It's not the first time Hrant has shoehorned his ideas about how we shouldn't be thinking about strokes into other threads. It's an interesting idea so I thought it deserved its own thread.
If you want your design to achieve its maximum potential, avoid "stroke". Language shapes thought.
Comments
I'm not trying to cause trouble. I just know it's a matter of time before some bombastic statement about strokes is going to show up in a random thread so I figured we may as well give it its own thread. And Hrant, why don't you start a thread about your descenders theory so we don't have to hear about in any thread that dares to mention a descender?
If you want to talk about it, go ahead. But I feel sorry for students who come here expecting something helpful and they get these up-is-down, black-is-white declamatory statements. And nobody wants to argue with it in the middle of a student's thread. Nobody likes it. It's the reason I left Typophile. It's the reason I'm looking elsewhere. Just stop it. There's nothing wrong with having ideas that are different. Stop shoehorning them into threads as every opportunity. So many times I've seen a thread where someone has made the mistake of mentioning the wrong thing and bang, next message is Hrant with something about descender frequency AGAIN. Make all the new threads you want but please stop taking advantage of people's reluctance to contradict you in the middle of a thread about something else.
I personally always see in shape and counter-shape, with one building the other. I don't care if others agree or like it or hate it. I am not offended by disagreement. I don't even have a name for my way of working because as soon as you get an exact term, you limit the process to what has already been done.
I do, however, dislike dogma. Dogma counteracts open design. If any individual chooses to be only stroke conscious, so be it. If any person chooses whatever they want to call the opposite of stroke, fine, so be it. Just don't draw dogmatic lines in the sand and say all others are bound by either.
This is supposed to be an open forum to discuss typographical concepts. We don't need to foster antagonism, we need to foster inquiry and dialogue and let any reader decide their own path. We should, however, not try to dismiss others' ideas or belittle them.
As for Hrant trying to derail threads with off topic comments, let’s remember that was a major factor in the creation of Typedrawers. On Typophile Hrant and Richard fink were constantly going offtopic or arguing and not being moderated, so many regular users left. It’s true that unmoderated spam attacks were what pushed me over the edge to start Typedrawers, but I had been thinking of doing so for a good six months after private conversations with people I missed. It would be a shame to see that happen again here. Hrant, you have some interesting and intelligent things to say. Stop being a shit about how you say them and just start new threads.
It's probably a good idea to have a go-to repository of things I can point to instead of repeating myself (although hand-crafting a contextual reply does have its merits). That said, if I were to watch people give bad advice and keep my mouth shut, I would be a lazy hypocritical traitor. Which of course I am to some extent (like anybody else) but the less the better.
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The deepest I've gone into the problem with stroke-based type design (AKA chirography) was my talk at ATypI 2009 in Mexico City, where I put forth that in the Display-Text axis, the stroke has æsthetic value towards the former, while detracting from the functionality of the latter. So it's not worthless. But it is anti-reading, and certainly highly over-rated, thanks in large part to the mediæval charisma of Gerrit Noordzij. More than anything I hope to right balances. And this one is waaay off.
In contrast to the depth of that talk, I think the most succinct I've been was my Typographica review of Legato in 2004. Slightly tweaked:
"Its essential attribute is that the white inside and between the letterforms is made equal in importance to the black bodies of the individual letters. It does this by disposing of the linking between the two edges of the black, something inherent in the conventional forming of shapes derived from a marking tool, such as the broad-nib pen. By making the black and white harmonize, Legato approaches an ideal of readability, since reading involves the perception of positive/negative space as one thing."
Painting the black is facile and romantic; an expression of personal physical control. Essentially Art, not Design. It cannot result in ideal white, no matter how much it wants to. The more the black contorts itself to approach ideal white, the more it sacrifices its own integrity, while never arriving at the ideal. I enjoy drawing this parallel: Thomas Jefferson loved Sally Hemings. But she was a slave nonetheless. The concept of the stroke precludes the harmonious marriage in ideal notan.
Typography, like many other technologies, is full of terminology borrowed from previous technologies — or from earlier periods of typographic technology — which have become dead metaphors, i.e. terminology that we don't think of as metaphorical, because it is the common terminology of the technology, e.g. 'foundry'. I consider 'stroke' to be very much in that terminological category: it is a term borrowed from the description of written signs, and its application in typography begins as metaphor. This kind of evolution of a term — from a specific meaning in one technology, to a metaphorical meaning in another technology, to a dead metaphor — often happens because there is a benefit in having a single term to discuss common features of things independent of the technologies that produce those things, e.g. the constituent structural elements of letters and other signs. Having different, specialist terminology to describe parts of letters depending on how those letters have been produced would make type design a precious and exclusionary practice.
Hrant thinks there's some kind of strong Whorfian determinism in the use of the term 'stroke'. I think that's no more the case than in using the term 'foundry' for a digital type company.
Prefix "para" if you must, but since I feel in a font that's necessarily so anyway I think it's superfluous, and could even serve as a form of apologism/distancing that distracts us. Because as @Thomas Phinney said elsewhere language does influence us; it doesn't have to be Deterministic (nothing is anyway). I believe that saying "stroke" (wait, not "parastroke"? :-) does reduce the chances an individual will come to grips with notan, thereby holding us back collectively.
As an aside (hoping its own thread would be overkill... :-) concerning "foundry": if somebody managed to explain how it does more harm than good, I would stop using it, and encourage others to also stop. See also:
In particular, when I look at an A or V which is perfectly symmetrical, it looks like the “down” stroke is thinner than the “up”.
Like so many things in type, designing notan is "subvisible": requiring training to see. Observing things like Legato is good training.
I am more conscious of challenging the pen stroke than I would have been if Hrant was not butting in in every thread – subtweeting my every tweet, no matter how unrelated the topic. But, honestly, I’m not sure some of the stuff we publish would have existed if not for that. I appreciate having my ideas challenged from time to time – only not all the time.
I think you're greatly exaggerating. For one thing, you stopped following me long ago.
Agreed, it's a great help in understanding the problem. Like how I would have been far less likely to understand the harm of chirography without Noordzij's formalization of the moving front, and I am thankful for that. The multiple schools now perpetuating mediævalism, not so much.
I think the term stroke is just the one end of the equation. Why it sticks around as a valid and useful term is less because of writing and more because of seeing.
Asking somebody to re-type thoughts? Yeah, bibliographies are evil too.
What we imagine seeing.
Seeing is exactly why chirography is misplaced.
Yes, language affects thought, but does not determine it.
Readability is a product of familiarity. Stroke doesn't aid or hinder finding a perfect design, unless you are talking about machine readability. Even then...
I think this statement needs some nuance though: