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Classifying types : building a user guide to Typography.
The purpose of this article is not to provide you with a digest - or more presumably an in-digest! - of the same old academic classifications.
Let's say it boldly : with all due respect to M. Thibaudeau and his collegues, these classifications have always failed.
WHY DOES ALL EXISTING CLASSIFICATIONS ARE USELESS ?
First, because of terminology : being made by different people at different period of time, they often give different meaning to the same words. They also use a lot of misleading terms. For example, the term "Gothic" either refers to the broken medieval writings than to some 20th century sans serifs.
Another example is the term "Antique", used by Thibaudeau to name the most modern category of his classification !
Second, because instead of solving the problems of the previous classifications, each new one has brought more and more complexity to the subject. In fact, each new classification has raised at least as much new questions as new answers ! So, finally, they all have enough good points to be interesting, and enough flaws to be useless on a user point of view...
Added to that, they all share the same conceptual flaw : their categories are heterogeneous. This too makes them more complex to use, as dissimilar categories are difficult to compare...
Third, because they were too much rooted in their time. As old classifications were more looking back than forward, they weren't prepared for the modern evolutions of Typography. Not only were they more focused on serifs than sans serifs, but it also influenced their very architecture, in such an extend that they can't handle new phenomenons. They are static.
Fourth reason : they considered that type started with the invention of printing, and only accounted for the typeforms created since. Of course, it is quite logical, but nowadays, a lot of types are revival of pre-Gutemberg forms of writing. Having a classification that includes them would either be usefull and very enlightening for users.
Fifth reason of their failure, and the major one in our mind, they choosed a wrong point of view. Either the historical or the graphical classifications have always been created for academic purposes. Being conceived with a "specialist" approach, they weren't intended as an aid for users, as a tool to choose the best typeface for a specific work. They were more taxonomic than How-to-esque : in one word, they weren't USER-ORIENTED.
Added to all these reasons, there is one that is due to the evolution of the type technologies : not only old classifications are mostly "horizontal" (that is providing one or at most two levels of classification) but they also are single-dimensioned.
This is totally irrelevant today : first, it forced them to use the heterogeneous categories we talked about earlier. Second, because they can't account for the essential evolution in recent Typography, that we call the "Effect phenomenon".
Most new trends in modern Typography are not new genre, but new treatments, versions to which has been applied an effect, made possible because Typography is now digital, and easily manipulatable. It brings an unprecedented confusion between type genre and type variants : is a blured Helvetica still an Helvetica (a new variant of it), or a new face ?
Unfortunately, as they don't include this "dimension" of effect, old classifications are only offering one single way to account for this : creating one more heterogeneous categorie, like Grunge Typography, for example...
This is one more proof that the key flaw of them all isn't in the details, in the subtle and refined way how they differenciate types, but in the way they categorize and structure them.
SO, WHAT IS THIS ARTICLE ABOUT ?
There is no point in criticising if you don't offer any answer. So, we will try to provide you with something new : not just one more academic classification, but a tool to understand Typography from a user point of view, and a tool to will help you using Typography at its best.
Of couse we will use many elements from the previous classifications, but we'll merge or split categories in order to avoid redundancy, and fix misleading terms or approximative concepts, eventualy reorganizing all this into a brand new architecture. Here's how we will do that :
First we will have a quick tour of the existing classifications : we'll focus on their objectives, and on their flaws.
Then, in a second part, we'll explore what genres of type are missing in these academic classifications. We'll also have a look at the most recent trends in Typography, to decide wether or not they are to be considered as new genres.
Then, in a third part, we'll play with all these Lego bits : we'll arrange them in the most logical, and coherent way possible, using an historical timeline.
Then, in a fourth part, we will introduce the treatment parameter. This will lead us to a new "academic" classification, able to handle the latest developements of typography.
We will provide you with a simple map of it, that you shall download and print as a reference tool.
One final preliminary statement : because Typography is a complicated matter, this article will be sometime a bit theoretical : to built a better tool, we will have to examine details that non-passionates may find mind-puzzling, if not boring.
So, If you're on the fast lane, and just want to have a tool for classifying your types easily, I suggest that you jump directly to the Downloadable classification page, that will offers the result of this study, illustrated with vivid visual examples.
Then, if you want to understand why we built it like this, if you want to have a matter of passionate discussions with fellow type addicts, or to argue with us about the validity of what we modestly made up, you'll have to read it all, my friend !
Now, let's start with deciphering the exisiting...
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