ABSTRACT


In my thesis I will do research about the relationship between text and typography. Text in the traditional definition of graphic design is seen as an ingredient that the designer needs to deal with in a visual way.
But what if the starting point is text and the meaning of text?
Does it change the way a designer or a typographer works?

Text is an important part in my work; my focus is on poetry, typography, and type design. It all deals with language and text.

I'm from a country –Iran– in which literature and poetry is an important part of people’s life and therefore many artists and designers use it as a powerful tool. I'll explore my own cultural background within western graphic design, particularly typography and push myself to develop a clear profile.

I hope the outcome of this thesis will help me to develop a system or structure that will direct and manage my design process, using the power of text. Text and meaning of the words as a starting point, experimenting with words and text relating to the content.

In order to achieve clear and practical results, I will have a general and short review on the works of important text artists as a starting point and my focus will be based on theoretical and visual research about the significance of text in the works of two designers, one from East (Reza Abedini) and one western designer (David Carson) as examples and through their works I will study the historical gains and losses of content and meaning within the technological achievements and eventually implement the outcomes of the research in a practical way (analogue and digital) in my own work.

As a conclusion, I hope I will find out clear or at least some practical solutions for the below questions:

How is the power of text used in the work of Reza Abedini and David Carson as a design tool, rather than a formal typographically polished element?

How do the two designers compare, since they use very different languages, are the techniques nevertheless the same?

How do text and typography in design interact and how can they direct and influence each other?

INTRODUCTION
My roots

I’m originally from Iran, where we speak and write in Farsi or Persian which is considered as a poetic language. Historically, Farsi has undergone great changes and can be categorized into the following groups:

1. Old Persian
2. Middle Persian
3. Classical Persian
4. Modern Persian

The Old and Middle Persian are not the topic of this discussion. But, I would like to have a short review on Classical and Modern Persian.

Classical Persian:
The origin of this language is not very clear. Words have their roots in different languages spoken in various parts of the country but the majority of the words have their roots in Old Persian, Pahlavi and Avesta. They are represented in classical writings and poems. Ferdowsi claims to have gone through great pains for a period of thirty years to preserve this language, which was under pressure from the Arab invaders, and was on the verge of being lost. 
 It is noteworthy that every country that the Arabs conquered lost its civilization, culture and language and adopted the Arabic language and way of life. It was only Iran that broke the trend and stood against the Arabs and preserved its culture and language and even adopted their own version of Islam by creating Shiaism. 

Modern Persian:
Language or Farsi (Arabic pronunciation of Parsi) as spoken today consists of a lot of words of non-Iranian origin. Some modern technical terms, understandably, have been incorporated from English, French and German and are recognizable, but Arabic has corrupted a major part of the language by replacing original Parsi words. What Ferdowsi worked so hard to preserve is finally being lost.  

It is assumed that for the Classical and Modern roots of Farsi, the language still is poetic in spite of all historical, political and social changes in Iranian society.

Farsi is written from right to left and has different alphabet and sounds than English. Although, historically Persian, English and many other European and Asian languages have a common vocabulary core from a reconstructed ancestor language which linguists have called Proto-Indo European, but in the context of this discussion there is not so much to compare.

It appears that in the last hundred years, after the Western Modernism in art and design was accepted in Iran, Iranian graphic design had two different encounters with this issue.
  First, it eagerly accepted the Western design the way it was, and then, after Post-modernism, it tried hardly to adapt so called Western Design to Iranian visual language by looking for its roots in the past.
  Considering two most important elements of graphic design, image and text, the main source in terms of text was Iranian calligraphy as well as Iranian classic illustration for image.
  As Reza Abdini, Iranian contemporary graphic designer, emphasizes that Farsi script is the most important element that Iranian designers should refer to. At least, on the eyes of an intellectual group of designers and artists, using the traditional rules of calligraphy unmixed with Western medium was a wise approach to express and promote themselves in the international design communities.

On the other hand, Iranian calligraphy was and perhaps still is one of the most complicated writing systems in the world, regarding the fact of having seven main and totally different scripts and complexity of each one.
  For this reason together with technological deficiencies, Farsi type design has never had the same process of evolution from calligraphy to movable metal type, or better to say from old to new techniques, as it’s seen in western type design.
  So, the first Farsi typefaces were adapted to Latin type press machines. But among those typefaces, there were a few which had some hints of Iranian classic calligraphic features and ironically they were the most used ones by designers.
  Although, these movable Farsi letters looked like their calligraphic ancestors in terms of contrast, justification feature (“Kashida”, “extended”, “stretched”, “lengthened”), punctuation marks, etc. Nevertheless, it was a drop in the ocean compared to the classics, the main feature of Farsi calligraphy, the soul and whole appearance was lost, the bigger image was gone.

Reza Abedini claims that in the past 100-150 years, Iranian eyes have been getting lazy by letters, declining from multiplex baseline sentences to one Western-like baseline, falling from an aesthetically complex forms to one thread of boxes of letters and words and the same goes for each letter and word, from having many multiple forms based on their positioning beside other letters in the word and even the surrounding words to one definite, predetermined form for each letter.

Typography, design and language has always been an interesting issue for me, but it has happened so often to hear this comment by other designers and teachers that I make it too complicated and difficult when it comes to typography and letters. The titles I make are not readable or at least too complicated to read. I assume that there must be two main reasons for this issue:

- My roots as an Iranian designer, used to deal with a complicated language and writing system which doesn’t mean that Latin based languages are simple in terms of typography, but are different than what I’m used to.

- My concurrence with Reza Abedini’s idea that the readability of the letters does not depend on their forms, but several other factors are involved, such as the whole counter-shape of the words apart from the form of the letters, the period we live in, our literacy rate and knowledge about language (for instance poetry, literature, etc), psychology of letters and our vocabulary of words.

I think that the aesthetics derived from the above reasons must be a good symptom of the fact that I never was interested in 60's International Typographic movement and subsequently too enthusiastic about using sans-serif typefaces. Perhaps, that kind of aesthetics which will be explained more and deeper in the next chapters encouraged me to the designers like David Carson, at least in its initial point, I found 90's Western graphic design language much closer to the soul of Iranian calligraphy in terms of dealing with the form and meaning of text.

Furthermore, my constant passion for poetry was a provocative for me to refer to some certain domains of design and art, such as Persian old calligraphy, Middle Ages art, 20th century text art in the west and so on, looking for a poetic way of dealing with design, art and language. A platform in which the relationship between text and image, form and meaning/concept becomes such strong that none of those components has a meaning without others.

THOUGHT 1
Technology, letters, habits

In the introduction, I briefly mentioned two different encounters that Iranian designers had with Western technological improvements in the last century. Basically, this happened in all parts of the world in which Farsi/Arabic writing system was used and designers had to upgrade their works with the most recent technological achievements.

We know that the type-setting machine originally was made for Latin-based writing systems that use separate letters. We also know that the first Farsi/Arabic typefaces were made in European countries such as Germany, France and Netherlands. However, apart from the origins of Farsi/Arabic typefaces, I would like to concentrate on the twenties century when Middle-Eastern designers got the chance to use typesetting machines and make the typefaces by their own, although there were some difficulties.

Farsi/Arabic writing system had to adapt its features to the mechanism of Latin-based typesetting machines. Therefore, the first encounter happened and that was to accept Western system with its all advantages and disadvantages. Perhaps, the biggest advantage of this adaption was that designers could move forward simultaneously with the technological developments and the visual language derived from the achievements of the time which we can consider as a gain.
 But on the other hand, the losses of this gain were more significant. In order to understand these losses better, we need to have quick look at the most basic differences between Farsi/Arabic and Latin writing systems. Two of these main differences are shown in the figure below:

Furthermore, to be able to find out and highlight the losses in a visual approach, we need to take some examples of Farsi calligraphy, as a good representation of this writing system, compared to current typefaces. [Figure.2]


For non-Persian eyes, it must be unbelievable to know that both figures show the same sentences. Upper one is a calligraphic piece, of course made by hand and the lower one is one of the first typefaces made by an Iranian designers. According to the opinion of many Iranian designers and also its widespread usage among Farsi spoken users, this typeface is one of best typefaces ever designed.
  Nevertheless, compared to the upper one, there are several considerable problems. First and probably the biggest one, is the reduction of base line from multiple to one. Considering multiple base-lines as a value for this script, we can simply call it “riches-to-rags” which caused by the appearance of type-setting machines in such countries.

Followed by, it caused two inappropriate and ungraceful aesthetic issues. Classically, the calligraphers were used to determine the position of letters and words while writing the sentences and according to three principles:
  Letters and words before and after (surrounding letters and words), Meaning of the words and the most significant, the efficacy of a specific letter form in emphasizing the meaning. These all meant that not only one shape for each letter-form, but there were several and even innovative shapes for each letter-form.

However, these all disappeared as soon as the punch-cutters started preparing Farsi letters for typesetting machine. They had to choose only one shape for each letter-form and position them in a way that they could connect to each other and since there was only one base-line made for Latin letters, so the multiplicity of base-line was gone. In the figure below, the red lines show the main base-lines and the blue lines show the extra base-lines. [Figure.3]


Furthermore, they had to position each letter-form in one letter punch which meant the letters intersection had no place anymore. Apart from aesthetic considerations, letters intersection was an important solution for calligraphers to avoid inappropriate letter and word spacing, but it couldn't happen anymore with the mechanism of the new machines. This also meant that the dots and diacritics of letters also had to be frozen inside the punch together with their related letters. Beside the fact that sometimes the calligrapher could leave out dots of some letters, according to the aesthetics, but with the new system dots were part of letters, rather than separate characters. In the figure below, you can see the differences. Blue and green strokes respectively show the letter and word spacing and rectangles show the position of dots.[Figure.4]


Perhaps, the most distinguishable sign of the influence of typesetting mechanism on Farsi writing system can be found in a feature called “Kashida”.

In classical calligraphy, this feature was used for three purposes: first to elongate the characters in order to justify the sentences, secondly to create intended compositions by stretching some characters on top of the other letters without making inappropriate white spaces and thirdly to emphasize some letters or words according to their meaning and importance in the sentence. New typesetting system could afford only the first purpose and those two other roles, if not completely disappeared, at least couldn't play the same role in the new texts as before.

As it's said before, calligraphers used ‘Kashida’ to stretch the characters according to the letters that were using this feature and the letters that were supposed to connect to it. It meant that like the other characters with several forms, ‘Kashida’ didn't have an absolute shape, but it could create very different curves based on its connection to letters before and after. With the metal type machines, the solution that type setters and designers found to apply ‘Kashida’ to the machines was to make extra lead for this feature. But since the position of all letters in the leads were fixed, this feature had to have an absolute form as well, therefore it lost all different natural curves and became a simple horizontal stroke, sort of a rectangle. Figures below, show the changes of ‘Kashida’ from manuscripts to metal typesetting and digital texts. [Figure.5]


As it's shown in the figures above, in the calligraphic piece there are much more connection between letters in the composition of the sentence, achieved by characters going on top and underneath each other and ‘kashida’ helps this more by filling the empty white spaces. This is while the second one creates only a horizontal thread of letters which can damage the reading rhythm. This becomes more clear if we look at the larger calligraphic text in compare with the same text made by typesetting or digital typeface. [Figure.6-7]




And it becomes almost unreadable when a Farsi paragraph is fully justified using ‘Kashida’, as you can see in the figure below. ‘Kashida’ is shown by red strokes. [Figure.8]


Along with technological developments in the recent decades, designers and font developers tried to achieve better results of non-linear Farsi texts, considering elongation and vertical arrangement of letters. In order to make the texts resemble to calligraphic ancestors as much as possible, they took two steps: First step was to make more ligatures and alternatives to create vertical arrangement of letters and break potentially horizontal structure of Farsi sentences, as you can see below. [Figure.9]


The problem with this solution was that the horizontal appearance of the whole text still was there. But the bigger problem was/is that the whole idea of making ligatures for Farsi/Arabic typefaces was/is not a good solution. In Latin, ligatures are limited to a few combination of letters such as ‘ff’, ‘fi’, ‘fl’, ‘ffi’ and ‘ffl’. [Figure. 10]
  In the days of metal fonts, ligatures were invented to solve a practical typesetting problem which was the physical collision of some features of certain characters. Later on, technological problem solved this problem and therefore presence of ligatures in the texts could only have stylistic reasons.


In Farsi calligraphy, because of the connection between letters, each pair of two letters basically could be considered as a ligature. Therefore, ligatures didn't actually exist or the whole text was made by ligatures and unlike Latin, the appearance of ligatures in Farsi metal type had only aesthetic reasons, but this was assumed as a functional solution to resemble stylistic features of calligraphy. [Figure. 11]


Overall, having too many ligatures (as vertical arrangements of letters) in typefaces not only help the reader to have a fluent reading experience with Farsi text, but caused a lot of fixation and barrier points for Iranian readers.

Second step that designers together with developers took was to focus on the significant role of ‘Kashida’ in creating non-linear threads of letters. Historically, this feature just on its own had a potential capacity to break the linear letter arrangements and add natural and smooth curves to the text. Compared to the first step, this was a better solution for Farsi letters, both aesthetically and functionally. Nevertheless, considering the visual aspects of Iranian calligraphy, combination of both steps would resem that old ancestor the most. A very good example of this kind of approach was ‘Tasmeem’ by Thomas Milo.

The essence of Arabic script is to be found not in calligraphy, but in script grammar. Calligraphy refers to the quality of script, script grammar to the structure of script. For Arabic, the key to the successful transition from text manufacture by scribes to mechanized text reproduction by means of movable type was the marriage of integral script expertise with typographic know-how. This involved the collaboration between different personalities and social groups.

Compared to the previous efforts and products in Farsi/Arabic type design, ‘Tasmeem’ had two big advantages: First, more than being only a package of typefaces, it was a technology, a set of plug-ins for Arabic script that could turn InDesign in a veritable Arabic typesetting system and provide technical and stylistic possibilities for designers to implement most of the calligraphic features, such as natural ‘Kashida’ and vertical letter arrangements, to their typography. [Figure. 12]


Although, ‘Tasmeem’ was appreciated in western type design and technology world, it couldn't catch the eyes of designers from the eastern side for three main reasons: First of all, the package was too expensive for the users in Middle-East. Furthermore, it only was only limited to Adobe InDesign ME and was not supported by other common design software companies like Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. And finally and the most important reason was that since the technology of ‘Tasmeem’ was not usable within font-editors such as ‘Glyphs’, ‘Fontlab Studio’, ‘Robofont’, etc. So the type designers couldn't use it in order to create their own typefaces, so it stayed as a package of typefaces with some specific possibilities resembling calligraphic scripts. The figures below, show some possibilities of ‘Tasmeem’: [Figure. 13-14]



Overall, despite that technological enhancements were applied to Farsi/Arabic scripts, but there were still two things lost: First that logical and somehow improvised connection between form and meaning, that sort of relationship which was the basis for calligraphers works. Secondly, the question that how this relationship was applicable to the new, modern typefaces and how meaning could be used as a design tool. Packages like ‘Tasmeem’ looked necessary and significant to be made, but eventually they stayed as plug-ins to resemble the old scripts rather than adding extra layer of meaning to the modern typefaces. There were gains of this adaptation of Farsi/Arabic letters to western typesetting system, but the losses weighted much more.

The 'four forms' analysis of Arabic script is mistaken, and really represents a particular mechanical solution to typesetting a simplified model of Arabic. In fact, there are two kinds of letters: those that can connect on both sides, and those that only connect on the right. The actual ways in which the letters connect, and hence how many forms they require, depend on the style of the script and what they're connecting to. There is no historical style in which there were only four forms of any given dual-joining letter.

In the same way, Iranian/Arabic contemporary artists and designers were/are divided to two groups. One follows this idea of adaption, while the other tries to create more suitable and costume system or structure, specifically made for Farsi/Arabic writing system. One still makes typefaces that follows ‘four forms’ idea of simplified Arabic and the other improves the thought behind ‘Tasmeem’.

Persian script is the most important element that Iranian designers should permanently refer to.

Among these two groups, Reza Abedini is probably the most outstanding designer from the second group. In the following, I will investigate his works as typical examples of this second thought.

There were always two challenges while making my works. First, how to deal with Farsi typefaces and secondly, how to combine them with Latin typefaces. Fundamentally, this challenge still exists for all Iranian designers.

For many years, there was a common thought among Iranian designers that Farsi script intrinsically is problematic and typesetting in Farsi wouldn't be as appealing as in Latin. Reza who was probably influenced by Ahmed Fardid's philosophical thinking, didn't surrender by this simplistic point of view.

Fardid was and still is generally regarded as a brilliant yet unsystematic thinker who introduced Iranian intellectuals to German philosophy. Since the 1950's he served as Iran's leading authority on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Influenced by Heidegger and the German historicist tradition, Fardid gave the Orient/Occident dichotomy a philosophical twist.

Fardid advocates a type of Geisteswissenschaften, or a moral philosophy not bereft of a theosophical introspection. He argues that humans have three dimensions: scientific, philosophical and ethical. Although the first two have been prominent in the Western tradition of thought, the last has been conspicuously absent.
 As such, Fardid reaches the conclusion that the West has to be abandoned both as an ontology and as a way of life. He believes that “Gharbzadegi” or “Westernization” is, thus,a transitional phase that one has to leave behind to reach to the essence of the West.
 To undertake this intellectual odyssey, however, one has to become Westernized, not in the sense of becoming alienated from one's own self, but in the more subtle sense of becoming cognizant about the adversary. To confront the West, Fardid asserts, one needs to get to the very core of its philosophy and ontology.
 Getting to know the other became, in Fardid's analysis, a prerequisite for knowing the self. For him, the main issue was the revival of the authentic Persian traditions and this could not occur without criticizing the principles of Western culture and technology, namely empiricism, rationalism and humanism.

Fardid's concept of the West was warmly received by an important segment of the community of Iranian intellectuals eager to reassert their own identity during a time of change both in the East and in the West.

Instead of conceding the problem to the essence of the Persian script, Reza decided to concentrate on the modern technology which was the foundation of graphic design and that was where he found the problem and the solution. One of the solutions was to make both Farsi and Latin letters by hand in order to incorporate them. [Figure.15]


In his view, the problem was the idea of using ‘four forms’ and ‘separate letters’ typesetting in Farsi script. Historically, the beauty and elegance of Farsi script was the vertical arrangement of letters. In his eyes, the invention of metal typesetting was in compliance with the soul and character of Latin script. But, the form and position of Farsi/Arabic letters in the words was not absolute. Therefore, Iranian/Arabic designers started to think of separate Farsi characters since their first encounter with the mechanism of metal type. For him, the Beauty of Farsi script was sacrificed for the technique. Aesthetics was a big loss, and in return of a minor and defective gain of technique.

Since we've seen and read the newspapers and documents, set in simplified Farsi metal type for many years and calligraphy as our historical source of readability has been replaced by simplified Farsi as a new source, naturally and unconsciously our habit of readability has therefore been simplified as well. Our eyes has become lazy.

The other important and problematic issue for Reza was the readability. He disassembled and distorted the letters in order to bring back the improvised approach of calligraphy to Farsi typefaces. But this wasn't only limited to the letters, he wanted to acquire a sort of Iranian dialectics and soul in his design, rather than literally using Iranian illustrative elements.

Square is not Swiss by itself, but the way of using this element makes it Swiss in Swiss design or Japanese circle in Japanese design. We can easily have Iranian circle.

To him, using motifs of Iranian ancient potteries, carpets such as the Phoenix, Boteh, etc or even was as worse as to Latinize Farsi typefaces. Also, using of Iranian scripts like ‘Nastaliq’ was not the case. In this case, one of the good examples for him was Polish design that was and still is very recognizable for all the designers, without using any element or symbol of Polish traditional art.

Reza Abedini's works are utterly modern and contemporary, there is no Boteh, nor is there ‘Nastaliq’. They don't try to resemble The Iranian traditional art, but instead, they utilize the traditions to present that dialectics in a contemporary way. Unlike the designers who use the folklore and native elements –in this case, Iranian designers using ‘Nastaliq’– to separate their works from the prevalent international design and at the same time highlight them among the others, he takes a different direction in dealing with these elements. By distorting and devaluing classical elements specially ‘Nastaliq’, he ruins the common image of eastern and western eyes about their historical value and consequently re-contextualizes them within his works. Somehow, using ‘Nastaliq’ becomes a statement of his reaction to that common image. [Figure.16]


At this point, his critical encounter with graphic design in Eastern world takes the orientation as same as David Carson's in West. The works of both designers derive from their formalistic point of view of graphic design and their reaction on design conventions. Carson rejects 1960s based grid formats, information hierarchy and consistent layouts and introduces the innovative typographies and distinct layouts. On the other side of the world, Reza Abedini rejects the whole idea of Western-like design in Iran and Latinized typography and layout and takes Iranian classical calligraphy as a study source for his experimental, modern and unconventional designs. [Figure.17-18]



In terms of letters and typography, there are three common procedures in both designers works:
 First, form of characters. Keeping the bigger image in mind, They both consider a specific form for each character. For instance, if there are four ‘A’s in a word, each ‘A’ has its own shape, depending on the characters and words before and after.
 Secondly, the positioning of characters and words. It means that each character is positioned individually and different than the same character in the part of one word and the words before and after, depend on typographic factors such as ascenders and descenders, vertical, horizontal or diagonal strokes, angular or curved shape of letters and so on and this goes the same for the words.
 And finally, baseline of the characters and specially the words. Depending the counter-shape of the words, they go up or come down from the main baseline. Of course these properties are not taken into account all the time.

It become more interesting, if we think of Iranian calligraphy in which all these three issues are significant. Here, it might be taken as my personal and subjective point of view, but it makes sense to compare their works to Iranian calligraphy and imagine a common source for both designers. In case of Carson, it must be unexpected to imagine him, thinking of or looking at Iranian calligraphy, but here the source that a designer uses is one thing and the interpretation of audience is a completely different issue. Therefore, to clarify this subjective interpretation more, I would like to take two examples from each designer and visualize the common points, in comparison to two calligraphic pieces. [Figure.19-20-21-22-23-24-25-26]

“Do not mistake legibility for communication”
David Carson

“Try to not to read this text, see it.”
Reza Abedini

Perhaps, more important than all these, the improvised way of creating typography and dealing with letters and therefore adding extra layer of meaning to the text is most significant connection point between the above contemporary works and their ancestors.

THOUGHT 2
Philosophy, connotation and metaphor

Theo Van Leeuwen in his article (Typographic meaning, Visual Communication 2005; 4; 137) uses two key semiotic principles to explain how letter forms can become signifiers in their own right: Connotation and metaphor.

Connotation

He uses the term connotation in a specific sense, building on Barthes’ concept of ‘myth’ and explains that connotations do not determine meaning in a narrow sense.
  By applying this to letters, he explains that the connotations form a meaning potential which can be narrowed down when a typeface is used in a specific context. Connotations are a resource for meaning-making and their understanding rests on cultural knowledge. Designers must therefore assume that users of their typefaces will recognize ‘where these signs come from’, and users, in turn, will have to assume the same for their readers or viewers.

He takes two typefaces as typographic examples and says that the signs from the electrical and industrial domains are imported into the domain of letter forms, and it therefore becomes available for uses in which the idea of ‘electricity’ or ‘industriality’ is to be conveyed. [Figure.1-2]



Bellantoni and Woolman (2000: 6) have written that the printed word has two levels of meaning, the ‘word image’, the idea represented by the word itself, constructed from a string of letters, and the ‘typographic image’, the ‘holistic visual impression’. And Brody Neuenschwander (1993: 13, 31) calls typography ‘a fully developed medium of expression’, possessing ‘a complex grammar by which communication is possible’, and he quotes Hans-Rudolf Lutz who has said that ‘design is also information’.

To me this idea of Teo van Leeuwen that he looks at letter forms and analyzes them from his writer point of view is very interesting. Such an idea can prepare a platform in which writers and designers can discuss about letters from a common perspective. It usually happens that writers do not talk about typography and designers do not talk about literature and none of these two communities enter each other's domains.
  This lack of knowledge can be caused by two reasons: humbleness and carelessness. Although when it comes to practice, the interference, negotiation and in its best the dialogue is always there, between designers and writers.
  A good example of this dialogue is when a writer r a poet, for instance Stéphane Mallarmé, puts notes for the designer to consider specific layout and hierarchic order of the words according to the meaning and importance of the words. Here, there is of course a dialogue going on. But the starting point which makes this dialogue, between form and meaning, to happen is even more important.
  I can imagine a triangle diagram which shows how the problem starts and a circular diagram which shows how such a dialogue happens. [Figure.3]


First diagram, shows that most of the writers use the first and second vertices of the triangle to create theirs works and communicate with their readers in a textual way. It also shows how designers usually use the second and third vertices to create typography and communicate with their viewers in a visual way.


The circular diagram shows how that dialogue can happen between a writer and a designer. But more important it shows how those three parameters can help the a writer, within literature, to become a typographer in a textual way and typographer, within typography, to become a writer in a visual way.

METAPHOR

Theo van Leeuwen uses the principle of metaphor or the metaphoric potential of specific features of letter forms when it is not possible to ‘place’ typefaces by connotation in order to provide meaning. He applies ‘distinctive features’ ,an idea from phonology, to the letter forms and explains that distinctive features were regarded as building blocks for meaning, but not as meaningful in themselves. He says that this view of the ‘distinctive’ role of speech sounds is quite similar to the view held by many traditional typographers that letter forms have no meaning in themselves and can only be more or less readable and more or less aesthetically pleasing.

However, by giving some examples, he claims that distinctive features can become meaningful and be applied to the distinctive features of letter forms. For instance, ‘roundness’ of a rounded typeface readily lends itself as a metaphor for ‘organicness’, ‘natural-ness’, ‘femininity’ and other related concepts. Or higher ascenders and lower descenders of a typeface can convey a sense of ‘aspiring’ to “higher” things’. Or the irregularity of these letter forms can therefore be used as a metaphor for other kinds of irregularity, other ways of going against the norms, for instance to represent the unconventionality or rebelliousness of youth subcultures and their music.

MULTI-MODALITY

He also explains that typography is no longer a ‘separate’ semiotic mode. Typographic communication is multi-modal. It uses a variety of semiotic resources. Contemporary typography creates meaning, not just with letter forms, but also with color, three-dimensionality, material texture, and, in kinetic typography, movement. Increasingly many typefaces also incorporate iconic elements, and deliberately blur the boundaries between image and letter-form, thus regaining a connection that has been lost in the course of the development of the alphabet.

THOUGHT 3
Psychology, letters, habits

In the introduction, I briefly explained about the Reza Abedini's idea of readability of letters and the several influential factors on readability such as the counter-shape of the words apart from the form of the letters, periodical and cultural habits, our literacy rate and knowledge about language, psychology of letters and our vocabulary of words.
  Also, I pointed to complex or at least difficult readability of my own works which comes from the similar idea. Here, I would like to take a deep look at some of this factors:

Why the right font layout makes us feel good?

In a study by psychologist and researcher Kevin Larson , 20 volunteers – half men and half women – were separated into two groups. Eacht group was shown a separate version of The New Yorker, one where the image placement, font, and layout were designed well and one where the layout was designed poorly.

The researchers found that readers felt bad while reading the poorly designed layout. Sometimes, this feeling would be expressed physically with a frown.
  Meanwhile, the participants who read content from the good reading layout, felt like it took less time to read and felt better. People exposed to the well-designed layout were found to have higher cognitive focus, more efficient mental processes, and a stronger sense of clarity.

The researchers concluded that well-designed reading environments don’t necessarily help you understand what you’re reading better, but they do make you feel good, causing you to feel inspired and more likely to take action.

In his article called The Science of Word Recognition, Dr. Larson describes three major categories of word recognition models:

  - Word shape
  - Serial letter recognition
  - Parallel letter recognition

In relationship with Reza Abedini's works, we might only need to take a look at the first model:

The word recognition model that says words are recognized as complete units is the oldest model in the psychological literature, and is likely much older than the psychological literature. The general idea is that we see words as a complete patterns rather than the sum of letter parts. Some claim that the information used to recognize a word is the pattern of ascending, descending, and neutral characters. Another formulation is to use the envelope created by the outline of the word. [Figure.1-2]

The word patterns are recognizable to us as an image because we have seen each of the patterns many times before.
Kevin Larson

We can consider a typeface more readable than the others just because simply we've used to see that typeface or read the texts set in that particular typeface more often than the others. This idea was the initial point for the designers like Abedini and Carson to change the visual habit of their audience.
  It does not really matter if we take form and concept apart from each other or think that form is concept and apart from all the other parameters involved in readability, we can claim that for both designers form was the most convenient way to communicate with the reader.
  Here, the meaning of the text shouldn't be taken as same as the concept, but meaning was the initial step of the design process and furthermore an extra layer of typographic meaning added to their design.

Culture impacts your preference for fonts

For none of these two designers designing for legibility and readability was not to design for saccades and fixations, but the whole idea of readability would be problematic. The way of dealing with text in their design was supposed to change the reading habits first of all. In case of Abedini, the historical habit was the most challenging issue and in international projects, cultural characteristic became significant. For Carson the historical taste of typefaces was the struggling part and then sub-cultural values of his time.

Reza's approach to deal with this issue was to use connotations such as using the most used Persian typefaces in Iranian newspapers, published during and after the Iranian revolution in 1979, like Zar-Bold to make a bridge between his design and the reader's cultural habits and within this bridge using the historical calligraphic references, which would be counted as the second connotation, was the stimulus way to challenge those habits. But the most important point before getting to design process was the meaning of the text which would determine the design approach and the kind of connotations that could or would be chosen. [Figure.3-4]



In the poster above, Reza uses two kind of connotations. First one is the typeface which is Zar-Bold and the second connotation is the way he uses this typeface or the layout of the text that refers to the historical calligraphic source. Apart from his manipulation of the letters and words, positioning of the words and multiple baselines of characters within the words- which we can consider as a metaphorical solution- meaning of the text, before the whole typographic approach, becomes a starting point and a tool of design for him to take the concept through the design process.
  The source of his poster shows ninety nine names and attributes of Allah. It shows that Allah can be powerful, kind, witness, listener, mighty and etc, and this goes the same for his poster that indicates the fact that there are many ways to do typography and type design. Here, it becomes difficult to separate form from concept. Furthermore, we can see that kind of connection between word image, word meaning and typographic impression.

One explanation for why some fonts make you feel a certain way is because of deep links in culture. For instance, ‘Courier’ fonts were designed to resemble old memos written on type writers. Or many people relate ‘Helvetica’ with the US Government because it’s used in tax forms. These associations are difficult to remove and should be considered when deciding on a font choice.

Because fonts are designed by humans, there is usually some meaning attached to them. You don’t want to choose a font that is easily associated with something in our culture that’s markedly different than the vibe you’re trying to give off.

Abedini takes the same approach for his Latin language based projects. But here, Iranian historical reading habits are replaced with the designer's distinctive cultural features in the global domain. The challenge is to how to differ the own from the others by cultural values and open a door for bilingual dialogue. [Figure.5-6]



This design approach can be explainable about David Carson's works as well. In his case, the neutral spirit of the typefaces like ‘Helvetica’ and the whole idea of the systematic and structured design such as 1960's International Typographic Movement would be the point of struggle. The idea of having a typeface like ‘Helvetica’ which could be applicable to any kind of design thoughts and products was problematic. For him, legibility of that kind of typeface didn't exactly mean the communication. For the same reason, a non-legible text could still communicate, but in a different level than the literal meaning of the text. A complete non-readable text could still convey a message and this message sometimes could be even a bigger and more communicative message. [Figure.7/1-7/2]



Carson explained later that he did it because the interview was rather dull. Although, the whole text was published in a legible font at the end of the same issue, however his design approach was completely based on the meaning of the text and he used this meaning, in this case a boring and dull text, as the starting point and a tool to convey a bigger message, a metaphoric message to the reader that he/she should not read the text. Although the dingbats might or might not have meaningful distinctive features by themselves, these features, however, are added to the dingbats by the metaphoric message of Carson's design approach.

“…[direct] associations refer to the influence of historical precedence on affective response to typography. The typeface Fraktur has many associations with Nazi Germany, and Helvetica is commonly associated with the U.S. government since it is used by the IRS on tax forms. Those fonts acquire meaning through your semantic network. Whenever you see a font (e.g., Fraktur), you associate meaning — based on the context. That includes semantic meaning (e.g., Nazi Germany) and emotional meaning (e.g., disgust).”
Shaikh, 2007, pp. 21

Furthermore, Carson's typography perhaps can not connect us to some certain historical references in the past, but for sure it directly connects us to the general artistic approach in the other fields of 90's like music, fashion and fine-arts. This happens not by our expected connotation of typography, but through the potential semantic network which is provided by Carson's typography itself.

CONCLUSION

Write well first. Design well second.
Read well first. Design well second.

The meaning of the text can become a strong tool of design, rather than only an ingredient of design, if we can create a circular diagram in our mind which asks the right questions and sets the right frame and by circling gives the right definition to our typographic demands.
  This cycle can only happen if we understand the meaning of the text and create a strong connection between three parameters of word-image, word meaning and typographic impression.
  Also, it can only create a strong message, if we can be aware of the choices of connotations and/or metaphors we take. Eventually, it can convey a clear message to our audience, if we can use the right semiotic resources for our multi-modal typographic communication.
  In my opinion, such designers as Reza Abedini and David Carson would not be able to use the meaning as a tool without creating this semantic network.

Furthermore, this semantic network makes it possible to compare the two designers, without being afraid of the different languages they deal with or perhaps different techniques they use. The most common and important point which provides this comparison, is the similar semantic network.
  Finally, the similar semantic network makes it possible for me to receive such close connotations in Carson's typography and Iranian traditional calligraphy. If we take this multi-interpretative form of such designers' works as a loss of the multi-modality of typographic communication, we can consider their potential for multi-lingual dialogue as a gain of contemporary typography.
  And in a bigger scale, if the lack of calligraphic improvisation is assumed to be a bigger loss of the multi-modal contemporary typography, the bigger gain must be the faster and wider range of possibilities and explorations which is provided by this kind of typographic domain.