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Record W2330130876 · doi:10.1353/scp.2008.0000

New Typographic Design (review)

2008· article· en· W2330130876 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

venuePublished in a venue whose home country is Canada.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueJournal of Scholarly Publishing · 2008
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicTechnology's Impact on Media
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsTypographyTypefacePublishingBook designCalligraphyReading (process)CopyingNothingArtPaintingGraphic designArt historyVisual artsLiteratureLinguisticsLawPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Reviewed by: New Typographic Design Cope Cumpston (bio) Roger Fawcett-Tang , New Typographic Design (with an introduction and essays by David Jury). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Pp. 192. Paper: ISBN-13 978-0300117752, US$35.00 What brings you to the Journal of Scholarly Publishing? It probably has nothing to do with typography - and yet the 'wondrous mystic art of painting speech'1 impacts us all with every printed page. It is design that triggers that indefinable rush of excitement for a new book we just can't resist. Content and design are inextricably wedded. So here we have a book about New Typographic Design. There is an especially strong tradition of skilful typography in scholarly publishing. The complexity of scholarly texts has always required careful design attention. Some of the best and most innovative book design is done at university presses. The typographic conventions for text have not changed much in 500 years. The Journal of Scholarly Publishing - on paper! - would be readable and comfortable to a scholar of the fifteenth century. Here the unspoken rule is Beatrice Warde's metaphor: the best typographic container is like the plain, invisible glass that reveals the true nature of wine rather than masking it in an elaborate goblet.2 Reading of this kind is a personal exchange between the writer and the reader, so the designer's work had best remain invisible. Although there are firm guidelines for what makes a typeset page functional and beautiful, an ugly page may be just as legible. Few people know what makes the difference. And now we come to Roger Fawcett-Tang's New Typographic Design. For anyone who practises typography, this title is bound to evoke a response. It could be distrust, scepticism, or curiosity: What kind of new typography? In what context? Is it well crafted, or simply new? Will it excite my creativity? Book designers are so accustomed to being unknown and ignored that any attention given to our work, and particularly a lavish book such Fawcett-Tang's from Yale, has to pique some interest. This new title echoes Jan Tschichold's 1928 classic, The New Typography, published in his native German. That work had an ambitious mission: to define 'modernist' in the process of [End Page 190] rejecting 'classical' design. Tschichold renounced serif faces in favour of sans serif and proclaimed asymmetric layout more effective for text than centred. His book, reissued in 1998 by the University of California Press, shows many examples of 'good' and 'bad' typography, with in-depth discussion of the appropriate fonts, layout, margins, and page proportions that he advocated in his manifesto on the new direction for the new age.3 In 1928, this was no mere academic exercise. After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, all designers were required to register with the Ministry of Culture. Tschichold and his wife were arrested by armed Gestapo in 1933 when Soviet posters were found in their apartment; his books were destroyed, his teaching contract was cancelled, and he was imprisoned for six weeks.4 The couple escaped to Switzerland, where Tschichold continued to be an influential teacher and designer. His great contribution to typography is the 500 books he art-directed for Penguin after reverting to a more classical style, declaring his 1928 revelations too extreme. Tschichold's Penguin Composition Rules remain an important reference for text designers. I find Tschichold's The New Typography fresh and instructive eighty years after its publication. Will Fawcett-Tang's New Typographic Design have something to say to designers in 2088? Fawcett-Tang is the founding partner of Struktur Design, a firm with offices in London and Denmark. He is a prolific author, focusing on innovative work, including his 2004 New Book Design.5 In the book under review, the essays that introduce four categories of typography are written by David Jury, head of design at the Colchester Institute in England. Jury has also published extensively, including About Face: Reviving the Rules of Typography (unfortunately out of print) and What Is Typography?6 Both authors are serious about the mission of teaching and promoting typographic design. New Typographic Design presents its message on several levels...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.024
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.170
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMetaresearch, Scholarly communication, Research integrity
Consensus categoriesScholarly communication
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.342
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0240.170
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.004
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0090.087
Open science0.0050.000
Research integrity0.0000.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.264
GPT teacher head0.381
Teacher spread0.117 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it