There’s a wonderful metaphor from Beatrice Warde, one of the foundational figures in 20th-century typography, about the use of typography, that really resonates with me. Warde published an entire book on this idea, but here is just a taste:
Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.
Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.
Beatrice Warde, The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible
So what do you spend more time on: the content or the container?
Most of us would like to point to the content, as Warde does above, but—in the course of actually doing work—I think many of us focus on the container.
Consider your standard proposal response to an RFP. What do you spend more time on? The raw content—words, images, structure—or on layout? Are you focusing on how to best highlight that raw content, or are you working up the graphical equivalent of a solid gold wine glass?
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Here is my fear of mine: What if your raw content is bad?
Warde suggests that the typographer’s goal should be to “reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing [the typography is] meant to contain.
So what if your raw content—I’m thinking of the “sustainability strategy” text that our firm had used year after year—is, well, rubbish?
What too often happens is that we use the leverage graphic design—the layout, use of imagery, typography—as a feint to our readers, an attempt to trick them into thinking that the raw content can’t really be all that bad because it looks so good.
I have found this tension difficult to navigate time and again. On the one hand, I must rely on boilerplate content to some extent in building these responses. On the other, I need to communicate the value of my firm to the reader, and not let the presentation get in the way.
So, should a proposal be a crystal goblet, giving the reader a transparent look at the raw content, good or bad? Or should a proposal (at times) be more like Warde’s maligned gold chalice—nice to look at, but distracting from the actual communication?
Taylor Coe 