total chaos. The word itself (contribution) is to give to a common purpose.
The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences. No one can say that the O’s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl’s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.
If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food from the bowl, the other to take information off the page... When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.
Culture is a sham if it is only a sort of Gothic front put on an iron building -- like Tower Bridge -- or a classical front put on a steel frame -- like the Daily Telegraph building in Fleet Street. Culture, if it is to be a real thing and a holy thing, must be the product of what we actually do for a living -- not something added, like sugar on a pill.
Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to. But this is not to say that because we have got used to something demonstrably less legible than something else would be if we could get used to it, we should make no effort to scrap the existing thing. This was done by the Florentines and Romans of the fifteenth century; it requires simply good sense in the originators & good will in the rest of us.