New Media Typography
Otília Ármeán · 2016
Changing Landscape of Technologies and TypographyThe semiotic changes are vast enough to warrant the term 'revolution', of two kinds; of the modes of representation on the one hand, from the centrality of writing to the increasing significance of image; and of the media of dissemination on the other, from the centrality of the medium of the book to the medium of the screen (Kress 2005, 6).However, owing to the universal access to digital technology, the word »typography« is increasingly used to refer to the arrangement of any written material and is certainly no longer restricted to the work of a typographer. Everyone is a typographer now... (Jury 2006, 8).Ideally, this means that authors can now influence these aspects of their message as well, they can take into account the typographic form that their work will present itself to the readers already when choosing the words, joining the sentences, coupling the images of their works. However, it may also mean that the typographic choices are neglected or result in a series of bad or unfounded decisions, because typographic choices are today no longer part of the publications, of disseminating (expert) opinion in the public space. Clearly, the webpages of new media, news feeds of social networks or publishing areas of blogs do not usually permit the information to go through all the traditional steps of publication (review, proofreading, personalized typographic form).However, the information published on online interfaces cannot fully lack typographic works: and this is the point where the user, the commissioner is exposed to the expert, the typographer, the graphic designer. Desktop publishing software made it possible for everyone to create their own wedding invitations, but the web-based interfaces of new media only lets one choose between pre-coded options. It is far from certain that we can always set the typeface for our text, and we must also come to terms with the fact that the typographic parameters of our text may be modified according to the users' needs when downloading, saving or reading our content.Nonetheless, it is a great mistake to assume that typography will be subsidiary or less important because of all these changes and needless to be researched on its own. Experts dealing with selling various products, services and information pay huge sums for the research of users' habits, the effect of advertisements, conditions of readability and even eye movements. More precisely, they finance researches in order to find out what makes something easily readable or remembered, to find the determinants of what captures our attention from a huge amount of information, what are our eyes drawn to, what we read through and why. Part of our reading habits are biologically, physiologically determined (the size of the letters we can read, the distance it takes for letters to be distinguishable), another part derives from our culture, so it is learned (the form of lines and margins, reading direction - everything that can be associated with different conventions in a different writing system).Bradley, for instance, analyzes the Gutenberg diagram, Z and F pattern layouts, and draws attention to the fact that a well functioning visual hierarchy can overwrite these patterns and program our eyes to follow other layouts (Bradley 2011). The reader can be permanently trained and new conventions - even if for one single publication - can always be formed in addition to the old ones. New rules can be based on forgotten habits (for instance marginal notes), but also on new developments of visual communication (formal changes of new media, for instance the film, mobile applications or graphical interfaces may all significantly change users' habits.)This way, in the light of the indisputable advantages of visual communication, typeface choices and character size (in terms of good readability on various carriers) as well as the text as a typographically shaped image are paramount. …