Typography and graphic design are deeply intertwined, but in certain respects they are also worlds apart. For one thing, design in the contemporary world is overwhelmingly involved with speed. It is mightily concerned with instantaneous recognition, in the same way that contemporary marketing is concerned with saturation. Typography is not oblivious to these concerns, but they are not its first priorities. Letterforms exist for the sake of reading, and reading takes time. Serious reading also involves rereading and reflection, and that takes even more time. Shoppers and travelers are usually grateful for clean, uncluttered design because it seems to speed them up, to lubricate their passage through the world. Readers appreciate clean, efficient design for the same reason, but their first requirement is a typographic environment in which they can comfortably settle down. Typography must offer them the prospect of a long and pleasant stay between the covers of a book: the prospect of a journey that is its own reward, and of pleasures that cannot be achieved except by slowing down.
There are other differences too. Both typography and design are highly imitative crafts, but imitation in typography is far more diachronic than synchronic. In most fields of design, historical imitation is an indulgence, a luxury, even perhaps a sport. Typography, however, has no choice but to conserve and recycle its own history. Here it is not a matter of fashion or amusement but of basic legibility. A typeface that has burned its historical bridges will have to be deciphered rather than read. Instead of slowing readers down to a comfortable reading speed, it will slow them to a crawl, and reading will almost certainly stop.
My old friend Alberto Manguel has remarked very perceptively that »We can live in a society founded on the book and yet not read, or we can live in a society where the book is merely an accessory and be, in the deepest, truest sense, readers.« We can also be readers – or non-readers – in a purely oral culture: a society where there are no physical books at all, apart from the world of earth and sky: the original book on which the traces of our passage are constantly inscribed, erased, and reinscribed. This process is far more ancient than human beings. Humans have adopted it as their own and have made it into an art, but those deeper-than-human foundations are what make typography a potentially respectable and humanistic profession.

I agree very strongly with Sybille Krämer that reading precedes writing (and indeed, as Prof. Krämer may know, I have been saying exactly that, in books and lectures, for something over twenty years). But reading is not where meaning begins. We should not therefore exaggerate the extent to which reading transforms what is read into something else. Reading is really a form of paying attention. It is in its way a creative act, but it is a gesture of acknowledgement and respect far more than an act of creation or transformation. The reader of a sign does not need to invest the sign with meaning. If the sign exists, meaning is already there. The reader’s task, and the reader’s privilege, is first to perceive it, then to augment it. To the extent that we invest what we read with meanings of our own, we are in danger of replacing one meaning with another – perhaps a richer with a poorer. That is to say, we are in danger of replacing what we don’t know and might learn with what we think we know already.
In simple terms, reading precedes writing, but meaning precedes reading. Meaning is coextensive with being – a large domain, in which humans are recent arrivals and minor participants – but now also major destroyers.
To be sure, meaning is made as well as found; it is accumulated and edited through time. In order to thrive and to reproduce, it needs to be fed. Better yet, it needs to be free to feed itself. It can also be starved, and all too easily erased, like the Buddhas of Bamyan or the languages once spoken by the painters of Lascaux. Reading and writing and type-designing are among the many ways in which we participate in the ecosystem of meaning, but they are not ways of creating meaning from scratch.

This lecture is presented by FontShop and FontFont.