I really enjoyed reading Lupton’s Thinking with Type, and it was really my first experience with typography in any strict sense. Of course I’ve thought about different fonts in my own work mainly because I now have a visceral reaction to seeing and using Times New Roman, but also because I think different fonts and typefaces (I still don’t quite grasp the difference there, despite Lupton’s efforts to correct this mistake) create different moods/effects for the reader.
That being said, Lupton’s book certainly drew my attention to other aspects of design that are important to a work other than font/type. Within the academy, I feel that there is a certain drive toward uniformity—especially in formatting texts for specific publishing houses or presses—that should be expanded. Almost obviously, I believe that each discipline or field, or perhaps even on a book-by-book or article-by-article basis, should tailor the design of their works. It shouldn’t necessarily be the case that an history of art monograph about Titian has the same design as a medieval French literature monograph just because they are both published by The University of Chicago Press, for instance.
As if the underlying thrust of Lupton’s guide, there is a really important relationship that exists between form and content, and how the user of these texts, the reader, interprets and interacts with them. My home base is the Medieval (used here as a general category), and manuscript materiality, so I’m inclined to begin there, but I want to move more toward a digital framework here.
In class, we discussed how typing in Microsoft Word can be really distracting, whereas working in a simpler text editor allows us to focus more on the content. In this regard, form matters for the writer because a simpler design can allow us to work more efficiently. However, when we publish our writing, like how I’ll publish this post to my website, form serves an entirely different purpose and is centered around the reader. So, I think we find ourselves at an interesting point in time, in publishing, that is, where we are moving more toward digital publishing, where form is crucial. Hypertext, for example, is one formatting element that can be really helpful to digital publishing, not just of academic scholarship, but of all sorts of writing.
To take up an issue from last week, I am interested in how we market ourselves as academics/scholars/graduate students, and what role design should play in that. If the universities or companies we work for, work with, or represent market themselves with various graphic elements, when we should do the same on an individual level. I would have loved to have learned Adobe InDesign and other programs that allow me to create more personalized works, instead of being limited to Microsoft Word or Pages from Apple.
I remember when I published my MA thesis, I had to follow a very specific format that adhered to The University of Texas so that they could digitize and archive it in their library’s repository. It would have been a real treat, however, to have been able to format the work so that it better reflected my project, which combined the medieval with video games, something that should have allowed for a digital or graphic component. For instance, a specially tailored format for my thesis would have allowed readers to see clips and cutscenes from the video game I was analyzing and visually represent some of the literary problems I was trying to underscore. Additionally, a move toward the digital would have allowed me to link to manuscript sources, critics, and other useful resources. I know that there are drawback to hyperlinks in scholarship, but I can certainly see the usefulness.
I believe that scholars should absolutely have design and form in mind when they are creating a project. I also believe that we should receive this type of training as a facet of our professionalization. Indeed, I think that scholars should be involved from a project’s inception to its completion, whether it be in a physical print, a digital iteration, or both. There is a lot to be said about having more than one version of a publication. I can, however, see some drawback to having scholars design and format their own works, but it should be an option available to us should we want it. Lupton’s book is a fine example of how designers can format their book to an audience while communicating content effectively. Design is important for the humanities, and for me as a language and literary scholar in particular, because as Lupton says, “Typography is what language looks like.”
