Typography & Language in Everyday Life


Book Description

Typography and Language in Everyday Life provides a detailed look at graphic as well as linguistic aspects of language and suggests there is much to be gained from collaboration between typographers and applied linguists. The first part of the book provides an introduction to aspects of typographic theory and history and suggests some areas of applied linguistics that offer approaches to studying graphic language. The second part comprises case studies which look at the relationship between prescription and practice for visual organisation by considering everyday display typography, house style and typing manuals, and letter-writing. Each of these subjects is looked at from historical and theoretical perspectives. Aimed at those who may be unfamiliar with theoretical and historical perspectives on the graphic aspects of language, and with broad concepts in applied linguistics, the book also directs readers to areas of further reading in each of these fields. Extensively illustrated with examples of past and present graphic language, Typography and Language in Everyday Life is essential reading for students of typography, graphic design, applied linguistics and education, as well as the general reader.




Language and Typography


Book Description




Typography: A Very Short Introduction


Book Description

Typography, the art of designing printed words, was once the domain of an elite few artists but has become an area with which millions of people engage daily. The widespread usage of digital devices from laptops to tablets and smart phones which are used for written communications means that we are regularly asked to make decisions about the fonts, sizes, and layouts we use in our writing. This broadening engagement with the field of typography has led to a perceptible shift from debates about legibility and technicalities to conversations about which fonts best reflect the writer's personality or style . In this Very Short Introduction, Paul Luna offers a broad definition of typography as design for reading, whether in print or on screens, where a set of visual choices are taken to make a written message more accessible, more easily transmitted, more significant, or more attractive. Considering the development of letterforms and the shapes of letter we use, Luna discusses the history behind our modern day letters and fonts, before considering the issues behind key typographic decisions, and the differences between printed and on-screen typography. Presenting any piece of typography as a fundamental design choice, Luna introduces the options available today, and explores the reasons why key typographic decisions are made. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.




The Typographic Imagination


Book Description

In the early twentieth century, Japan was awash with typographic text and mass-produced print. Over the short span of a few decades, affordable books and magazines became a part of everyday life, and a new generation of writers and thinkers considered how their world could be reconstructed through the circulation of printed language as a mass-market commodity. The Typographic Imagination explores how this commercial print revolution transformed Japan’s media ecology and traces the possibilities and pitfalls of type as a force for radical social change. Nathan Shockey examines the emergence of new forms of reading, writing, and thinking in Japan from the last years of the nineteenth century through the first decades of the twentieth. Charting the relationships among prose, politics, and print capitalism, he considers the meanings and functions of print as a staple commodity and as a ubiquitous and material medium for discourse and thought. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Typographic Imagination brings into conversation a wide array of materials, including bookseller trade circulars, language reform debates, works of experimental fiction, photo gazetteers, socialist periodicals, Esperanto primers, declassified censorship documents, and printing press strike bulletins. Combining the rigorous close analysis of Japanese literary studies with transdisciplinary methodologies from media studies, book history, and intellectual history, The Typographic Imagination presents a multivalent vision of the rise of mass print media and the transformations of modern Japanese literature, language, and culture.




Discourse Studies


Book Description

"A landmark in the oeuvre of one of the founding fathers of discourse analysis. Van Dijk has managed to edit a volume of lasting significance, and some of the chapters in this book belong to the most widely read in the field. In its totality, Discourse Studies offers us a 360 degree tour of the field... Nothing in this volume is dated, everything remains mandatory reading for every student and advanced practicioner." - Jan Blommaert, Tilburg University "This very welcome updated second edition will allow Teun van Dijk′s very popular Discourse Studies to consolidate its already strong and central position in the area. Featuring chapters written by so many of the leading scholars it will continue to be a stimulating and wide-ranging introduction to the discipline of discourse studies for new generations of students." - Malcolm Coulthard, University of Birmingham This book is the largest, most complete, most diverse and only multidisciplinary introduction to the field. A combined Second Edition of two seminal texts in the field (the 1997 titles Discourse as Social Interaction and Discourse as Structure and Process) this essential handbook: Is fully updated from start to finish to cover contemporary debates and research literature. Covers everything from grammar, narrative, argumentation, cognition and pragmatics to social, political and critical approaches. Adds two new chapters on ideology and identity. Puts the student at the centre, offering brand new features such as worked examples, sample analyses and recommended further reading. Written and edited by world-class scholars in their fields, it is the essential, one-stop companion for any student of discourse analysis and discourse studies.




Writing and Seeing


Book Description

The essays in this volume are informed by a variety of theoretical assumptions and of critical methodologies, but they all share an interest in the intersections of word and image in a variety of media. This unifying rationale secures the present collection's central position in the current critical context, defined as it predominantly is by ways of reading that are based on a relational nexus. The intertextual, the intermedial, the intersemiotic are indeed foregrounded and combined in these essays, conceptually as much as in the critical practices favoured by the various contributions. Studies of literature in its relation to pictorial genres enjoy a relative prominence in the volume - but the range of media and of approaches considered is broad enough to include photography, film, video, television, comic strips, animated film, public art, material culture. The backgrounds of contributors are likewise diverse - culturally, academically, linguistically. The volume combines contributions by prominent scholars and critics with essays by younger scholars, from a variety of backgrounds. The resulting plurality of perspective is indeed a source of new insights into the relations between writing and seeing, and it contributes to making this collection an exciting new contribution to word and image studies.




Just My Type


Book Description

Just My Type is not just a font book, but a book of stories. About how Helvetica and Comic Sans took over the world. About why Barack Obama opted for Gotham, while Amy Winehouse found her soul in 30s Art Deco. About the great originators of type, from Baskerville to Zapf, or people like Neville Brody who threw out the rulebook, or Margaret Calvert, who invented the motorway signs that are used from Watford Gap to Abu Dhabi. About the pivotal moment when fonts left the world of Letraset and were loaded onto computers ... and typefaces became something we realised we all have an opinion about. As the Sunday Times review put it, the book is 'a kind of Eats, Shoots and Leaves for letters, revealing the extent to which fonts are not only shaped by but also define the world in which we live.' This edition is available with both black and silver covers.




Type & Typography


Book Description

Providing an essential grounding for both students and professionals, this text takes readers through every aspect of typography, from the history of language and writing systems to the invention of moveable type and the evolution of the digital systems of today.




Information Design


Book Description

Information Design provides citizens, business and government with a means of presenting and interacting with complex information. It embraces applications from wayfinding and map reading to forms design; from website and screen layout to instruction. Done well it can communicate across languages and cultures, convey complicated instructions, even change behaviours. Information Design offers an authoritative guide to this important multidisciplinary subject. The book weaves design theory and methods with case studies of professional practice from leading information designers across the world. The heavily illustrated text is rigorous yet readable and offers a single, must-have, reference to anyone interested in information design or any of its related disciplines such as interaction design and information architecture, information graphics, document design, universal design, service design, map-making and wayfinding.




Writing Systems and Their Use


Book Description

Grapholinguistics, the multifaceted study of writing systems, is growing increasingly popular, yet to date no coherent account covering and connecting its major branches exists. This book now gives an overview of the core theoretical and empirical questions of this field. A treatment of the structure of writing systems—their relation to speech and language, their material features, linguistic functions, and norms, as well as the different types in which they come—is complemented by perspectives centring on the use of writing, incorporating psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic issues such as reading processes or orthographic variation as social action. Examples stem from a variety of diverse systems such as Chinese, English, Japanese, Arabic, Thai, German, and Korean, which allows defining concepts in a broadly applicable way and thereby constructing a comparative grapholinguistic framework that provides readers with important tools for studying any writing system. The book emphasizes that grapholinguistics is a discipline in its own right, inviting discussion and further research in this up-and-coming field as well as an overdue integration of writing into general linguistic discussion.




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