4type.org

The ini­tial thought pos­ted on this site, ‘it’s not a per­fect world, but the skilled craft of typo­graphy allows an indi­vidual to be very pro­duct­ive – yet elo­quent & aware – within it’ could be 4type’s brief mani­festo – but it’s not. 4type rep­res­ents a blend­ing of new and old (and writ­ten and visual) interests that inform type use and type design.

In a related thought pro­cess, Kurt Schwitters has been noted to observe:

‘Typography is a unity out of mul­ti­pli­city: by selec­tion, lim­it­a­tion, form­a­tion, rhythm – via static or dir­ectly moved bal­ances – via a sys­tem.’---Kurt Schwitters

This text above was ori­gin­ally trans­lated by graphic designer Oliver Wehn. He pos­ted this (on Typophile):

‘…[in] 2006 we did some typo­graphic com­pos­i­tions in the typo­graphy class in Basel dur­ing our first year at the academy with our pro­fessor Philipp Stamm. We worked with the words of a quote by Kurt Schwitters taken from his script ‘Die neue Gestaltung in der Typografie’ (loose trans­la­tion: ‘The New Design in Typography’) he did in 1930:

“Gestaltung ist Einheit aus Vielheit, durch Auswahl, Begrenzung, Gliederung, Rhythmus, durch ruhendes oder gerichtet bewegtes Gleichgewicht, durch System.”

Wehn states, ‘I would trans­late it this way:

”Design is unity out of mul­ti­pli­city, by selec­tion, lim­it­a­tion, form­a­tion, rhythm, via static or dir­ec­tedly moved bal­ance, via a sys­tem.”’

I’ve rein­ter­preted Oliver’s trans­la­tion as:

‘Typography is unity out of mul­ti­pli­city: by selec­tion, lim­it­a­tion, form­a­tion, rhythm – via static or dir­ectly moved bal­ances – via a sys­tem.’

I assumed ‘dir­ec­tedly’ was a typo, so I changed it to ‘dir­ectly’. And, ‘bal­ance’ becomes ‘bal­ances’ since there are notice­ably many bal­ances within typo­graphy: ver­tical, hori­zontal, diag­onal, col­our, weight, con­trasts (coun­ters, ter­min­als, ascend­ers, des­cend­ers and lig­at­ures as stroked stress, etc).

I think Oliver’s trans­lat­ing the German word ‘durch’ as the English word ‘via’ is very clear. It implies the sys­tem Schwitters refers to isn’t fixed, dog­matic or predetermined.

The major change I made to his trans­la­tion was to rein­ter­pret the word ‘design’ as ‘typo­graphy’. Since Schwitters is refer­ring to the design of typo­graphy, not design in gen­eral, in an essay called,‘The new design of typo­graphy’ and, since ‘Gestaltung’, roughly trans­lates to ‘organ­isa­tion’ as well as ‘design’, nam­ing which form (design or typo­graphy) he means to organ­ise is valid, I think. Part of the prob­lem with any lit­eral trans­la­tion is that it doesn’t offer the clearer con­texts of mean­ings included in the com­plete text.

Schwitters lists ‘selec­tion, lim­it­a­tion, form­a­tion and rhythm’ as a col­lect­ive reas­on­ing res­ult­ing in ‘mul­ti­pli­city’. Naming lim­it­a­tion can be some­what start­ling within some cur­rent views of practice.

Although lim­its are always required to pro­duce typo­graphic work on time, design­ers can also be over­whelmed by choices regard­ing vast vari­ations of forms and their applied use. Eighty years ago, when Schwitters wrote this, this was less of a prob­lem (in terms of being spoiled for choice). But, it’s also likely he was refer­ring to self imposed as well as phys­ic­ally imposed lim­its – even then.