From Monotype to Digg

October 28th, 2006

I remember being taken round the Monotype factory as a young man. (The place that designed and produced typefaces and typesetting equipment)

Where designers of typefaces were taught to draw the most difficult letter as their apprenticeship, the letter O. Perfect in form, beautiful and transfixing as I watched a lady draw an O – a pure visual act of delight.

Those of you not into typography, will not understand how important typeface design was to information communication for the printed page. Baskerville, Eric Gill, Anthony Froshaug, moderns like Jeremy Tankard et al., created for us delightful reading forms for books and newspapers, magazines, posters and cinema etc.,

And we forget, how closely tied these great mean were to the information age of the last 600 years. Right back to Gutenberg.

Aesthetics play a very different role in our information needy age – where the quantity of communication and information has become supercharged. It has without doubt become more audio-visual, and more oral.

The aesthetics of information sounds like an idea

Witness the rise of podcasts or the 100m viewers per day at You Tube.

My son is learning to spell via search. By which I mean his compulsion to find what he wants overrides his knowledge of spelling -so that it becomes cognitive.

He will perhaps not understand the beauty of letter forms as I did and do – as his aesthetics of information will be created around: admiring a piece of code, a widget, or the architecture of a user interface.

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