The Typography of Order: Emil Ruder

Emil Ruder, Basel 1965

Emil Ruder, Basel 1965.

Typography is primarily designed as a means to bring a determined order to which a variety of diverse realities are subjected. It is no longer about ambitious aesthetic postulates and "creations," but rather about responding, formally and functionally, to the demands of everyday life. The first principle: clear readability of the text. The "textual" mass of a page must be measured in such a way that it can be assimilated without unnecessary effort by the reader. Lines of more than sixty letters are difficult to read. The spaces between words, characters, and lines must be judiciously proportioned. The problem of form arises only once this elementary condition has been duly fulfilled. But of course, these rules do not in any way mean a limitation of artistic freedom, which should not be enslaved to a closed and rigid system.

Typography, characterized by the mechanical manufacture of characters and right-angled composition work, requires a clear distribution of its elements, sober and strict proportions and formulation. In contrast, the free line of an illustration - a hair, for example, or the curling of some cord - constitutes the most striking contrast.

All attempts to escape these rules are enemies of soundly conceived typography. The so-called "artisanal" irregularities in the shape of characters and the use of alternately varied letters are only foreign bodies borrowed from reproduction techniques other than typography, which is, even more than applied and advertising art, an expression of our time; in other words, it is essentially precision and order.

Reciprocal relationships between function and form.

When grouping characters to form words, lines, paragraphs, and pages, many questions arise regarding the relationships between function and form. We will try to illustrate this using the word "buch" (book).

Emil Ruder

In figure 1, one first reads the word itself (buch), and only afterward perceives a certain image. In other words, the primacy of readability is strictly observed. We can speak of good typography when the goal is achieved in a satisfactory manner, which is apparently the case here. With the vertical composition in figure 2, readability is diminished and form is more emphasized. Figure 3: composed from top to bottom, the line is barely readable. Figure 4: the mirrored image, although familiar to typographers, is unreadable for the layperson and is thus perceived only as form. The simple inversion of letters (fig. 5), which can be formally beautiful, also renders the word unreadable. (This also reminds us that the formal qualities of written or printed matter appear more evident in an unknown language.) In figure 13, the letters are arranged in an entirely new, arbitrary way. Curves and straight lines unite in a formal play without verbal meaning: typography has lost its purpose.

White spaces.

The internal white space of characters is essential, as its proper form is of the utmost importance, while the spaces between words and lines contribute to the readability and beauty of the text. Similarly, the non-inked spaces have an incomparable optical value.

Emil Ruder

Our example shows white spaces of clearly different sizes and values in the composition of three letters. The intervals are narrow and, as a result, more intensely white; the white inside the 'o' is somewhat more muted, while the one above it is the weakest. The whole creates a white space full of tension and vitality that constitutes a value in itself, which typography consciously uses.

Formal unity.

All printed materials with multiple pages - brochures, magazines, and books - require rigorous formal unity. This unity cannot preside over an isolated page, but must extend to the whole and therefore demands perfect logical conception from the typographer. The typographical chaos that abounded at the beginning of our century was primarily evident in the inability to formally connect the pages of the same work. One of the postulates of the rehabilitation of typography, inaugurated by William Morris, was precisely the principle of "linear register," or the concordance between the lines on the front and back of a page.

For soundly modern typography, the greatest possible harmony between the various parts of a multi-page work is almost self-evident. When a book is illustrated, its illustrations cannot be arbitrary but must follow a determined plan.

Emil Ruder

The illustrations opposite show some of the pages of a book with rigorously thought-out formal design: half-title, introduction, title, copyright, chapter head, and text page. The height of chapter beginnings is the same throughout the work, and the layout of the title page also adopts this level. A commercial enterprise's letterhead should be designed with the same logic. The primary element is the letterhead itself, to which all elements of correspondence and information must be subordinated: invoice and offer forms, memos, business cards, and envelopes.

Grid system.

In printed materials with numerous changes in text, captions, and illustration formats, the layout can be based on a "grid" or division of the page into squares. Strict observance of this scheme and the sizes it implies leads to a soundly logical typographic realization of all pages. The smaller and more numerous the elements of the scheme, i.e., the squares, the more numerous the possibilities themselves.

Emil Ruder

The example on the left shows a "grid" of 36 squares serving as a basis for the layout of a complex set of images and text. This square scheme allows for about 70 illustration sizes and thus meets the greatest potential needs for variability. The example on the right illustrates the layout, according to the "grid" system, of a page composed of two illustrations with subtitle and text...

Writing and printing.

Handwriting and printing are two entirely distinct techniques that must remain clearly separate. Handwriting is personal, spontaneous. The printed character, on the contrary, mechanically cast in the same matrix, always repeats in the same form and is thus impersonal, universal. Its nature, by definition anonymous and neutral, nevertheless opens up ever-renewed formal possibilities. But trying to bring the spontaneity of handwritten text into the form of the printed letter (especially using characters imitating written letters) is equivalent to attempting the impossible, as it claims to reconcile the irreconcilable.

Emil Ruder

Our two illustrations show the same letter from Paul Klee to art dealer Hermann Rupf. In the handwritten text, the author's emotion is clearly evident. The same text, composed in typography, gives a completely different impression: objective and documentary.

Typography and image.

In Far Eastern cultures, image and writing constitute an indissoluble unity. The technique of the brush tracing characters and that of woodcut engraving are jointly determinant. We are far from being in such an enviable situation, and it is all too often extremely difficult for us to harmonize image and typography. Modern typography must therefore strive all the more intensely to achieve harmony between image and writing. For example, the letter, by adopting the same line intensity as the drawing, can harmonize with it. Conversely, it is no less possible to contrast illustrations and characters, for example, the discreet gray of a printed surface with the deep black of an intensely inked illustration.

Emil Ruder

Our example shows how typography can accord with the subject of the image: the vertical dominant of the left third of the image harmonizes with the typographic composition surfaces at the top and bottom.

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