Paying Homage to an Older Medium and How to Break Free
Since the birth of the Gutenberg Bible in the mid-fifteenth century, our writing system has become so thoroughly aligned to the printed word, that the small screen, small keypad seems somehow ill-equipped to perform any sufficient exchange of information. And this will continue to remain the perceived case, until screen typography for the mobile ceases to mimic typographic conventions associated with print. Design engineers seem unaware of such conventions or the implications for the ‘user’, and the following design issues are a direct consequence of allowing a new media (mobile) to remediate an older media (book).
© Susan Campbell, no republication without permission of the author.
- Design engineers working for mobile phone manufacturers insist on a ‘generic’ system font, so typographic control is handed over to the device, not the ‘user’. Having to accept someone else’s font choice is a remnant from the conventions of static print.
- Having to pan content from left to right, and up-down on a small screen is not only taxing on the human digits, it forces the small handheld screen to mimic a much larger desktop screen.
- Predictive text forces the mobile keypad to think it is a QWERTY keyboard. Although predictive text can be helpful in business communications, it effectively pays homage to the old typewriter, and slows down the ‘texter’ with spell-checking and suggested corrections, and generally makes conversational exchange next to impossible.
At this point in the essay, it might assist the reader to illustrate how remediation, or the habit of refashioning, can be broken, i.e. how a new medium can define its own role, so that it no longer serves as a remnant of an older medium.
In 1967, the experimental New Alphabet defined digital typography. This was a theoretical exercise at first, carried out by Wim Crouwel, a Dutch typographic designer, on foot of a visit to a trade show in Germany. There, he saw how the first digital typesetting machines (Rudolf Hell’s Phototypesetter was a replacement for mechanical typesetting) reproduced typography such as the typeface, Garamond, and he was absolutely horrified at the results. As Crouwel understood the problem at the time, the new digital typesetting machines only allowed 90˚or 45˚angles, rendering forms onto a fixed grid of cells. The technology did not cope well with curves, and effectively butchered classical serif typefaces. Crouwel strongly disapproved of such approximated versions of typefaces, and the basic problem, as he saw it, was that the new medium (digital typesetter) was remediating an older medium (movable type). So Crouwel set about breaking away from the present writing system, remarking: “We need to move on to a completely different form of letter”, and he later conceived the New Alphabet.
© Susan Campbell, no republication without permission of the author.
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