134 | nº 28, pp. 133-150 | doxa.comunicación

January-June of 2019

How typeface shouts. Cultural mediation processes and the state of that which is visible

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

1. Introduction and presentation: typography as a cognitive device

Steve Jobs, in his famous speech at Stanford University in 2005, stressed the importance of typography in the subsequent development of Apple computers – “and since Windows did nothing except to copy the Mac”, now all computers owe a debt of gratitude for at least part of their interface to typography:

At that time, Reed University offered what was perhaps the best calligraphy program in the country (...) I learned things about serif and sans serif typefaces, about the variable spaces between letters, about what makes a typeface truly magnificent. It was subtly beautiful, both historically and artistically (...) and I found it fascinating. None of this had the slightest hope of practical application in my life. However, ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, all of that came back to me. Furthermore, we designed the Mac with that as its essence. It was the first computer with beautiful fonts (...), and as Windows did nothing more than copy the Mac, it is likely that no personal computer would have them today. If (...) I had not taken that calligraphy class, personal computers would not have the wonderful typefaces they now possess (Jobs, 2005).

“Magnificent typography”... and all the current graphics potential. It was necessary for those who developed the first personal computers to use typefaces as images in order to be able to represent them with the precision that Jobs wanted, both in the software of their operating systems and in the hardware of their graphics cards and processors that were capable of encoding images of very high resolution. This guided the development of computers in a specific direction: visual representations (desks, windows, icons... precise letters). It is a clear example of the importance of typography, not as a set of alphabetic signs, but as images themselves. It seems clear that for the basic functioning of characters such as symbols of an alphabet, no more than one typeface would actually be needed, and a growing variety would be senseless; thus, it is evident that we have different fonts because each one expresses something different, although we cannot forget the need for distinct fonts depending on the reproduction technique, the medium in which they are going to be arranged, either in print or on a screen, or depending on the size of the characters themselves, according to authors such as Enric Jardí (2007: 12, 64).