Top 72 Quotes About Typography: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Typography

#1. You can do a good ad without good typography, but you can't do a great ad without good typography.

Herb Lubalin

#2. When typography is on point, words become images.

Shawn Lukas

#3. Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

Marshall McLuhan

#4. Typography is what language looks like.

Ellen Lupton

#5. 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

#6. Simplicity, wit, and good typography.

Michael Bierut

#7. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

Steve Jobs

#8. The book, that stubbornly unelectric artifact of pure typography, possesses resources conducive to the flourishing of the soul. A thoughtful reading of the printed text orients one to a world of order, meaning, and the possibility of knowing truth.

Douglas Groothuis

#9. Everyone complains that we can no longer intake huge chunks of text. I find that a reason to celebrate. It's something that has deep roots in modernism, stretching from the Futurists' use of typography to Pound's use of ideograms to concrete poetry.

Kenneth Goldsmith

#10. Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy's habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product.

Ellen Lupton

#11. There's a simplicity in typography that demands absolute accuracy ... the only way you can experience it is by doing it, and you can't do it on a screen because a screen never gives you the entire picture.

Bruno Maag

#12. The first thing one learns about typography & type design is that these rules are made to be broken.

Jeffery Keedy

#13. I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

Tom Wolfe

#14. Typography is two-dimensional architecture, based on experience and imagination, and guided by rules and readability.

Hermann Zapf

#15. Perfect typography is more a science than an art.

Jan Tschichold

#16. Copy, art, and typography should be seen as a living entity; each element integrally related, in harmony with the whole, and essential to the execution of an idea.

Paul Rand

#17. Typography's really white, you know. It's not even black, in a sense. It is the space between the blacks that really makes it. In a sense, it's like music - it's not the notes; it's the space you put between the notes that makes the music.

Gary Hustwit

#18. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself, you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else.

Beatrice Warde

#19. Of the many unforeseen consequences of typography, the emergence of nationalism is, perhaps, the most familiar

Marshall McLuhan

#20. What a graphic designer tries to do is make sure the typography is emotionally consistent with the brand.

Michael Ian Kaye

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

Robert Bringhurst

#22. Type and typography - what you do and how you do it - are both science and art.

James Felici

#23. Typography is the use of type to advocate, communicate, celebrate, edu- cate, elaborate, illuminate, and disseminate. Along the way, the words and pages become art.

James Felici

#24. Typography is to literature as musical performance is to composition: an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness.

Robert Bringhurst

#25. Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society.

Neville Brody

#26. You could say that bad typography brought us the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, the housing crisis and a good number of other things.

Stefan Sagmeister

#27. Typography needs to be audible. Typography needs to be felt. Typography needs to be experienced.

Helmut Schmid

#28. If your words aren't truthful, the finest optically letter-spaced typography won't help,

Edward Tufte

#29. There are bad types and good types, and the whole science and art of typography begins after the first category has been set aside.

Beatrice Warde

#30. 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

#31. Space in typography is like time in music. It is infinitely divisible, but a few proportional intervals can be much more useful than a limitless choice of arbitrary quantities.

Robert Bringhurst

#32. They should make new ways to better design buildings and books. The computer was the end of Swiss typography!

Emil Ruder

#33. I was a generalist in college. You take a lot of courses to feel out what you're interested in. I really felt web design was too limited for me to interested in it - [instead] I was really into typography.

Jessica Hische

#34. Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration

Neil Postman

#35. Typography is a minor technicality of civilized life.

Stanley Morison

#36. Typography is not only a technology but is in itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple, it shapes not only private sense ratios but also
patterns of communal interdependence.

Marshall McLuhan

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

Jan Tschichold

#38. I'm very much a word person, so that's why typography for me is the obvious extension. It just makes my words visible.

Erik Spiekermann

#39. Typography can be as exciting as illustration and photography.

Herb Lubalin

#40. The material of typography is the black, and it is the designer's task with the help of this black to capture space, to create harmonious whites inside the letters as well as between them.

Adrian Frutiger

#41. 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

#42. I was never really satisfied with writing only text or with the way my texts looked when they were published. Most online journals have a pretty lame sense of typography - bad font, counter-intuitive margins and line spacing - that it makes me sour on my writing.

Masha Tupitsyn

#43. The better people communicate, the greater will be the need for better typography-expressive typography.

Herb Lubalin

#44. 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

#45. The house was a vast labyrinth of books. Volumes were stacked from floor to ceiling on every wall, dark, crackling, redolent of leather bindings, smooth to the touch, with their gold titles and translucent gilt-edged pages and delicate typography.

Isabel Allende

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

Michael Bierut

#47. Typography is what communication looks like.
There is beauty in the language and beauty in the way it is presented.

James Felici

#48. Descriptive anatomy is to physiology what geography is to history, and just as it is not enough to know the typography of a country to understand its history, so also it is not enough to know the anatomy of organs to understand their functions.

Claude Bernard

#49. The contributions that one makes in typography, design, and art in general cannot be, and must not be measured on how much money is involved. That would lead to total chaos. The word itself (contribution) is to give to a common purpose.

Ed Benguiat

#50. There were voices on the other side - eldritch voices, the sort of voices that mere typography will remain totally unable to convey until someone can make a linotype machine with echo-reverb and, possibly, a typeface that looks like something said by a slug.

Terry Pratchett

#51. 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

#52. Typography exists to honor content.

Robert Bringhurst

#53. Every page should explode, either because of its staggering absurdity, the enthusiasm of its principles, or its typography.

Tristan Tzara

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

Wolfgang Weingart

#55. What makes Helvetica more beautiful is the word "Helvetica" as a logotype in its typeface. It just makes the rest of the alphabets effective.

Shawn Lukas

#56. A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .

Robert Bringhurst

#57. By the year 2000 every secretary will have a favorite typeface.

Roger Black

#58. I discovered that I never really used Helvetica but I like to look at it. I like the VW beetle, too, although I've never driven one.

Stefan Sagmeister

#59. Anyone who uses Helvetica knows nothing about typefaces.

Wolfgang Weingart

#60. Typefaces are to the written word what different dialects are to different languages.

Steven Heller

#61. Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

H.G.Wells

#62. All the old fellows stole our best ideas.

Frederic Goudy

#63. Its focus wasn't on the written word but how the word was written.

Neville Brody

#64. You can say, "I love you," in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it's really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.

Massimo Vignelli