Best of TOC, 3rd Edition

Chapter 13. Production

The New New Typography

By Adam Hyde

In the 1920s and 1930s in Europe there was a movement known as the New Typography. It was a movement that rejected traditional type set in symmetrical columns and instead treated the printers block as a blank canvas to be explored in its entirety. The calling card of the movement was type arranged in harmonious and beautiful asymmetrical compositions. In the last 2 years there is another slow breaking wave of typographical exploration. The printers block is now HTML and CSS and JavaScript are fast becoming the new tools of the typographer — not just for the web, for ebooks and for print, and not just for printed books, but for all printed material.

Browser as typesetting machine

The change of the books basic carrier medium from paper to HTML (the stuff webpages are made of) has meant many changes to what we might still call typesetting. Kindle and other e-ink devices actually move ink on a display to form words, sentences and paragraphs. The moveable type of Gutenberg’s time has become realtime, in a very real sense each book is typeset as we read it. Content is dynamically re-flowed for each device depending on display dimensions and individualised settings to aid readability. Moving type in read time marks a significant paradigm shift from moveable type systems, including digital moveable type manipulated by Desktop Publishing software, to flowable typesetting. We are leaving behind moveable type for flowable type.

The engine ...