Chapter 6 Reflection - Stephanie Tatoiu

Chapter 6 Reflection: The Typographic Message

Chapter 6 discusses an important part of typography, which is typographic message. Like I’ve mentioned before in summaries, I’ve often taken for granted typography in general. I never even considered how important typographic messages are and how much they shape our culture and lives. Something I didn’t know about typographic messages is that they can be verbal, visual, and vocal. The book describes it as a “dynamic communication medium”.  The chapter goes into the history of typographic messages by going back to the forms that occurred in Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was an activist period that was experimenting with all sorts of visual and performing arts. They were being affected tremendously by the social and philosophical changes of the time, such as industrial and technological developments. The typographic designs were being brought into a revolution of art. Poets and artists alike were embracing the idea that meaning and form could be implemented into typographic communication.  

The chapter goes into specifics, discussing the Futurist manifesto, which was written by the Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti in 1909. The futurist manifesto changed the way people in Europe and Russia thought in general. The futurist manifesto commended technology, violence, danger, movement through the futurist typography, which was also known as “free typography”. The futurist typography showed these ideas in an expressive manner, giving people the idea that typography didn’t have to be solely read, but also “seen, heard, felt and experienced”. It officially became an expressive form of communication.

People today might assume that because we are given so much printed and broadcasted messages, typographic messages do not have much of an impact. That is far from the truth, because they still influence change in a social, political, and economical way. Type can function as signs as well, representing concepts that can possess important meaning. Appropriately designing typographic design will leave some sort of an overall impression on the person interpreting it.