Drowning the Crystal Goblet | Typography for Lawyers

As the ben­e­fits of good de­sign have got­ten more at­ten­tion in re­cent years, it’s be­come trendy to de­clare that the best de­sign ought to be “in­vis­i­ble”, es­pe­cially typography.

This line of think­ing goes back at least as far as Beat­rice Warde’s 1932 es­say “The Crys­tal Gob­let (or Print­ing Should Be In­vis­i­ble)”, which of­fers the epony­mous ves­sel as a metaphor for ty­pog­ra­phy. Warde was a col­league of Stan­ley Mori­son, the in­sti­ga­tor of Times New Ro­man. For decades, ty­pog­ra­phy teach­ers have as­signed this es­say to ex­plain how ty­pog­ra­phy works, as if it were both self-ev­i­dent and infallible.

But it’s nei­ther. It’s poorly rea­soned, con­tra­dicts com­mon sense, and like all faulty analo­gies, leads to faulty con­clu­sions. Ty­pog­ra­phy isn’t in­vis­i­ble. By em­brac­ing that fact rather than deny­ing it, we can cre­ate bet­ter typography.

Warde pro­poses that on the printed page, the text is like a fine wine, and ty­pog­ra­phy is the ves­sel that con­tains it. She ar­gues that the ideal ves­sel for wine is one that shows rather than hides the wine’s virtues—the tit­u­lar crys­tal gob­let. (Se­ri­ous wine drinkers might al­ready quib­ble, as dif­fer­ent shapes of glasses are pre­ferred for dif­fer­ent wines.) Ac­cord­ing to Warde, ideal ty­pog­ra­phy should like­wise be in­vis­i­ble, let­ting the in­trin­sic virtues of the text show through.

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