Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether.
Tipografija je nešto što koristimo u ogromnim količinama. U većini svijeta je potpuno neizbježna. Svejedno, samo se nekolicina korisnika zanima pitanjem odakle dolazi određeni oblik pisma i kada i tko ga je stvorio ako je u njegov nastanak uopće upletena ljudska ruka i ako se nije, na neki način, samo od sebe pojavio iz softverskog etera.
But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good.
No ja se tim stvarima moram baviti. Jer mi je to posao. Jedan sam od vrlo malenog broja onih ljudi koji se jako uzrujaju zbog lošeg razmaka među slovima T i E kakav vidite ovdje. Moram skloniti ovaj slajd. Jer ga ne mogu gledati. Kao ni Chris. Evo, sad je dobro.
So my talk is about the connection between technology and design of type. The technology has changed a number of times since I started work: photo, digital, desktop, screen, web. I've had to survive those changes and try to understand their implications for what I do for design. This slide is about the effect of tools on form. The two letters, the two K's, the one on your left, my right, is modern, made on a computer. All straight lines are dead straight. The curves have that kind of mathematical smoothness that the Bézier formula imposes. On the right, ancient Gothic, cut in the resistant material of steel by hand. None of the straight lines are actually straight. The curves are kind of subtle. It has that spark of life from the human hand that the machine or the program can never capture. What a contrast.
Dakle, u mojem govoru radi se o povezanosti tehnologije i oblikovanja pisama. Tehnologija se promijenila nekoliko puta otkad sam počeo raditi: foto, digitalija, stolna računala, zasloni, web. Morao sam preživjeti te promjene i pokušati razumjeti njihov utjecaj na ono što radim u svijetu dizajna. Ovaj slajd prikazuje utjecaj alata na oblik. Dva slova K, ovo vama slijeva, meni zdesna, je suvremeno i oblikovano je na računalu. Sve ravne linije potpuno su ravne. Krivulje imaju onu vrstu matematičke uglađenosti kakvu definira Bézierova formula. Zdesna je stari Gothic izrezan rukom u otpornom čeliku. Nijedna ravna linija nije uistinu ravna. Krivulje su dosta suptilne. Ona posjeduje onu iskru života koja dolazi od ljudske ruke, kakvu stroj ili program nikada neće moći doseći. Kakav kontrast.
Well, I tell a lie. A lie at TED. I'm really sorry. Both of these were made on a computer, same software, same Bézier curves, same font format. The one on your left was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre, and I did the other one. The tool is the same, yet the letters are different. The letters are different because the designers are different. That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that. I wanted mine to look like that. End of story. Type is very adaptable. Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, type hides its methods. I think of myself as an industrial designer. The thing I design is manufactured, and it has a function: to be read, to convey meaning. But there is a bit more to it than that. There's the sort of aesthetic element. What makes these two letters different from different interpretations by different designers? What gives the work of some designers sort of characteristic personal style, as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, an automobile designer, whatever?
E pa, sad vam lažem. Lažem na TED-u. Zaista mi je žao. Oba su oblikovana na računalu. Isti je softver, iste su Bézierove krivulje, isti je format fonta. Ovo vama slijeva oblikovala je Zuzana Licko u Emigreu, a ja sam napravio drugo. Alat je isti, a slova su drukčija. Slova su drukčija jer su dizajneri drukčiji. I to je sve. Zuzana je htjela da njeno izgleda baš tako. Ja sam htio da moje izgleda ovako. Kraj priče. Tipografija je vrlo prilagodljiva. Za razliku od lijepih umjetnosti poput kiparstva ili arhitekture, tipografija ne otkriva svoje metode. O sebi razmišljam kao o produkt-dizajneru. Ono što ja oblikujem, proizvodi se i ima funkciju: da se čita i prenosi značenje. Ima toga još. Prisutan je i svojevrstan estetski element. Što je to što ova dva slova čini različitima u različitim interpretacijama različitih dizajnera? Što je to što radu pojedinih dizajnera daje karakterističan, osobni stil, kakav možete vidjeti kod dizajnera odjeće ili recimo automobila?
There have been some cases, I admit, where I as a designer did feel the influence of technology. This is from the mid-'60s, the change from metal type to photo, hot to cold. This brought some benefits but also one particular drawback: a spacing system that only provided 18 discrete units for letters to be accommodated on. I was asked at this time to design a series of condensed sans serif types with as many different variants as possible within this 18-unit box. Quickly looking at the arithmetic, I realized I could only actually make three of related design. Here you see them. In Helvetica Compressed, Extra Compressed, and Ultra Compressed, this rigid 18-unit system really boxed me in. It kind of determined the proportions of the design. Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases. So do you look at these and say, "Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem, and by God it shows in the results." I hope not. If I were doing this same job today, instead of having 18 spacing units, I would have 1,000. Clearly I could make more variants, but would these three members of the family be better? It's hard to say without actually doing it, but they would not be better in the proportion of 1,000 to 18, I can tell you that. My instinct tells you that any improvement would be rather slight, because they were designed as functions of the system they were designed to fit, and as I said, type is very adaptable. It does hide its methods. All industrial designers work within constraints. This is not fine art.
Moram priznati da je bilo slučajeva kada sam kao dizajner itekako osjetio utjecaj tehnologije. Ovo je primjer iz sredine 60-ih, prelazak s metalnih slova na fotoslog, s vrućeg na hladno. To je donijelo određene benefite, ali i jedan bitan nedostatak: prostorni sustav koji je nudio samo 18 diskretnih jedinica za smještaj slova. U to vrijeme od mene su zatražili da oblikujem seriju sans serif suženih pisama u što više različitih varijanti, poštujući okvir ovih 18 jedinica. Malo brze aritmetike i shvatio sam da mogu izraditi samo tri srodne varijante. Evo ih. Kod Helvetice Compressed, Extra Compressed i Ultra Compressed, ovaj me je rigidni 18-jedinični sustav zbilja ograničio. Na neki način odredio je proporcije konačnog proizvoda. Ovo su ta pisma, zapravo, njihova mala slova. Kažete li dok ih gledate: "Jadni Matthew, morao se potčiniti problemu i to se, ruku na srce, vidi po rezultatima"? Nadam se da nije tako. Kad bih danas radio taj isti posao, umjesto 18 prostornih jedinica na raspolaganju bih imao 1.000. Razumljivo, načinio bih više varijanti, ali bi li ove tri iz te obitelji tada ispale bolje? Teško je to sada reći ovako bez da se zaista i učini, ali ne bi bile bolje u omjeru od 1.000 naprema 18, u to sam siguran. Osjećaj mi govori da bi bilo kakvo poboljšanje vjerojatno bilo neznatno, stoga što su oblikovane kao funkcije sustava u koji su se trebale uklopiti. Kako sam rekao, tipografija je vrlo prilagodljiva. I ne otkriva metode. Svi produkt-dizajneri rade unutar traženih okvira. A to nije lijepa umjetnost.
The question is, does a constraint force a compromise? By accepting a constraint, are you working to a lower standard? I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged by something that Charles Eames said. He said he was conscious of working within constraints, but not of making compromises. The distinction between a constraint and a compromise is obviously very subtle, but it's very central to my attitude to work.
Sad je pitanje, nameću li okviri kompromis? Prihvaćajući okvire, radite li po nižim standardima? Ne mislim tako i uvijek me je poticalo nešto što je rekao Charles Eames. Rekao je da je svjestan rada u okvirima ali nesvjestan kompromisa. Razlika između okvira i kompromisa je očito vrlo fina, ali je ključna za moj stav prema radu.
Remember this reading experience? The phone book. I'll hold the slide so you can enjoy the nostalgia. This is from the mid-'70s early trials of Bell Centennial typeface I designed for the U.S. phone books, and it was my first experience of digital type, and quite a baptism. Designed for the phone books, as I said, to be printed at tiny size on newsprint on very high-speed rotary presses with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. This is not a hospitable environment for a typographic designer. So the challenge for me was to design type that performed as well as possible in these very adverse production conditions. As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. I had to draw every character by hand on quadrille graph paper -- there were four weights of Bell Centennial — pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line for the keyboard. It took two years, but I learned a lot. These letters look as though they've been chewed by the dog or something or other, but the missing pixels at the intersections of strokes or in the crotches are the result of my studying the effects of ink spread on cheap paper and reacting, revising the font accordingly. These strange artifacts are designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of scale and production process. At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible. This is not the recipe for legibility at small size. It looks very elegant up on a slide. I had to disambiguate these forms of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see in the bottom part of that slide.
Sjećate se ovog čitalačkog iskustva? Telefonski imenik. Ostavit ću vam slajd kako biste mogli uživati u nostalgiji. Ovo je iz ranih pokusa sredinom 70-ih za font Bell Centennial koji sam dizuajnirao za telefonske imenike u Sjedinjenim Državama. Bilo je to moje prvo iskustvo s digitalnom tipografijom i poprilično vatreno krštenje. Oblikovano je za, kako rekoh, telefonske imenike, za tisak u sitnim veličinama na roto-papiru na vrlo brzim roto-presama bojom koja je načinjena iz kerozina i čađi. To baš i nije gostoljubivo okružje za tipografa. Izazov za mene bilo je oblikovanje pisma koje bi se ponašalo čim bolje u tim vrlo nepovoljnim produkcijskim uvjetima. Kako sam rekao, nalazili smo se u ranom djetinjstvu digitalne tipografije. Svaki znak sam morao nacrtati ručno na kvadratićastom papiru -- Bell Centennial imao je četiri debljine -- piksel po piksel i onda kodiranje rastersku liniju po rastersku liniju za tipkovnicu, Trebalo mi je dvije godine, ali puno sam naučio. Ta slova izgledaju kao da ih je prožvakao pas ili nešto drugo ili treće, ali pikseli koji nedostaju na sjecištima i račvanjima linija rezultat su mojeg istraživanja razlijevanja tinte na jeftinom papiru i onoga što sam u skladu s time poduzeo kod oblikovanja fonta. Ti neobični artefakti načinjeni su kako bi kompenzirali neželjene efekte veličine slova i proizvodnog procesa. Prvobitno su u AT&T-u željeli telefonske imenike složene u Helvetici, ali kao što je moj prijatelj Erik Spiekermann rekao u filmu "Helvetica", ako ste ga gledali, slova Helvetice oblikovana su kako bi bila što sličnija jedno drugome. To baš i nije recept za čitkost pri malim veličinama. Na slajdu to izgleda vrlo elegantno. Te sam forme morao učiniti što jasnijima kod Bell Centenniala svojevrsnim otvaranjem likova, kao što vidite u donjem dijelu slajda.
So now we're on to the mid-'80s, the early days of digital outline fonts, vector technology. There was an issue at that time with the size of the fonts, the amount of data that was required to find and store a font in computer memory. It limited the number of fonts you could get on your typesetting system at any one time. I did an analysis of the data, and found that a typical serif face you see on the left needed nearly twice as much data as a sans serif in the middle because of all the points required to define the elegantly curved serif brackets. The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way, they represent the amount of data needed to store each of the fonts. So the sans serif, in the middle, sans the serifs, was much more economical, 81 to 151.
Dakle, idemo u srednje 80-te, na iskon fontova digitalnih obrisa i vektorske tehnologije. U to vrijeme postojao je problem s veličinom fontova, to jest količinom podataka potrebnom za pronalazak i pohranu fonta u memoriji računala. To je ograničavalo broj fontova koji ste u nekom vremenu mogli pohraniti na svom sustavu za tipografski slog. Analizirao sam podatke i zaključio da tipično serifno pismo kakvo vidite slijeva traži skoro dvostruku količinu podataka u odnosu na sans serifno u sredini i to zahvaljujući svim točkama potrebnim da bi se odredila elegantno zakrivljena uporišta serifa. Uzgred rečeno, brojevi pri dnu slajda predstavljaju količinu podataka potrebnu da bi se pohranio svaki od fontova. Tako je sans serif u sredini, sans (bez) serifa, bio puno ekonomičniji. 81 naprema 151.
"Aha," I thought. "The engineers have a problem. Designer to the rescue."
"Aha", pomislio sam, "inženjeri imaju problem. Dizajner stiže upomoć."
I made a serif type, you can see it on the right, without curved serifs. I made them polygonal, out of straight line segments, chamfered brackets. And look, as economical in data as a sans serif. We call it Charter, on the right.
Načinio sam serifno pismo, vidite ga zdesna, bez zakrivljenih serifa. Učinio sam ih poligonalnima, od ravnih linijskih segmenata i skošenih uporišta. I evo - po pitanju količine podataka ekonomično je kao i sans serif. Nazvali smo ga Charter, ovaj zdesna.
So I went to the head of engineering with my numbers, and I said proudly, "I have solved your problem."
Tako sam sa svojim brojevima otišao do glavnog inženjera i ponosno rekao: "Riješio sam vam problem."
"Oh," he said. "What problem?"
"O," reče on meni, "a koji problem?"
And I said, "Well, you know, the problem of the huge data you require for serif fonts and so on."
A ja ću: "Pa znate, problem ogromne količine podataka potrebne za serifne fontove i tako dalje."
"Oh," he said. "We solved that problem last week. We wrote a compaction routine that reduces the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude. You can have as many fonts on your system as you like."
"O," reče on, "taj smo problem riješili prošli tjedan. Napisali smo racionalizacijski protokol koji smanjuje zapreminu svih fontova po redu veličine, tako da na svom sustavu od sada možete imati koliko god fontova hoćete."
"Well, thank you for letting me know," I said.
"Pa hvala što ste me obavijestili", rekao sam.
Foiled again. I was left with a design solution for a nonexistent technical problem.
Opet osujećen. Ostavili su me s dizajnerskim rješenjem za nepostojeći tehnički problem.
But here is where the story sort of gets interesting for me. I didn't just throw my design away in a fit of pique. I persevered. What had started as a technical exercise became an aesthetic exercise, really. In other words, I had come to like this typeface. Forget its origins. Screw that. I liked the design for its own sake. The simplified forms of Charter gave it a sort of plain-spoken quality and unfussy spareness that sort of pleased me. You know, at times of technical innovation, designers want to be influenced by what's in the air. We want to respond. We want to be pushed into exploring something new. So Charter is a sort of parable for me, really. In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link between the technology and the design of Charter. I had really misunderstood the technology. The technology did suggest something to me, but it did not force my hand, and I think this happens very often.
No tu za mene priča postaje interesantna. Svoj rad nisam bacio u napadaju ljutnje. Sačuvao sam ga. Ono što je počelo kao tehnička vježba zaista je postalo estetska vježba. Drugim riječima, zavolio sam to pismo. Zaboravi kako je nastalo, nema veze. Volio sam dizajn radi dizajna. Charterove pojednostavljene forme dale su mu određenu izravnost i skromnu štedljivost koja mi je godila. Znate, u trenucima tehničkih inovacija dizajneri jednostavno žele da na njih utječe ono što je u zraku. Želimo odgovarati na izazove, želimo poticaj na istraživanje novoga. Evo, Charter je za mene nekakva parabola. Na kraju krajeva, nije tu bilo čvrste i izravne uzročno-posljedične veze između tehnologije i oblikovanja Chartera. Zbilja sam krivo protumačio tehnologiju. Ona mi jest nešto sugerirala, ali mi nije ruku natjerala na posao. i mislim da se to događa vrlo često.
You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance.
Znate, inženjeri su vrlo domišljati i unatoč povremenim frustracijama zbog svoje nešto manje domišljatosti, uvijek sam s njima uživao raditi i učiti od njih. Apropos, sredinom 90-ih s Microsoftom sam počeo razgovarati o zaslonskim fontovima. Do tog trenutka svi fontovi na zaslonima bili su prilagođeni već postojeći fontovi za tisak. No Microsoft je ispravno predvidio pokret, dapače stampedo, prema elektroničkoj komunikaciji, čitanju i pisanju na zaslonima, s tiskanim izlazom informacija kao sekundarnim po važnosti.
So the priorities were just tipping at that point. They wanted a small core set of fonts that were not adapted but designed for the screen to face up to the problems of screen, which were their coarse resolution displays. I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed for a particular technology is a self-obsoleting typeface. I've designed too many faces in the past that were intended to mitigate technical problems. Thanks to the engineers, the technical problems went away. So did my typeface. It was only a stopgap. Microsoft came back to say that affordable computer monitors with better resolutions were at least a decade away. So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad, that's more than a stopgap.
Prioriteti su se tada tek počinjali nazirati. Željeli su malu osnovnu garnituru fontova koji ne bi bili prilagođeni, nego namjenski oblikovani za zaslon, kako bi se suočili s problemima koji proizlaze iz prirode zaslona i njihove grube razlučivosti prikaza. Microsoftu sam rekao da je pismo oblikovano samo za određenu tehnologiju pismo koje samo sebe zastarjeva i čini izlišnim. U prošlosti sam oblikovao puno pisama namijenjenih ublažavanju tehničkih problema. Zahvaljujući inženjerima, tehnički problemi su otišli. Pa su tako otišla i moja pisma. Bilo je to samo krpanje. Microsoft je odgovorio da su cjenovno povoljni računalni monitori boljih razlučivosti od nas udaljeni još najmanje desetljeće. Tada sam pomislio, pa desetljeće, nije to loše, to je više od krpanja.
So I was persuaded, I was convinced, and we went to work on what became Verdana and Georgia, for the first time working not on paper but directly onto the screen from the pixel up. At that time, screens were binary. The pixel was either on or it was off. Here you see the outline of a letter, the cap H, which is the thin black line, the contour, which is how it is stored in memory, superimposed on the bitmap, which is the grey area, which is how it's displayed on the screen. The bitmap is rasterized from the outline. Here in a cap H, which is all straight lines, the two are in almost perfect sync on the Cartesian grid. Not so with an O. This looks more like bricklaying than type design, but believe me, this is a good bitmap O, for the simple reason that it's symmetrical in both x and y axes. In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask for more than that. I would sometimes make, I don't know, three or four different versions of a difficult letter like a lowercase A, and then stand back to choose which was the best. Well, there was no best, so the designer's judgment comes in in trying to decide which is the least bad. Is that a compromise? Not to me, if you are working at the highest standard the technology will allow, although that standard may be well short of the ideal. You may be able to see on this slide two different bitmap fonts there. The "a" in the upper one, I think, is better than the "a" in the lower one, but it still ain't great. You can maybe see the effect better if it's reduced. Well, maybe not.
Tako da su me natjerali, uvjerili, i bacili smo se na posao koji će uroditi Verdanom i Georgiom, po prvi put radeći ne na papiru, nego direktno na zaslonu, od prvog piksela. U to vrijeme zasloni su bili binarni. Piksel je bio ili uključen ili isključen. Ovdje vidite obris slova, velikog H, tanku crnu liniju, konturu, ono što se pohranjuje u memoriji, stavljenu preko bitmape, to je ovo sivo područje, što pak predstavlja ono što se prikazuje na zaslonu. Bitmapa se rasterizira iz obrisa. Ovdje kod velikog H, koje je posve u ravnim linijama, obris i bitmapa su skoro u savršenoj podudarnosti na kartezijskoj mreži. To nije slučaj s O. Ovo više liči na zidanje opekom, nego na oblikovanje pisma, ali, vjerujte, ovo je korektno bitmapirano O iz jednostavnog razloga što je simetrično i po osi x i po osi y. Od binarne bitmape zapravo ne možete tražiti više. Katkad bih načinio, ne znam, tri ili četiri različite verzije kompliciranog slova kao što je malo A, i onda bih stao i birao koja je najbolja. E pa, najboljeg nije bilo, tako da se dizajnerova procjena svodila na pokušaj odluke koja je najmanje loša. Je li to kompromis? Što se mene tiče, nije ako radite po najvišem standardu koji tehnologija omogućava, bez obzira što taj standard može biti itekako daleko od idealnog. Na ovom slajdu vjerojatno uočavate dva različita bitmap-fonta. "a" u gornjem je, mislim, bolje nego "a" u donjem, pa ipak nije odlično. Ishod možda bolje možete uočiti ako to smanjimo. Dobro, možda i ne.
So I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist, out of necessity. For a certain kind of temperament, there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect but can still be done to the best of your ability. Here's the lowercase H from Georgia Italic. The bitmap looks jagged and rough. It is jagged and rough. But I discovered, by experiment, that there is an optimum slant for an italic on a screen so the strokes break well at the pixel boundaries. Look in this example how, rough as it is, how the left and right legs actually break at the same level. That's a victory. That's good, right there. And of course, at the lower depths, you don't get much choice. This is an S, in case you were wondering.
Dakle, ja sam pragmatičar, a ne idealist, i to radi potrebe. Za određenu vrstu temperamenta postoji određena vrsta zadovoljstva radom na nečemu što ne može biti savršeno, ali svejedno može biti napravljeno najbolje što možemo. Ovo je malo H iz Georgie Italic. Bitmapa izgleda nazubljeno i grubo. I jest nazubljena i gruba. Međutim, eksperimentalno sam utvrdio da postoji optimalan kut za zaslonski italik pod kojim se linije lijepo "lome" na spoju piksela. Na ovom primjeru, kako god grub da jest, pogledajte kako se lijeva i desna noga zapravo lome na istoj razini. To je pobjeda. To je dobro, baš tako. Naravno, na manjim razlučivostima nemate puno izbora. Za slučaj da ste se zapitali, ovo je S.
Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for coarser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology? In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining.
Eto, prošlo je 18 godina otkad su objavljene Verdana i Georgia. Microsoft je apsolutno bio u pravu: bilo je potrebno dobrih 10 godina, a zasloni sada imaju poboljšanu prostornu razlučivost i jako poboljšanu fotometrijsku razlučivost zahvaljujući anti-aliasingu i drugim stvarima. I sada kad je njihova misija izvršena, znači li to odlazak zaslonskih fontova koje sam oblikovao za ondašnje grublje zaslone? Hoće li oni nadživjeti te zastarjele zaslone i nadiranje novih fontova za web koji dolaze na tržište? Ili su stvorili vlastitu vrstu evolucijske niše neovisne o tehnologiji? Drugim riječima, jesu li utopljeni u tipografski mainstream? Nisam siguran, ali za sada im je dobro išlo. O, 18 godina je lijepo trajanje bilo čega uzevši u obzir današnji intenzitet "trošenja", tako da se ne žalim.
Thank you.
Hvala!
(Applause)
(Pljesak)