Recently I’ve been thinking about typography as a practice of care.
By typography, I mean both the communications function of type, as well as its crafted details. The “communications function” entails attending to the meaning of the text, coaxing it out, making it visible, giving it physical form. By “details” I mean everything from creating and managing spaces (whether between letters, words, lines, paragraphs, or margins), to the use of dashes, to considerations of when one might use old style vs. lining vs. tabular figures.
For a contemporary analysis of care, I turn to Matters of Care by María Puig de la Bellacasa, who draws upon the thinking of feminist theorists before her, including Joan Tronto and Bernice Fischer. While this book makes no mention of typography, I find it rich with resonance.
De la Bellacasa offers Tronto’s definition of care as “everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” (3). ‘Our world’ contains design artifacts; individual design artifacts, such as books, also create their own world. De la Bellacasa emphasizes that “‘caring about’ and ‘taking care of’ need to be supported by material practices” (4), that caring necessitates acting; one cannot design without doing something. She notes that “feminist interest in care has brought to the forefront the specificity of care as a devalued doing, often taken for granted if not rendered invisible” (53). The labor of typographers and graphic designers is ubiquitous, yet largely anonymous. Evidence of their work surrounds us, and yet as workers they remain largely uncredited and invisible.
I came to the notion of “care” as a lens to think through how to teach typographic rules that feels personally authentic to me as a feminist practitioner. As my students will attest, I care a lot about typographic detail. And my eagerness to teach conventions gives me pause. Many contemporary students and instructors alike are skeptical of Eurocentric inheritances, weary of their weight, and seek alternatives. New texts in this area, such as matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, by Heather Snyder Quinn and Ayako Takase, advocate for “changing the rules, unlearning the systems and structures under which we have been trained” and advise students against “checking off boxes and working to ‘please the professor’” (n.p.). My zealous presentation of a handout called the Yale Typesetting Checklist (distributed by a beloved former professor, Yale University Printer and Senior Critic John Gambell, now retired) hardly seems in line with this pedagogical approach. I relish teaching this checklist, yet I identify as a feminist design educator who values creating an environment where students explore, experiment, identify their influences, follow their interests, and develop their own research and methods. How do I reconcile my love of this traditional checklist with my dedication to feminist pedagogy?
Learner-centered teaching is knowledge and skill sharing, something long considered a part of feminist practice and process. Certainly there is power in understanding how and why things work, and being able to shape material to get a desired outcome: to know how to polish something. When students take a raw paragraph into InDesign and iterate various ways to shape and detail it based upon a desired outcome, the text gains character, liveliness, identity; the text becomes more itself. De la Bellacasa offers that “collective reenactment of committed knowledge [is] a form of care” (16), which suggests to me that typographic shaping is a way of caring for a text. One cannot care without knowledge and without action. The point to remember is that there are many types of knowledge, many ways of knowing, many ways of caring, multiple ways of acting.
So in teaching the checklist, the question becomes “how to care in ways that challenge situations and open possibilities rather than close or police spaces of thought and practice”(67)?
How to teach skills and principles while creating space for invention? What could this mean for a typographic checklist?
In the original checklist, one item is “to render all underlined titles of literary or artistic work in italic type.” I offer to my students that this is a reminder to treat titles differently: italics is a quiet and effective approach. Other options could be to underline a title (creating custom underlines is one of my favorite InDesign tricks), or make a title bold, or a different typeface, or a different color.... the reminder is to attend to the difference of the title, and not flatten it to the rest of the surrounding text.
Another item in the checklist outlines the usage of hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes. Dashes are glyphs, symbols, meaning-givers, like the letter A: you use the sign you need to communicate what you need to communicate. While I may be satisfied with conventional dashes and have yet to seek alternatives, I think of Samuel R. Delany inventing his own punctuation mark “⋮” for simultaneity. So in dashes there could be room too for invention, if students have the desire and care to create them.
Instead of a rigid list of rules, the checklist becomes a jumping off point for (re)considering every design choice. Does caring for a particular text mean adhering to the conventional, or inventing the unconventional? In discussing the value of the checklist, my student Tomaso Scotti offered “When details are cared for, people notice.” He elaborated that even if a layperson may not be able to identify why or how a design artifact appears cared for, they still recognize the designer’s attention. This “caring for” is a world-building, and world-maintaining, an outlook of attention and responsibility, an ethics of praxis: a cycle of theory, action, and reflection. If you consider a book (or any design artifact) its own world, “to maintain, continue, and repair ‘our world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible” offers a feminist lens through which to think through what we do as typographers, one checklist point at a time.
* this post presupposes that typography is a book art relevant to all students and practitioners of the book.
Works referred to:
de la Bellacasa, María Puig. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Quinn, Heather Snyder and Ayako Takase, matriarchal design futures: a collective work in progress, Chicago and Providence: self-published, 2024.
Emily Larned has been publishing as an artistic practice since 1993, when as a teenager she began making zines. She is currently Associate Professor of Art in Graphic Design at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
