Theses on Typography – Kurt Schwitters

Countless laws can be written about typography. The most important is: never do it the way someone before you has done it. Or one could also say: always do it differently from the way others do it. First, some general theses on typography:

1. Typography can, under certain circumstances, be art.
2. There is originally no parallelism between the content of a text and its typographic form.
3. Design is the essence of all art; typographic design is not the depiction of textual content.
4. Typographic design is the expression of the tensions and compressions within the textual content (Lissitzky).
5. Even the textually negative parts — the unprinted areas of the printed page — are typographically positive values. Every particle of material has typographic value: letter, word, text passage, number, punctuation mark, rule, signet, illustration, spacing, total area.
6. From the standpoint of artistic typography, the relationship between typographic values is important, while the quality of the type itself — of the individual typographic element — is immaterial.
7. From the standpoint of the type itself, the quality of the type is the primary requirement.
8. Quality of type means simplicity and beauty. Simplicity encompasses clarity, unambiguous and purpose-appropriate form, the renunciation of all dispensable ballast such as flourishes and all forms unnecessary to the essential core of the type. Beauty means a good balancing of proportions. The photographic illustration is clearer and therefore better than the drawn one.
9. An advertisement or poster constructed from existing type is in principle simpler and therefore better than a hand-drawn lettering poster. The impersonal printing type is also better than the individual hand of an artist.
10. The demand of content upon typography is that the purpose for which the content is to be printed be emphasized.

The typographic poster is thus the result of the demands of typography and the demands of the textual content. It is incomprehensible that the demands of typography have been so neglected until now by attending solely to the demands of the textual content. Thus even today, quality goods are still announced through barbaric advertisements. And even more unbelievable is the fact that nearly all older art journals understand as little about typography as they do about art. Conversely, the leading contemporary art journals employ typography as one of their chief promotional tools. I mention here especially the journal "G", editor Hans Richter, Berlin-Friedenau, Eschenstraße 7; "Gestaltung der Reklame", editor Max Burchartz, Bochum; the journal "ABC", Zurich; and I could name a few others.

Advertising has long since recognized the importance of advertisement and poster design for the impression made by the advertised goods, and has long employed advertising artists. But unfortunately these advertising artists of the recent past were individualists who had no idea of consistent overall design of the advertisement or of typography. They designed individual details with more or less skill, strived for extravagant compositions, drew ornate or otherwise illegible letters, painted conspicuous and distorted illustrations — thereby compromising the advertised goods in the eyes of any rational person. It is irrelevant here that, from their own standpoint, good work was produced, when that standpoint was wrong. Today advertising is beginning to recognize its error in choosing individualists and, instead of employing artists for its advertising purposes, is making use of art — or more precisely: of typography. Better no advertising at all than inferior advertising, for the reader judges the product from the impression of the advertisement, not from the textual content.