‘Harmonised type design’ revisited

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Nemeth, T. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3871-5792 (2016) ‘Harmonised type design’ revisited. In: Dyson, M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0920-4312 and Suen, C. Y. (eds.) Digital Fonts and Reading. Series on Language Processing, Pattern Recognition, and Intelligent Systems. World Scientific, Singapore, pp. 150-172. ISBN 9789814759533 doi: 10.1142/9789814759540_0009

Abstract/Summary

In 1993 Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes published The design of a Unicode font. It was one of the first scholarly discussions of type design for multiple scripts, and likely coined the term harmonised design. Bigelow and Holmes defined the concept thus: ‘By “harmonization”, we mean that the basic weights and alignments of disparate alphabets are regularized and tuned to work together, so that their inessential differences are minimized, but their essential, meaningful differences preserved.’ In 1993 the introduction of the Unicode standard provided the technological background which allowed this novel approach as fonts could now contain many thousands of characters. And just as Unicode aspired to be the single, universal encoding standard of the world, now it became tangible to create typefaces with unified typographic representations of many of the world's scripts. Harmonised type design was soon widely embraced, copied and promoted, and was received with little, if any, critique. Bigelow and Holmes' assertion that ‘harmonization seems like a desirable goal’ appears to have been a view which was widely shared in the trade, and harmonisation became an established concept. This article revisits the notion of harmonised type design 20 years after its inception. It critically assesses the origin of the concept, identifies its parallels to modernist design ideas, and queries its applicability in different typographic scenarios. Some limits of the concept of harmonised type design are discussed and different interpretations of designing type for multiple scripts are briefly mentioned.

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Item Type	Book or Report Section
URI	https://reading-clone.eprints-hosting.org/id/eprint/87161
Identification Number/DOI	10.1142/9789814759540_0009
Refereed	Yes
Divisions	No Reading authors. Back catalogue items Arts, Humanities and Social Science > School of Arts and Communication Design > Typography & Graphic Communication
Uncontrolled Keywords	Multilingual, typography, Arabic, harmonisation, type design
Publisher	World Scientific
Download/View statistics	View download statistics for this item

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Date Deposited:	12 Nov 2019 14:34	Date item deposited into CentAUR
Last Modified:	24 Jan 2024 21:44	Date item last modified

References

Bigelow, C. and Holmes, K. (1993). The design of a ‎Unicode font, Electronic Publishing, vol 6, no. 3, 289–305. Biľak, P. (2008) Family planning, or how type families work, https://www.typotheque.com/articles/type_families (accessed September 9, 2014), first published in CAP & Design, November 2007 (in Swedish). Boutros™ Arabic Typography (2014) “Boutros Advertisers Naskh”, http://www.boutrosfonts.com/spip.php?article23 (accessed September 9, 2014). Craig, J. (1998) Shemlan: a history of the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies, (Macmillan, Basingstoke). Dreyfus, J. (1994) Into Print: Selected Writings on Printing History, Typography and Book Production, “Jan Tschichold’s Sabon: The first ‘Harmonized’ Type,” (The British Library, London) pp. 190–197, first published as “Sabon: the first ‘harmonized’ type” in the Penrose Annual, vol. 61, London, 1968. Froshaug, A. (2000a) Anthony Froshaug: Typography & texts / Documents of a life, ed. Kinross, R., “Univers,” (Hyphen Press, London) pp. 174–176. Froshaug, A. (2000b) Anthony Froshaug: Typography & texts / Documents of a life, ed. Kinross, R., “Typography is a grid,” (Hyphen Press, London) pp. 187–190. Kinross, R. (2002a) Unjustified texts: perspectives on typography, “Universal faces, ideal characters” (Hyphen Press, London) pp. 233–245, first published in Baseline, no. 6, 1985. Kinross, R. (2002b) Unjustified texts: perspectives on typography, “What is a typeface?” (Hyphen Press, London) pp. 113–130, first published in Baseline, no. 7, 1986, 14–18, Kinross, R. (2004), Modern typography, 2nd Ed. (Hyphen Press, London). Mosley, J. (1997). French academicians and modern typography: designing new types in the 1690s, Typography Papers no. 2, pp. 5–29. Ulrich, F. (2014) From compressed light to extended ultra: Visual systems in type designs, http://next.fontshop.com/content/from-compressed-light-to-extended-ultra/ (accessed September 17, 2014). Unicode, Inc. (2009) History of Unicode, ‘Chronology of Unicode Version 1.0,’ http://www.unicode.org/history/versionone.html (accessed September 9, 2014).

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