Music for the eyes

A few months ago Google re-designed it’s logo to look more ‘clean and efficient’. 

The principal method its designers chose to achieve the effect was to switch from a typeface with serifs to one sans serif.

The change touches upon an argument about aesthetics that has divided typographers for over two hundred years. The word ‘serif’ itself invites controversy. Some historians claim that the word originated in 18^th century Dutch ‘schreef’ (marks of the pen) while others claim that the word is a back-formation. 

Serif were not acknowledged consciously until they began to be removed, and the sans serif (from French, sans means ‘without’) typeface began their ascendancy and contemporary dominance.

Decoding symbols is one of the most complex processes of human visual intelligence: the way our brains grasp the meaning of words visually but are also able to simultaneously add layers of interpretation depending on the very shape and colours of the letters themselves. Alluding to the universal power of symbols, as opposed to poetry (which is trapped by the grammar and idiom of the language a poem is written in), the author John Updike writes: “Only the letters themselves, originally drawn with sticks and styluses and pens, and then cast into metal fonts, whose forms are now reproduced by twinkling electronic processes, legitimately touch the printed page with cartoon magic.” Updike, who cartooned as a young man for Harvard Lampoon, considers the art form one of the highest. By ‘cartoon magic’ he means the specific power of the medium of comics to convey meaning universally. One of the important tools that cartoonist employ is the shapes of words, of which serifs, or the lack of them, form a critical component.

Physically, serifs originate in the flourishes of the calligrapher’s wrist. In calligraphy, the art of hand-drawing letters, serifs serve a dual purpose. They help a writer gain control over mark-making momentum, the arm shifting pressure and angles to form curves and modify the thickness of strokes. Serifs are to a calligrapher what a run-up and follow-through are to a fast bowler in cricket. Over time, through practice and perfection, what was once mechanical necessity turned into expressive lines that made writing appear individualistic, ornate and intricate. When transposed as a basis for stone-carving, serifs allowed words to appear aligned. Hence, the Victorians associated typefaces with serifs, common in Italian renaissance architecture, as “Roman”.

The secret history that is contained in the way the computer fonts are named (Times New Roman, Comic Sans, etc), and the shape of the letters themselves, is the self-contained history of European civilisation. 

The geographical terrain of classical music
 in Vikram Seth's An Equal Music is shared by the history of typography 

A rare source that unifies this vast, complex and fragmented history in one narrative is Vikram Seth’s novel An Equal Music (1999). The book has been praised by critics for not just masterfully presenting the world of European classical musicians in the form of a novel but also, dually, serving as thesis on European high culture. The deep structure of the novel stretches over a fascinating psycho-geography. While most of the novel is set in London, there are journeys to Vienna (capital of the Habsburg empire; the entrepot of the Spice Route to Europe) and Venice (the Italian freeport that oversaw the Renaissance). Paris, with its revolutionary contributions, the city of the auteur,  is missing as a location in the novel, but represented by the protagonist’s very French girlfriend and music student. The unity of culture, as object and subject, is represented in the novel by a Carappaccio painting of St. Augustine in a Venetian palace. 

These centres of classical art and music— Vienna; Venice; Paris; and London— also serve as homes of print innovation involving Latin alphabets.

Yet, it took some convincing to accept print technology. In the times of Gutenberg, 1450 and thereabouts, paradoxical as this may sound, it was important that printed text looked hand-written. Printing was seen as a ‘black art’. The industrial revolution caused massive changes in society. Huge numbers of people were displaced and the countryside torn up and polluted. Intellectuals were skeptical about the transformation. William Blake asked: “And was Jerusalem builded here. Among these dark Satanic mills?” 

 It didn’t help that printers were small groups of masonic men who worked late into the night, with ink and metal in foul-smelling foundries, developing carefully guarded trade secrets. Typesetting employed mirroring: the letters were done backwards and looked nonsensical, but when applied to paper, the result, almost like a form of magic, was perfect legible text. In these set of circumstances, all typefaces in use commercially were adorned with serifs.

The Rosetta stone is an early example of sans serif type

The critical event that inspired the first set of sans serif mechanical typefaces was the discovery and translation of the Rosetta Stone (one of the earliest surviving uses of sans serif type). Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt, where he took along a whole bunch of academics and cultural experts (to invoke the Alexander the Great’s court of historians and poets), resulted in the looting and collection of many artefacts. However, the badly planned logistics of the venture and the maritime dominance of the Britain navy, enabled the English to hold hostage and ransom the artefact off the French. The reporting of the trips in newspapers lead to wide public excitement and speculation about mummies, sarcophaguses, hieroglyphic murals and, of course, curses. Following this, the first sans serif fonts that were published were claimed to be ‘Egyptian’ and sought to tap into the mania for all things Egyptian. However, the fonts offended the elites. Letters without serifs appeared nude and barbaric.

The typefaces were considered grotesque and came to be known as ‘Gothic’ (this should not be confused with Blackletter typefaces, the original thick black, highly ornate letters which used be considered gothic until sans serifs came along— the definition of barbarianism clearly changes with time).

This was also the age of the Romantics, an intellectual and arts movement that was tired of Church intrigues and the pollution of industrialisation. Curiously, the new style appealed to the two very different poles of the society. Sans serif typefaces was shorn of all medieval pretensions but also, was similar to writing developed by architects, industrialists and ship-builders in their mechanical plans and drawings. The font suited bohemians, but also, naval ships and war memorials.

All was not lost for serifs. By 1896, they staged a comeback with the Art Nouveau movement celebrating “floriated madness”. This development so infuriated the typographer Adolf Loos that he wrote, in 1908, an essay titled “Ornament and Crime” declaring that the “evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects”. For Loos, as Heller and Anderson note in their book on New Ornamental Type, superfluous decoration was not merely a waste of designer’s time— it was downright immoral! 

Despite the warnings of fire and brimstone, serifs made yet another comeback, this time in pre-depression America, through the Arts and Crafts movement. William Morris had a novel solution to the dichotomy between the pure natural state and the austerity of industrialisation— the combination of modern printing methods and traditional art could counteract the corrosive impact of industrialisation. 

Yet, the damage was done. The revolutionary Bauhaus movement, while retaining some decorative elements as a way to escape definition and stereotyping, rejected ornamentation as a relic of an older order. It became a foundational belief of Modernism that minimalism enables the cleanest communication. Slowly, the memory of the connection between the calligrapher’s wrist and the typographer’s lead began to fade. Post-war movements sought, like the Romantics before them, to emphasise the foolishness of the elites and their ways. One particular line of attack was on the serif. What had once seemed ornate and the very definition of civilisation, harking back to the grand Roman empire, was now seen as chintzy and messy. There was need to repent from what the aggression and destruction of European imperialism had caused and remember, once again, the plurality and openness of the ancients, in the civilisations of Greece, Egypt, Rome and Baghdad.

The neatening of type was a way to clean up the mistakes of history. However, this movement was restricted to posters and public signage. Technologically, the pen had been replaced by the typewriter. As fonts like Courier, inspired from that age, hold testament: typewritten material possessed pronounced serifs.

Then, within a few decades, came the computer and a man named Steve Jobs.

What sped up the dizzying variety in which computers would enable typographic innovation, blurring the traditional boundary between design and illustration, was the apocryphal decision of Jobs to drop-out of university (to save his parents the fees) and attend whatever classes he took a fancy to. Jobs noticed that posters on campus were beautifully lettered. Asking around, he discovered that the signage originated in the high-quality calligraphy classes offered on campus. Jobs’s decision to study calligraphy would result in “fonts” for Apple’s word processing software. The initial six fonts that the Apple II came with have now given way to millions, with “foundries”— illustration and design studios— that employ illustrators and graphic designers to focus solely on producing electronic typefaces for various electronic and physical media.

The aesthetic choices that require Google’s brand-image to appear clean and friendly are quite obvious. This is a corporation asking you to trust it with your most intimate data— search history, location, email, chats, and so on— so that it can help advertisers reach you more efficiently.  Curious then—  the peripheral grotesque sans serif of the Victorians has come represent the mainstream and normal. What was once considered proper, the traditional serif based typefaces, currently thrive in cultures of resistance: through tattoos and spray-can graffiti walls. 

Whether one belongs to the serif camp or the sans serif camp, one thing can be agreed upon, building upon Vikram Seth’s exegesis on European art and culture: typography is, certainly, music for the eyes.