In Defense of Text: Readers’ Rights
The Brazilian artist and writer Adriano Pedrosa suggests in his Emigre magazine article that it would be ideal for a writer to handwrite text so that traces of the writer’s subjectivity would be revealed.1 This is the ultimate design solution, expressing the writer’s character, position and mood through handwriting. Why should somebody else transmit the author’s message? Transforming the message by a third party creates the risk that the emphasis may be shifted. Designing the look of a message guarantees the most direct and efficient communication. You would not need to choose any of the thousands of available fonts to imitate the gesture of the author; you would simply use the original, the most personal of all typefaces—handwriting.
However, it is not that simple. Letters must conform to established codes which give them functional readability. Since writing is based on the repetitiveness of sign, excessively distorted letters lose much of their communicative power. Who is able or wants to handwrite hundreds of pages so they are readable for others? This approach might as well be a return to pre-Gutenberg times.
According to the Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco, the function of the text is to create the Model reader. Text is a tool used by a reader, which enables him to speculate. It does not limit the range of questions that it provokes. The intention of the text eventually merges with the reader’s intention. An active model reader can be created only if the designer is willing to adjust his position. In a book or a magazine, for instance, there are two authors: the author of the text and the author of the visual representation of the text. Naturally, the graphic designer should adapt his position to promote the reading.
Following the French literary critic Roland Barthes, Pedrosa developed further the idea that “the birth of reader must be at the cost of the death of the author [designer].” Graphic designers have struggled for a long time to invite the reader to actively participate in the process of reading. They have, however, achieved exactly the opposite effect. Because of the power of graphic work, contemporary readers are less active than before. Graphic designers select the information; they hierarchize it, underline it, and point out the key message for us. Designers took away all the readers’ activity. We overlook the fact that reading and interpretation is largely based on fantasies. When we overdefine the text, the reader loses much of the illusion.
There are only a few movies that I liked better than the original books the film was made from. Partially it is so because motion pictures need to have a much larger audience, so they necessarily have to adapt to an “average” taste. But the other reason is that people want to create their own dreams. People want to imagine their own heroes, to involve their own creativity. They don’t want to have it done for them.
In the age of multimedia, Internet, and soon interactive television, the reader can no longer remain passive. Postmodern typographers have tried to increase the reader’s activity, but their solutions fell short. Using many different fonts in different sizes and different leading, and combining them with chaotic images, did not clarify design. This kind of typography only frustrated readers. The narcissistic attitude of some designers also contributes to the fragmentation of communication. The reader, then, perceives separate elements instead of a complex unified sensory experience. The reader cannot interpret the work, because a fixed meaning has been given to him by the designer. The designer’s doctrine discourages the reader from reconstructing the message on his own. Rather than inviting the reader to participate, the designer has often achieved the reader’s deep passivity. The expectation of an improved and intensified communication brought by new technology has not been fulfilled.
Text has its own physical character without a designer’s intervention. The kind of paper, printing, condition and environment in which the reading takes place affect the act of reading more than the work of typographer. Designers should have more respect for their readers. A typographer should be the most sensitive reader because his task is to prepare the work for public criticism. Richard Feurer puts it like this in Emigre magazine: “My task is to generate an effect. You can’t define what exactly, or how, the viewer will take in your visual message. There are an endless number of possible ways of looking at it. The only thing I can do as designer is to animate the person through my message. He himself should act, should analyze, and reproduce the visual message for himself.” 2 The reader should benefit from the empowering role of graphic design, not the designer.
Text and images together have the potential to convey meaning in a more compact unit of expression. A designer has to be more attentive to the meaning: both images and text have their own meaning. If we admit that visual communication and verbal communication are independent on the semantic level, we must presume that there might be a shift between layers of meaning presented by text and visual elements. In the case of graphic design, the visual representation of an idea may be in complete contradiction to the message, or it also may communicate things that have not been clearly articulated in the text.
Visual language is not transparent. The transparency of a medium is a major problem in the communication process. To what degree is a designer to act transparently? Does he have the right to critically interpret the message? Usually emphasis is placed on a clarity of communication, but does one achieve that clarity by being neutral to the communicated information or by visually translating it? Who is responsible for the meaning then? The writer, the interviewed person, the graphic designer? Should we leave it up to the reader to completely interpret the information? Contemporary graphic design is unreservedly subjective. It is impossible to remain neutral towards the message it delivers. Graphic designers, writers, and the public see text differently, which therefore suggests different interpretations. The meaning shifts with the context in which texts are sent and received. Since there are many aspects that affect the reading/viewing of graphic design, designers must not be a barrier on the readers’ way toward the content. Graphic designers are to help to communicate a message.
In the article “Since when did USA Today become the national design ideal?” Michael Rock wrote: “If you compare Time or Newsweek or a fifth grade schoolbook of twenty years ago to their present incarnations, the change is remarkable. The headlines are bigger, the captions are bigger, the photographs, charts, and call-outs are all bigger. Something had to go, someone must have decided, and what went was the text. The trend in typography is clearly towards a destruction of narrative text, with images increasingly responsible for carrying content. Running copy is replaced with exaggerated hierarchies, charts, sidebars, boxes, captions, and call-outs that reduce the ‘story’ to a collection of visualized pseudo-facts.”
Is there only one way to read this magazine? The role of a designer should be in promoting multiple perspectives, and opening the text to various interpretations. If an image could replace dozens of words, all the better—it would be the ideal solution. But so far, graphic designers have produced schizophrenic messages, where the meaning of the images often contradicts the text. The reader often gets used to reading pre-digested information.
Some concepts are difficult to abstract or stylize. Highly complex ideas are difficult to express visually. Designs often have the look of information, but without real content. At some point the graphic designer does not see the text as a carrier of information, because the texts become just gray areas for him. The mission of a designer then is to make them look good. A page becomes an empty carrier and text becomes a page filler. In that sense type is nothing but decoration.
Reading is a very individual and unpredictable process. We do not need a designer to make it more complicated. Language is intrinsically associative, offering readers mental correlation and parallels to their experiences. In fact, it is not the author but the language itself that provokes such associations. William of Baskerville, in Eco’s book The Name of the Rose, remarks: “Books are not written to trust them, they are to be explored. If you think about a book, you can’t ask yourself what does it say, you need to ask what does it mean.”
Since the writer is rarely physically present during the act of reading, he has no control over the interpretation of his text. It is legitimate for a sensitive reader to find what he finds, since there are unlimited potential associations hidden in a written work. We cannot say that some interpretations are wrong or right. Any text is created as much by the reader as by the author. The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges radicalized this attitude to the point of parody, stating that a writer doesn't have to add a line to what already exists. It suffices to republish text under his/her name.*
Potentially a text has no end, no final interpretation—it has an absolute plurality of meaning. This is so only if you agree that interpretation is not a reconstruction of the author’s intention. “A text, that claims to state something indisputable is a failed galaxy, a product of a confused creator...,” writes Umberto Eco in his study Interpretation and Overinterpretation. It was Eco who coined the term reader’s intention. In his text, Eco acknowledges both the author’s intent and the reader’s intent. Furthermore, he adds a new term the intention of text making the interpretation theory even more interesting.
Is the reader really passive? The enthusiasm of the first multimedia projects calmed down quickly; the public’s feeling of disappointment dominated the excitement. Today’s CD-ROM is less interactive than an ordinary book. With a book, the reader can choose the environment and the condition where the act of reading is going to take place—which affects the interpretation. A book is immediately and randomly accessible. The CD-ROM, by contrast, is limited by the annoying presence of the monitor and the static position of the screen. Waiting for the next sequence makes reading via computer a very uncomfortable process. The content changes with every CD, but its form is always the same: a glossy screen and pixelated images.
Perhaps in the future new media will enhance our lives. Nicholas Negroponte, one of the world’s foremost experts on multimedia, writes in his Being Digital: “The structure of the text should be imagined like a complex molecular model. Chunks of information can be reordered, sentences expanded, and words given definitions on the spot. [...] Think of hypermedia as a collection of elastic messages that can stretch and shrink in accordance with the reader's actions.”
The concept of the active reader is certainly a good one idea. But I do not know if today’s CD-ROM can make the reader more active. Very often it only discourages the reader by time-consuming downloading and poor design. Nonetheless, changing atoms to bits is an inevitable technical progression, the same as when the steam engine was replaced by the electrical motor. The future will introduce even more of these advances.

* This observation comes from the idea that the same text will be interpreted differently in a different time period. (Magazine litéraire)


Adriano Pedrosa (Writing and Design and the Subject) Emigre#35 summer 95,