The Space Bar Is Not a Design Tool
Form, Function, and the Appearance-Oriented Essay
by Caitlin Leffel
Editor’s Note: See this essay’s companion slide show at the bottom of the page.
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Many people say that I don’t know how to draw because I don’t draw particular forms. When will they understand that execution, drawing, and color (in other words, style) must be in harmony with the poem?……………… – Paul Gauguin
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The first thing I ever tried to design was a t-shirt for a charity race that I was running with my company, a publisher of art and illustrated books. In my job as an editor, I frequently worked with people who were professionally trained in the visual language of design. But at work I often felt inferior, unable to assess how successfully a layout of text and white space and different fonts functioned. I’d volunteered to design the t-shirt because I wanted to learn from working alongside my husband, an illustrator and graphic designer. I thought it would be a fun collaboration—I’m the writer, so I’d come up with the content; then Alex would arrange it artfully. But when we started working on it, as always, I was stumped. Why did the design choices Alex made—the fonts he selected and the way he arranged the logo, race information, and team slogan on the shirt—work better than the more literal ideas I gave him?
Writers think about words a lot. We think about what they mean, and how many different meanings they have. We think about what they do when we string them together, and try to use them to create a specific picture in our readers’ heads. We think about how to make words evoke action, description, and emotion. But it is rather unfashionable for prose writers to be concerned with how their words look on a page, as if the visual aesthetics of the form were a vanity reserved for poets, or an absurd concern for anyone who wants to be published. Prose writers are expected to write like monks, enrobing their good work in the uniform of double-spaced 12-point Times and forsaking individual aesthetic expression in deference to the gods of publication.
Yet what distinguishes writers from other artists who work with words (actors, storytellers) is precisely the corporality of a written page. Prose—whether read in a book, off a sheet of paper, or on a computer screen—has a fundamental visual tangibility that many writers ignore. I had always considered myself a “word person” but working with “picture people”—including graphic designers, typesetters, and printers—introduced me to the subtle powers of writing’s physical dimension, and revealed the expressiveness of the modern writer’s primary medium: type. “We know from experience that what we have to say is much easier for others to understand if we put it in the right voice,” write Erik Spiekermann and E.M. Ginger in Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works, a classic text in the field of typography. “Type is that voice, the visible language linking writing and reader.” House style is a uniform that is often necessary for writers to clothe their words in, but it’s not the only choice a writer has in his or her wardrobe. Ignoring the visual experience of reading neglects an inherent quality of the art writers struggle to produce.
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“The book is no longer the chief custodian of the written word,” writes the graphic designer Ellen Lupton in Thinking with Type. Today, people read in more forms than Gutenberg could have imagined. We read on screens, and on electronic tickers. We read on portable devices and immovable ones. We read text that allows, through hyperlinks, the opportunity for readers to determine individual paths through content. We read ad copy, logos, highway signs, horrifically ungrammatical Facebook status updates, and the CNN screen crawl. The assumed flexibility and literate sophistication of the modern reader gives writers a multitude of visual references to play with when they conceive their work. This same technology has also put page design, typography, and fontography within the reach of the average writer, through computers. Today, the act of writing is not limited to transcribing the narratives we compose in our heads. Modern writers are by practice printers and designers of their own work as well.
Many prose writers are uncomfortable with these visually-oriented roles. Once, in a nonfiction writing workshop I attended, the group got into a discussion about the asterisks one participant used to mark certain narrative breaks in her piece. Why had she chosen asterisks? we wondered. And why did she put them between some breaks and not others? Timidly, other writers opened up about visual cues they had used in their work to signify narrative breaks. White space, but not too much, someone volunteered. We nodded nervously. Someone else mentioned having used asterisks but couldn’t say why.
As everyone began to reveal that they had tried similar techniques without understanding why, the group recognized that the discussion wasn’t frivolous. Though at first the discussion of white space and asterisks seemed like unfamiliar territory, we realized we were actually talking about aiding the reader’s comprehension, and the literal and fundamental structure of an essay. I knew from working with graphic designers on layouts for the coffee table books I edited that the elements of a page’s appearance—white space, line breaks, fonts, line, and letter spacing—are adjusted to work both functionally (by making text easy to read, and guiding the reader through content) and aesthetically (conveying a mood or tone, or adding a specific visual allure to a title or other text meant to stand out). But on an even more basic level, the visual choices writers make can evoke as much as an active verb or a well-crafted metaphor. It takes only a simple click for a writer to add an asterisk or italicize a block of text. But why would a writer insert anything into his or her work with less care than the selection of adjectives and verbs? Any prose writer who has felt uneasy adding an asterisk or an extra space can find guidance and inspiration in the close attention designers pay to the presentation of words.
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Form and function are two basic principles of design. Something that is well designed—whether a piece of writing or a coffee pot or a book—possesses shape, construction, and appearance (form) that facilitate its use or consumption (function). Just as the world is filled with many beautiful but poorly designed objects, so are there plenty of great books with sloppy typesetting; well-written Web content that is full of bad breaks and lacking punctuation; and, as in the above anecdote, excellent workshop pieces that throw readers off with inconsistent white space, or meaningless asterisks. Before computers, the translation of writing to print was the domain of typesetters, printers, and designers. The primary goal of these professionals was not to make beautiful or eye-catching compositions but to make pieces of writing—from novels to road signs—function better. That is, to make them easier to read and comprehend, and, where needed, to reinforce visually what the words were intended to communicate.
With computers, writers have the ability—and the responsibility—to design their own pages. We have access to fonts and control over white space. We have machines that standardize the space between lines and letters, and enable us to manipulate text orientation. We have save buttons and delete keys that let us experiment without risk. Yet while technology has made writers more self-sufficient—no longer is a publisher required to make one’s writing legible, or to reproduce it—it has also given us access to a slew of tools that used to be wielded by other practitioners. A basic understanding of page design allows writers to use these tools to make empowered choices that enhance their work.
Fittingly, our access to technology that can both manipulate and standardize the appearance of writing coincided with the appearance of more visually experimental essays. The Next American Essay tracks this evolution. Edited by John D’Agata and containing essays written between 1975 and 2003, this anthology reveals not only stylistic transformations in the essay form, but also visual ones. D’Agata writes about seeing young essayists in the twenty-first century reveling in the open possibilities of this genre, “publishing books that act like the essays they grew up reading, but that look like something else.” In his introduction to Jenny Boully’s 2003 essay, The Body, in which the narrative is told entirely through footnotes below blank pages, D’Agata asks, “What happens when an essayist starts imagining things, making things up, filling in blank spaces, or—worse yet—leaving things blank? What happens when statistics, reportage, and observation in an essay are abandoned for image, emotion, expressive transformation?”
Boully and others achieve D’Agata’s “expressive transformation” by experimenting with the essay in terms of subject matter and narrative structure but also with—literally—the form their work is experienced through: print on page. D’Agata refers to these pieces as “lyric essays,” a nonfiction subgenre characterized by a more poetic and image-focused treatment of narrative. I would define these pieces as a separate subgenre that considers the author’s craft of the visual experience along with the rhythmic: the appearance-oriented essay.
An earlier example of an appearance-oriented essay is David Antin’s The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto, from 1983. In this essay—which is constructed around the story of Antin and his wife buying a new mattress—the author uses white space to create a particular visual experience that the reader takes in along with the narrative. There is no punctuation, no capital letters. Absence provides the only breaks between content, which can be seen as a metaphor for the pauses between thought and action that one experiences in life. There is nothing artificial in this essay—Antin preserves the “rivers” of white space that flow through the lines which a typographer would instinctually close up. Mechanical production not only enabled Antin to design his prose the way he did; it also ensured that his choices were understood as deliberate, and thus would be preserved in every reproduction. He creates a visual experience that is considered inextricable from the meaning of the words, and thus, through white space, asserts complete ownership of his text.
In his 2004 essay, “Absence as Content: Negative Space in Creative Nonfiction,” Harrison Fletcher discusses how contemporary essayists such as Antin use negative space to engage more intimately with readers, using visual cues to guide readers “toward discoveries through the use of image, symbol and selective omission.” Antin’s deliberate crafting of white space in his piece imbues these breaks between words with its own meaning. Wordless space in prose is never mute. A reader experiences something in even the smallest breaks in content—instants of comprehension and clarity are achieved by space between words, for example. In the work of writers such as Antin and Boully, white space is articulate. It magnifies emptiness and suggests alternate entry points.
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Writers of intricately designed, appearance-oriented essays who feel lonely in their obsession with the minutiae of page layout may find camaraderie in the design world. The only thing graphic designers like to talk about more than Helvetica is white space. “White is the bird up your sleeve, the ace in your cap,” writes the graphic designer Peter Buchanan Smith. “It is the greatest luxury, the greatest riddle. Like a good comedian who knows when to stop talking as much as he does when to start, white must be dealt with good timing.” Like Antin and Boully, graphic designers see white space as a distinct piece of content—not the absence of it. “Design is as much of an act of spacing as an act of marking,” Lupton writes in Thinking with Type. “The typographer’s art concerns not only the positive grain of the letterforms, but the negative gaps between and around them.”
A focus on space can lead even more deeply into a piece of text—right into the word itself. Printers who hand-set type craft spaces as deliberately as they place the letters, using flat blocks of lead measured in units called “picas.” When selecting a font for a particular text, they consider the unique attributes of sequential letters: a lowercase “a” and a lowercase “p,” for instance, reach out to each other in a way that an “l” and a “t” do not. As Julie Schumacher, an artisan letterpress printer who produces books for poets and prose writers, told me, “You can change a lot about the tone of a piece with a two-pica piece of lead.”
Schumacher also spoke to me about the difference in process between working with handset type and designing on the computer. The computer can make certain calculations that help her adjust the leading (the space between the lines) and kerning (the spaces between each pair of letters). When she prints with handset type, she spends more time thinking about the space she will need between each letter and word. “I have to think about the way the letters ‘react’ to each other,” she told me. On the computer, she might spend an hour on the leading and kerning. When she uses hand-set type, she’ll work on it for maybe seven hours.
For prose writers, spending hours on spacing may seem more appealing as procrastination than production, but Schumacher’s explanation of her printing process speaks to a deliberateness—and a fascination—with arranging words that many writers can surely relate to. The intricate construction of white space seen in the essays of Antin and Boully may be particular to the subgenre of the appearance-oriented essay. But space affects the reader’s experience of text even in prose with more traditional narrative and visual structures. Thinking about how space functions both aesthetically and intellectually, as Schumacher does, can help writers use their space bars and hard returns with more beauty and nuance.
So in what instances might one want to use a lot of white space? I asked this of Reed Seifer, a graphic designer I have worked with on several books. He told me that in a project with very heavy material—say a narrative of abuse, or a story by a Holocaust survivor—he might add additional white space between paragraphs to help readers digest the weighty subject matter more comfortably. This would aid the reader’s experience with the text, as white space encourages a reader to read “gently.” It gives opportunities for pauses and mitigates bombardment with images or emotions. Seifer also chose to use generous white space in a project we worked on together, a book about resort fashion. There, he wanted the readers’ experience reading the text to reflect the subject, and the mood of the clothing: elegant, but unfussy.
What effect does reducing white space have on readers? “In typography as in urban life, density invites intimate exchange among people and ideas,” writes Lupton. A denser page—achieved through tightening line spacing, which can be controlled manually in Microsoft Word, or the addition of columns and footnotes—can preempt dreaminess, set a more rapid pace, or enable readers to consider multiple narrative movements simultaneously.
In Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun, Faith Adiele fills the margins of her story of becoming a Buddhist nun in Thailand with pieces of corollary narrative material: notes from her journals, translations of important Thai words, quotes, lists. Visually, her crowded pages work in provocative opposition to the extreme asceticism Adiele is introduced to, and add texture to her visually sparse existence amongst the nuns. The dilemma that the reader experiences on each page—what to read first, what to pay most attention to, whether to ignore anything—acts as a metaphor for the tension Adiele is experiencing herself: the pull between west and east; the identity conflicts of being a half-black, half-Scandinavian American amongst Thai Buddhists; and the difficulty of keeping a quiet mind through hours and days of meditation. It’s worth noting, I think, the prominent thank you Adiele gives to Shari DeGraw in the acknowledgements, for the time she spent designing “the perfect layout.”
These examples show that while white space is visually expressive, its meaning isn’t fixed. Rather, it can be crafted to suit the needs of the text or the objectives of the author. This requires only—but necessarily—thoughtful consideration before each use of the space bar, tab key, and hard return.
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When essayists do think about visual attributes of their pages, it’s often when they are trying to convey emphasis. When I started working on this essay, a memoirist told me in an email exchange about a piece she submitted for a writing workshop once in which she had enlarged the type for the dialogue of a woman—a former actress with a dramatic personality—who repeated phrases in escalating octaves to convey enthusiasm (like “Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!”). In the workshop, the technique fell flat, and she told me she wouldn’t make the same choice today. But her intent was to achieve something we’re all familiar with: to show the readers what the narrator was experiencing without telling them that the woman’s voice was getting louder and louder.
Perhaps the trick is in understanding that visual cues in writing—like metaphor, or imagery—don’t have to be literal. As an editor, one of the complaints I hear most frequently from designers is about the use of italics and bold. Their objections are technical as well as conceptual. Fonts are designed in “families,” and a font designer will create separate “siblings” for each font they design: light, bold, condensed, and italics are some of the more common variations. But Microsoft Word and other word processing programs allow people to italicize or make bold any font, even ones that were not designed with those siblings. The bold and italicized versions one creates by clicking the I or the B at the top of the screen are bastardized versions that bluntly slant or widen the original form of the font—to designers, the fontographic equivalent of an electric keyboard where a concert piano should be.
But designers also object to what they see as a reflexive and misplaced use of the forms themselves. A bit of backstory: Italics were developed in Italy in the fifteenth century. Because italicized letters are closer together, books printed in italics were cheaper to produce, and italics were seen as a more casual counterpoint to rigid, upright roman lettering. Bold versions of existing typefaces followed a typographic trend toward bolder typefaces in general in the nineteenth century, when advertising was developing as a mode of communication. Both of these forms—italics and bold—have a history and a raison d’être that can inform various uses in a piece of prose, uses that go beyond the visual cliché of “emphasis.”
In her prelude to The Balloonists, Eula Biss shows how bolding and italics can act in more nuanced ways than simply drawing attention to words that are “louder” or “bigger.” The piece is told as two parallel narratives. The first consists of a series of quotes that loosely give the backstory of Biss’s artistic mother and her parents’ divorce. Before each quote, the name of the speaker (“Mother”; “Father”; “Uncle”; “Aunt”) is set in bold and followed by a colon, as in the script of a play. Between the quotes are sections about airplane crashes and black box recovery, set in italics. The visual distinction between the two narrative currents conveys to the reader that these two strands are not expected to “go together”: they run parallel, but on different frequencies. This visual division between the narrative strands helps the reader keep them on separate mental planes. The italicized sections take on a softer, whisper-like quality of interior monologue, while the bolding of the names before the quotes gives the feeling of people talking over each other. The piece is visually complex, but the style isn’t a burden for the reader. It creates the opposite of a subtext—a visible “supertext”—acting like a frame on top of the prose that holds it together, and presents these two narratives as a single work.
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Architects sometimes say working with spatial constraints can lead to inspiration. The same is true in page design. Schumacher told me about wedding invitations, a staple for letterpress printers. There are aesthetic conventions within this “genre”: a single font and point size is used for all copy except the bride’s and groom’s names, and generous leading is created between their names, and around the rest of the text. A printer may experiment with the expected form—putting the couple’s names in a plain font and the rest of the copy in an ornamental one, for instance—but a good printer will let these conventions guide their design, she told me, because that’s how an audience expects to read a wedding invitation. Using the expected form—even if the printer adapts it to the specifics of the project—facilitates comprehension; ignoring it interferes with the recipient’s experience with the page. “I’ve seen wedding invitations where the copy is all typeset with the same leading and they look like menus.”
Design constraints can also work the opposite way, providing a sort of inspiration-by-necessity. Once, while setting the type for a book of poetry, Schumacher found that she was missing the leads for parentheses in the font she and the poet had decided on. Missing leads aren’t easy to replace—finding replacements would have required tracking down the specific missing pieces in antique shops, or buying an entirely new set. But so many of the poems had already been set that it was too late to go back. So she experimented with sets of parentheses from other font sets and ultimately chose one that was slightly thinner than the rest of the type. This slight change made that moment on the page softer, a subtle shift in tone that was fitting and elegant.
But before you spend a fortune on new font families, a word of caution. When making a content-specific gesture—whether it be with white space, font, or any kind of dramatic page layout—consider how it will impact the ultimate objective: giving your audience a meaningful reading experience. The intricate design of pieces like those of Boully, Antin, Biss, and Adiele successfully convey additional layers of meaning to their text. But successful design choices don’t have to draw attention to themselves. Designers strive to make choices that people will experience, but not identify. Likewise, writers can enhance their work through barely detectable aesthetic choices—visual cues that guide the reader towards subtle dimensions of the piece. In the appearance-oriented essay, type can be a metaphor. It invites the writer to go beyond established associations to discover deeper, more specific meaning.
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Back in my t-shirt–making days, I thought design was a tool to be used only by trained professionals. But today, as a writer, I see it as a frame—the vessel through which a piece of writing is consumed experientially. Frames come in all sorts: they can be intricately carved, gilded or painted, or subtle and nearly transparent. Modern writers have the ability to choose and manufacture the frame their work is experienced through, whether simple or decorative, showy or subtle. So now, I consider my frame and type mindfully—but I’m not afraid to experiment. We writers have the tools, and don’t need a license to operate them—just the courage to start engaging with them. Good design isn’t a default; it’s deliberate, sensitive to meaning, situation, and subtle modulation. Above all, design is what presents your words to the world.
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Click any image to enlarge and enter the slide show.
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Special thanks to Reed Seifer and Julie Schumacher for their generosity in time and insight. Thanks also to Ellen Lupton, Faith Adiele, Eula Biss, and Diane Vadino for granting me permission to cite and show their works here.
Author’s note: The title of this article is taken from a piece of editorial advice Ellen Lupton gives Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors & Students. (Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; page 166)
Sources
“Absence as Content: Negative Space in Creative Nonfiction.” Harrison ……….Fletcher, 2004.
The Balloonists. Eula Biss. Hanging Loose Press, 2002.
Meeting Faith: The Forest Journals of a Black Buddhist Nun. Faith Adiele. ……….Norton, 2005.
The Next American Essay. John D’Agata (ed.) Graywolf Press, 2003.
Resort Fashion: Style in Sun-Drenched Climates. Caroline Rennolds ……….Milbank. Designed by Reed Seifer. Rizzoli, 2009.
Stop Stealing Sheep and Find out How Type Works. Erik Spiekermann and ……….E.M. Ginger. Adobe Press, 2002.
Thinking with Type. Ellen Lupton. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Very interesting take on a subject that hadn’t really come together for me before. I particularly like the detail about italics being developed as a “more casual form” — I guess the current version of “more casual” would be elimination of vowels and uppercase, as well as substitution of numbers for syllables, license-plate style. Good job.