If a culture existed that used only crayons as a method of writing, it would be a curious one. Nevertheless, writing with crayons has its advantages, and this culture would embrace those advantages, turning what we (as part of our culture) view as shortcomings into norms.
Because writing with crayons is more physically challenging than writing with a pen or pencil (or, perhaps, typing on a keyboard), the most renowned writers would be those with enough physical prowess to stay resilient when drafting works. This physical prowess may become tangled with the culture’s perception of their intellectual abilities, forming a more concretely related complex of both physical and mental ability. It also may negatively impact those who possess superior intellectual ability but lack the physical strength to express their extraordinary ideas.
The culture, as a whole, may accept different styles of writing or drawing as essential to their cultural identity because of the likelihood that those who create them were accepting the difficulties of crayon-writing as normal. This could either contribute to an ignorance of legibility in favor of content, or it could foster an obsession with legibility over content, implying that the observing public would be more impressed with a writer’s visual comprehensibility.
If that is the case, the culture may view those that can produce perfectly legible and precise writing (not unlike ours) as the crème de la crème.
When you discuss the legibility of crayon writing above, it makes me wonder whether or not you think an alphanumeric system would be a viable means of expression. Do you project that a crayon-only culture would be more visual and less textual?
ReplyDeleteI’m having trouble answering decisively on the visual culture/textual culture question. I maintain that the difficulties involved in crayon-writing would end up influencing the culture to create textual symbols that resemble what we would judge to be “more visual” as opposed to textual. But for them, their text would be their text. For me, this introduces another question: what’s so non-visual about text? Reading text is an incredibly visual process. When possible, I avoid accepting the notion that text, just because the characters involved are repetitious (and the fact that text, in academic circles, is almost never done right), is not an artfully visual experience. Typography in graphic design and publishing has an enormously understated role in evoking “feeling”—the same type of “feeling” we would normally associate with artful symbols or images that don’t resemble the Latin alphabet. Whenever I read text, in titles, headers, captions, or even large amounts of body text, the typeface in which it is set affects me in profound ways. Typefaces are unique, like the abstract shapes in a surreal Dalí painting. They have voice, tone, and pitch.
ReplyDeleteHelvetica, the most popular sans-serif typeface in the world, and my favorite typeface, speaks clearly and definitively. I like to think that Helvetica is a 29 year-old male, with a deep voice, clear dialect, and an almost monotone intonation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helvetica
Palatino, a popular serif face, is a calm female in her late forties, speaking slowly and in a genuine and believable way.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatino
Archer, a slab serif face by designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, is one of my favorites, and sounds just like you, Dr. Lay!
http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_overview.php?productLineID=100033