Typography Quotes

• Perfect typography is certainly the most elusive of all arts. Sculpture in stone alone comes near it in obstinacy.

  Jan Tschichold

  Art, Perfect, Design

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• By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately and well.

  Robert Bringhurst

  I Hate You, Mean, Break

  "The Elements of Typographic Style". Book by Robert Bringhurst, 1992.

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• Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society.

  Neville Brody

  Tools, Manipulation

  174 Copy quote

• For me, typography is a triangular relationship between design idea, typographic elements, and printing technique.

  Wolfgang Weingart

  Relationship, Ideas, Design

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• Good typography, first, makes words readable. At its best, it does something more: it helps express the animating spirit of the ideas behind the words.

  Michael Bierut

  Ideas, Doe, Firsts

  Source: scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org

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• When a type design is good it is not because each individual letter of the alphabet is perfect in form, but because there is a feeling of harmony and unbroken rhythm that runs through the whole design, each letter kin to every other and to all.

  Frederic Goudy

  Running, Perfect, Design

  Frederic William Goudy (1940). “Typologia: Studies in Type Design & Type Making, with Comments on the Invention of Typography, the First Types, Legibility, and Fine Printing”, p.43, Univ of California Press

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• Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Design, Durability, Language

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• Typography needs to be audible. Typography needs to be felt. Typography needs to be experienced.

  Helmut Schmid

  Design, Needs, Felt

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• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Independent, Hands, Years

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• Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

  Robert Bringhurst

  Crafts, Language, Form

  "15 Free Fonts That Harken Back To Vintage Typography" by Katherine Brooks, www.huffingtonpost.com. November 7, 2014.

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• Typographical design should perform optically what the speaker creates through voice and gesture of his thoughts.

  El Lissitzky

  Voice, Design, Gestures

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• White space is to be regarded as an active element, not a passive background.

  Jan Tschichold

  White, Space, Design

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• Perfect typography is more a science than an art.

  Jan Tschichold

  Art, Perfect, Design

  Jan Tschichold, Robert Bringhurst, Hajo Hadeler (1991). “The form of the book: essays on the morality of good design”, Hartley & Marks Publishers

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• Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

  Emil Ruder

  Writing, Design, Information

  Emil Ruder (2001). “Typographie”, Arthur Niggli

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• Each typeface is a piece of history, like a chip in a mosaic that depicts the development of human communication. Each typeface is also a visual record of the person who created it - his skill as a designer, his philosophy as an artist, his feeling for... the details of each letter and the resulting impressions of an alphabet or a text line.

  Will Burtin

  Philosophy, Communication, Artist

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• From all these experiences the most important thing I have learned is that legibility and beauty stand close together and that type design, in its restraint, should be only felt but not perceived by the reader.

  Adrian Frutiger

  Beauty, Reading, Learning

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• If you love it, you don't know much about typography. And if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either and you should get another hobby.

  Vincent Connare

  Hate, Hobbies, Should

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• Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar

  Marshall McLuhan

  Design, Patriotism, Familiar

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• If typography is calling attention to itself, it's taking that attention away from what the words are saying.

  Michael Bierut

  Attention, Calling, Consciousness

  "Interview with Michael Bierut — Typography, Modern Applications, and Timeless Communication Challenges". Interview with Kent Anderson, scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org. April 16, 2013.

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• To say a grid is limiting is to say that language is limiting, or typography is limiting. It is up to us to use these media critically or passively.

  Ellen Lupton

  Media, Use, Language

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• Typography must be as beautiful as a forest, not like the concrete jungle of the tenements It gives distance between the trees, the room to breathe and allow for life.

  Adrian Frutiger

  Life, Beauty, Beautiful

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• Just as typography is human speech translated into what can be read, so photography is the translation of reality into a readable image.

  Herbert Bayer

  Photography, Reality, Design

  Herbert Bayer, Beaumont Newhall (1977). “Herbert Bayer: Photographic Works an Exhibition”

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• To me designing has never been a job or profession. It's a way of life, like a priest or rabbi.

  Ed Benguiat

  Jobs, Design, Way

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• Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.

  James Fenton

  Beautiful, Lyric Poetry, Musical

  49 Copy quote

• Type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader. The good type-designer therefore realizes that, for a new font to be successful, it has to be so good that only very few recognize its novelty.

  Stanley Morison

  Moving, Successful, Design

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