Calyx Design

o … sometimes my train of thought leaves from an unusual station.

During my morning perambulations a car cruised past, blasting bass-heavy tunes from enormous speakers. The sub-sonic frequencies made the vehicle’s bodywork vibrate so loudly that the music itself was completely drowned out.

You probably hear this particular kind of sonic sandwich all the time. In fact, this combination — loud, heavy bass combined with an even louder rattling trunk — is ubiquitous: cars just aren’t constructed for this low-frequency assault; a couple of pieces of bodywork are always going to protest by making some extra noise.

The funny thing is, I’ve actually begun to associate the two sounds. Can it be that this awful rattling — a seemingly undesirable side effect — is developing its own positive aesthetic associations? Maybe I’m wrong about the inevitablity of rattling, and people have begun to make it happen as a conscious choice!

It wouldn’t be the first time that technology has influenced cultural aesthetics.

Rock …

Consider the guitar. Prior to electrically-aided amplification, clarity of tone was the norm. Early vacuum-tube driven amplifiers overloaded easily, though, and over time the distorted sound of those over-driven tubes became an essential component of blues (‘Muddy Waters invented electricity’), rockabilly, and the juggernaut of rock and roll.

This particular tube-distorted, once-unbearable sound has become beautiful. It’s now so essential to music that modern amplifiers strive to digitally emulate the sound of archaic tube technology, and vintage amps sell for a fortune on eBay.

…and Harder Rock.

Which led me, naturally enough, right to thinking about typography.

Serifs, the tiny “feet” that appear on many familiar typefaces, are another example of a technological necessity that evolved into an aesthetic standard. These little flourishes were born from the difficulties Roman stonecutters ran into chiseling letterforms into marble. Incising letters involved cutting a V-shaped channel along the length of a stroke, and finishing with a perpendicular cut to square off the end. Making those three planes intersect perfectly was really hard, so these artisans worked out a little trick: just extend the triangular shape past those corners, making any imperfection impossible to notice (an antique example of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”).

So. Carving in stone was difficult, and the unintended consequence was that “serifs” have became embedded in aesthetic culture; it’s the way we think type oughtta look. And after centuries of technological repetition, from wood type to metal, to — well, chances are you’re reading this very post in serif type, on a digital display. These pixels are a long way from the stonecutter’s chisel, but here they are — a cultural transmission from Emperor Trajan’s time beamed right into your modern eyeballs.

Blackletter Blues

So here’s the final stop on the barely-sequitur train: since I’m thinking about typefaces, what about Blackletter?

Call it “Gothic” or “Old English”, split the family into textura, fraktur, bastarda and rotunda… the baroque curlicues, spiky facets, plunging verticality, the chiaroscuro effected by its thickest thicks and thinnest thins, the larger-than-life operatic drama of it all … these are the results of technology too. Those angled strokes, thicks and thins, and all the rest of it stem directly from the calligraphic scratching of a medieval scribe’s sharpened quill. Blackletter is the middle-ages, still redolent of parchment, candle-black ink and time a-plenty.

And I just love the face. There, I said it.

I know, I know … most of the planet still despises it. I ran across a gratuitous attack just yesterday — Steven Heller sideswiped it as “ugly and graceless” in one of his historical graphic design collections. It’s hard to read. It has fascist connotations. And worst of all, it’s … ugly.

HARD TO READ: Bah! As Emigre founder and typographer Zuzana Licko succinctly put it, “we read best what we read most”. The first newspaper was set in blackletter, as was the first printed Bible. It’s only difficult to read because it’s gone out of fashion, and our eyeballs don’t know what to make of its spiky, faceted forms. Practice makes perfect, as has been empirically demonstrated, so let’s just toss that one out.

FASCIST: It’s long been damned by association with Hitler and the Nazi regime. And of course they used it, and so did the Bolsheviks, along with everybody else in Germany. It is, of course, an essentially German creation.

What few know, thought, is this: the Third Reich itself banned the typeface as grotesque and decadent, going so far as to issue a official order to use roman type only in all official communications. Ironically, this document itself featured a blackletter headline (stupid Nazis).

UGLY: I’ve think I’ve probably already made my feelings clear on that point.

The Pendulum Swings…

So. Is the resuscitation of blackletter (my fondest hope) actually possible? It’s still way out of fashion, except in the vernacular ghettos of heavy-metal band names, newspaper mastheads and skateboard graphics.

As a teensy glimmer of hope, though, there’s a movement to rehabilitate the maligned typeface already underway in Germany. In Berlin last fall I noticed a good half dozen fancy-pants design books devoted to the subject, with more on the way. I’ve also started to see it popping up in both high-end fashion magazines and in graffiti (the bleeding edge of design gentrification). So I believe it’s about to make a comeback. Of course, I also believe that one day, the San Francisco Giants will win the World Series.

More to the point, if human ears can learn to perceive the sound of a rattling car trunk as aural bliss, anything is possible.

This entry was posted Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 10:19 am and is filed under BLOG, Rants, Typography. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.