Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
A podcast about the art and science of making books. Arthur Attwell speaks to book-making leaders about design, production, marketing, distribution, and technology. These are conversations for book lovers and publishing decision makers, whether you’re crafting books at a big company or a boutique publisher.
Hello, and welcome to How Books Are Made, a podcast about the art and science of making books. I'm Arthur Attwell.
Arthur Attwell:My dad once pointed something out to me about Beethoven. He said that, as you listen, each note is totally unexpected. And yet once you've heard it, it seems like the only note that could possibly have come next. And this is just like great typography. Even if it surprises us at first, if we notice it at all, it should still feel just right, as if the designer never had any alternative.
Arthur Attwell:But the downside of this is that we can't possibly appreciate how much work goes into good type decisions and how much energy we spend accommodating bad ones. Just think about how much stuff you read every day: messages, posters, billboards, menus, web pages, and of course, books. Not only did someone design their layout, but someone designed the fonts in that layout. In fact, every single letter was painstakingly designed choice by choice, and every letter form has a personality. It's trying to make you feel something.
Arthur Attwell:Just like Comic Sans feels like silliness, and Times New Roman feels like school. You might say that typefaces give ideas a smell. Today, I'm talking with someone who is working right at the coalface of typefaces, Thomas Jockin. Thomas is a typeface designer and the founder of Type Thursday, a worldwide community of type designers. He's also a lecturer in Design and Philosophy.
Arthur Attwell:He's worked on some of my favourite typefaces, and I couldn't wait to ask him all about it. Thomas, I am so excited to be talking to you today. Thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
Thomas Jockin:Arthur, it's an absolute pleasure to be here with you.
Arthur Attwell:I loved doing the preparation for our conversation, I learned so much. And one thing I discovered is that when you were younger, you wanted to be a fine artist, I believe, until you came across Lewis Blackwell's book about David Carson called The End of Print. And it's a shame we can't show the book to our listener on a podcast because it really is something to see. I didn't know of it before and loved looking through it online.
Arthur Attwell:What did you see in it that changed things for you?
Thomas Jockin:Well, to give the audience some context, you're right, I did wanna go into the fine arts, and I was generally a painter. That's what I was focused on mostly in high school, and even going into my undergrad at Parsons School of Design. I was going to be a painter.
Thomas Jockin:I was gonna go into fine arts. But absolutely part of the kind of transition initiation into design and typography in particular was running into David Carson and that monogram of his work and of print. Because for the most part, it was one of the first examples where I saw typography being treated almost as paint, as a material and a composition of a painterly quality. It wasn't just the, you know, taking for granted text blocks, just these blocks of texts that we just use every day and no one would think about, for his materiality or kind of his textual quality or sensual experience.
Thomas Jockin:But Carson, when I was that age, I was so inspired by just his sense of ease of use, almost I mean, that's the whole point. Back then, his complete disregard for the linguistic value of the text. It was just purely aesthetic composition. So as a youthful seventeen year old, sixteen year old, I was very enlivened by that.
Thomas Jockin:So that was how it started. And then when I went to Parsons, I eventually became, I chose to go into communication design as of my BFA. And in my sophomore year, I met a type designer named Joshua Darden, and that's the second act of my initiation, starting from painting going into type design.
Arthur Attwell:I know that you worked very closely with Joshua on a number of projects, and then at some point had to strike out on your own. How did that go?
Thomas Jockin:Yes. So what happened was I took my Typography One class with Joshua Darden. He was an adjunct in that class. He was invited in by the chair, Charles Nix, who's now at Monotype as a creative type director, to teach the Type One class. And I fell in love with type.
Thomas Jockin:That first lecture from him, I just fell in love with the way he thought. His process of thought and approach of consideration was just something so unlike everything I'd ever experienced from any of my art instructors or any of the professors at Parsons School of Design. I was basically just, and again, as an eighteen year old, I was saying, 'I want a mind like his. So whatever he's doing, I'm gonna do that.' You know, not realizing that required an entire training in type design.
Thomas Jockin:One thing I'm very proud of myself, my younger self, was I was completely fearless, that fearlessness and just self assurance of... at the end of that sophomore class, I went to Josh and said, 'Josh, I'm gonna intern for you. I'll do it for free. I'll do it for credit.' I already had the paperwork from the department. 'Here it is. You just have to sign it.'
Arthur Attwell:Fantastic.
Thomas Jockin:Yes. I think he looked at me with a kind of, charming, kind of a charmed, 'wow! Quite the presumption, my friend.' But he did gracefully accept me, and I was first his intern for a semester, and then I was his apprentice for a following year and a half, two years at that point.
Thomas Jockin:You know, it was very mundane work. You know, I'll be very blunt with you. It was very basic things, like checking, very production-oriented things and checking in on work, developing things for Josh that he would review and supervise. So I think that was a very, very humbling experience. It was very important, it's very good for character building.
Arthur Attwell:I love the idea of an apprenticeship where you really get to see the pragmatic details of the work. And I'm keen to get into the weeds of type design. Before I geek out completely in the details, I'd like us to cover some absolute basics for those new to book design and typography in books in particular. And perhaps we can start with just the difference between display fonts and text fonts.
Thomas Jockin:Generally, what this is implying when we see a display versus text, typography or fonts, is related to usually the size of the fonts, so usually scale as well as its function. For example, generally larger sizes. And in the past, when things were set in metal or cast in wood, they would be a certain large size display of the glyph in question versus, say, a text font is generally implied to be a smaller size. Usually, there are formal design changes that happen between display and text fonts. So for example, properties like contrast, the kind of grammar of the articulations of the outlines vary based on display and text.
Thomas Jockin:So for example, usually, display will usually have finer details. So things like, you know, Bodoni or Didone really emphasize that, where the thins are incredibly thin and the thicks are really heavy. As opposed to a text face, it tends to be a much more lower contrast, a much more lower difference between the thick and thins in elements of the glyph component.
Arthur Attwell:Obviously, a text font is gonna be so small on the page that if the thin strokes were already thin, you almost wouldn't see them at all, and you wouldn't really be able to make out the letter.
Thomas Jockin:Yes. The designs were hand produced at certain sizes. There was just quite frankly the fidelity of the craftsman to produce thins that thin. I mean, actually, a very famous example, there was the French typesetting for the Romain du Roi where the detailed thins were so thin that when they actually had to be cast into metal, the type founders just ignored it.
Thomas Jockin:They knew they could not match that. The blueprint, the perfect mathematical outlines could be rendered on a grid system very finely, but then had to produce, and the actual material metal and cast in the matrices, that was not gonna be possible. You know, the kind of material generation of the outlines did limit how thin you could go.
Arthur Attwell:One thing that fascinates me is that many fonts are actually commissioned, from type designers like you, for specific purposes and created from scratch. Why would someone commission a totally new font, and how does it work?
Thomas Jockin:Yes, that happens quite often. There's many several use cases. But in general, it would be things like in some use cases, in some clients, it actually is cheaper to commission a typeface versus licensing it. In other cases, there are basic very particular formal requirements that they need that the fonts on the marketplace do not meet.
Thomas Jockin:They're good enough, but they're not exactly what they need. So that kind of specification is what bespoke typeface design is all about so that you can come and, just like a tailor. Right? You could go to H&M and get a fast fashion suit, for example. That's okay.
Thomas Jockin:That fits you alright. But then if you had a very particular case, so you wanted to find Italian tailored suits, you go to the tailor that handles that. That would be an analogy for typeface design commissions.
Arthur Attwell:You've done a lot of work on improving existing fonts, notably your work on the hugely popular font, Quicksand. We love using Quicksand, we use it in many of the children's books we produce. But several of the characters or glyphs that the Tshivenḓa language needs didn't exist in Quicksand. And so we reached out to you, and I'll be honest, it was kind of magical to see you create these characters and get them added to the typeface on Google Fonts for us in just a few weeks.
Arthur Attwell:And now everybody producing Tshivenḓa books can use Quicksand. And so thank you for that.
Thomas Jockin:Of course.
Arthur Attwell:It was a really, really great little project.
Thomas Jockin:The point of, like, context for bespoke typefaces, this is an example of it. So an existing typeface can be addendomed because there's a current need. So you guys at BookDash, which is how we met, is exactly one of the use cases. There's a language support you needed for the Latin script, and we didn't have it yet in the basic coverage, so you contacted me, and we added it in, and then it updated to Google Font. So then it became available to anyone to use.
Arthur Attwell:It's really, really fantastic. But of course, there are lots of different ways you might improve a font, and I suppose in that way there are always works in progress. For someone who doesn't know how fonts are constructed, what kinds of things are you looking to improve when you wanna work on an existing font?
Thomas Jockin:That's a great question. So, but in order to give people context, Quicksand was originally designed by a colleague who passed away, Andrew Paglinawan, and he transferred his rights, those rights of those fonts, to Google when he passed away. And I was part of a team that was brought in 2015, 2016, around that time period, to evaluate the Google font collection, which is an assortment of open source fonts. I remember seeing it in the list of fonts, and I actually saw its potential.
Thomas Jockin:I saw what it was trying to do. It's very much, there's always an intention behind a design. A lot of times, there's the question of the intention against its execution, its expression of that intention. And that tension between the two is usually what you have to address to improve it. Actually, the original Quicksand, hilariously, had insanely loose spacing.
Arthur Attwell:Interesting.
Thomas Jockin:It really was like a, literally like a sand dune. Like, someone was blowing wind through this letter. And I remember seeing that. I was like, 'that's fascinating.' Because, basically, anyone could do what's called tracking to any font and track it out that way.
Arthur Attwell:And tracking is adjusting the spaces between the letters?
Thomas Jockin:Yes. Uniformly. A lot of people get that confused. Like, it's the idea of a spacing uniformly so the entire sentence or word is spaced out co-equally. Every glyph, separate equal amounts, that's tracking.
Thomas Jockin:When you want a very particular pair of letters to be adjusted, either increase or decrease, that's kerning. Quicksand had these attributes that were actually kind of hindering what I saw was this potential of what it could be. That was, so that's one example of it. Another case is when I work with students is, yeah, they have an intention. They're trying to do something with the typeface.
Thomas Jockin:So this is where distinctions like, are you trying to make a display? You're trying to captivate an idea, set it in motion, give an association, versus, are you trying to make this a transparent reading experience that the typographic aesthetic experience is much more like musical modes where the impression on you is very subtle. It's very much a colouring on the experience, but it's not overwhelming.
Arthur Attwell:Back in 2018, you gave a talk for TypeLab where you explained that more than 60% of people struggle to some degree with reading comprehension, and that much of that can be helped by better type designs and decisions, the fonts that they are having to read in. You've worked on some fonts that try to address this problem. Can you tell me more about that work?
Thomas Jockin:So to give some context for the audience, in 2017, 2018, I was reached out to by an educational therapist named Dr Bonnie Shaver-Troup, whom was working with pupils for about ten years in an educational context in California where they had reading difficulties. And independently on her own in research, she found that typographic adjustments helped her patients, her students, read more proficiently, usually by measurements of fluency. Now, while things like dyslexia or basically phonological deficits of understanding, typographic presentation can help them in better reading fluency measurements. So the method of intervention that Bonnie presented to me was using tracking, right, basically, spacing between letters, a very aggressive intervention of more space between the letters and more space inside the letters. That would be a change of the width of the letter. Those two properties of adding more space between and inside letters, basically tracking and making it wider and usually a low contrast Sans Serif form, improves dramatically reading fluency for subjects who have reading difficulties. So that is what she presented to me.
Thomas Jockin:Interesting enough, again, I don't come from an education background nor necessarily initially a reading cognitive science background or reading science background. However, from a typographic background, it is common practice. This is what partly got me interested was that it's common practice when you make a font, usually you're making types smaller, you know, like, if you need to fit a lot of content in a small amount of space, the general instincts when you drop the font size is to use a narrower font —
Arthur Attwell:Right. Sure.
Thomas Jockin:— to help it fit the space. A good trick is to instead to reduce the font size and use a wider font with maybe some tracking added on too, mainly because of the letter acuity. The idea to identify letters is easier when you add more space between and inside letters. That was something known in the trade in typography for, you know, I've known that for my entire training. And also even things like, for example, when you said all caps, even in normal context, a good rule of thumb is to track out your capital slightly.
Thomas Jockin:It helps with, basically, recognition of the letters. It's exactly the same property. From those kind of base trades, I basically inferred that, well, that seems very reasonable then, what Dr Shaver-Troup's presenting to me. So basically, I presented this to my contacts at Google, and they supported us producing open source variable fonts that applies Dr Bonnie Shaver-Troup's formulations, what she calls hybrid expansion, which is this intensification of spacing between and inside letters.
Arthur Attwell:And what fonts did this result in? What would we be looking for if we wanted to go into Google Fonts and find them?
Thomas Jockin:You can search by using the font name Lexend. So Lexend is the design from Bonnie Shaver-Troup that I assisted her on producing. And it is a series of either discrete fonts that are named at different levels of intensity, basically Giga, Mega, Peta, for example, which you'll see that basic intensification of spacing when you see that and width.
Arthur Attwell:We'll put some links to the Lexend website, in the show notes. You can find the font in Google Fonts, but also the Lexend website itself is a stunning piece of web design. I've also thought we should just add a little sidebar here for me to ask the question, do you use the words 'font' and 'typeface' interchangeably, or is there a technical difference? I've been using it interchangeably, but I know that some people say, actually, there's an important difference.
Thomas Jockin:I mean, there is, but it depends on... so it depends on whom you're talking to. Right? And in general conversations, they are interchangeable. But obviously, within the technical sense, there is a difference.
Arthur Attwell:Sure.
Thomas Jockin:I've always been fond of the idea that there is a bundling and then there's particular. So that's usually the best way to talk about it. So for example, if I said Lexend in a general term as a typeface, what that entails inside would be all the weights, all these other secondary properties of, like, the hyper expansion property, for example. So when I say Lexend as a general statement, as a typeface, I'm bundling within it that entire system logic, which is made up of fonts, which you basically would then list out individually.
Thomas Jockin:So you would say Lexend Bold Zeta, Lexend Bold Peta, like, as an example. So it's about the kind of individuation as to individual fonts versus the kind of collective grouping, is a typeface. And that's even true in terms of if you did a CSS call out on it, that's how you would handle it. It'd be a similar method.
Arthur Attwell:In fact, you'd use the CSS word 'font-face'. Yeah. Which is kind of a combination of both, I suppose.
Thomas Jockin:Exactly. That's exactly, as you can tell, it's a little ambiguous. Thus, you know, other trades, other industries have had, just kind of split the baby down the middle, the bottom two together.
Arthur Attwell:Great, okay. That has resolved a long standing question for me. Something that I was surprised by in preparing for our conversation, happily surprised and fascinated, was that you had worked on an Arabic font too, and that this even inspired you to learn Arabic. I also watched a lovely talk you did with the American designer Aaron Bell, who has created fonts for Hangul, the Korean alphabet.
Arthur Attwell:And it made me wonder to what extent the features of a typeface that give it personality and make it better for readability are universal no matter what script it's in. What's been your experience working across different scripts and languages?
Thomas Jockin:That's an excellent question. So that typeface is Readex, which is the Arabic expansion of Lexend. So it takes the logic of Lexend and then applies it to world scripts. So in this case, Arabic was the first one. So if you search on Google fonts for Readex, you'll find that font, which will have its Latin component, will be the visual equivalent of the Lexend one for the most part.
Thomas Jockin:There are some variations, but it's generally the same design. The Arabic part was designed with Dr Nadine Chahine. She is one of my mentors. I took a workshop with her fifteen years ago in Arabic type design and been in contact with her since.
Thomas Jockin:She's formerly a type director at Monotype, and she has her own practice now. After I completed the Latin series, right, with Lexend, what happened was I remembered Nadine went to do work with MIT in legibility studies and did research in it. I got curious and read her dissertation, her doctoral dissertation in legibility studies for Arabic. And reading it, I realized even though she didn't say it in the dissertation itself, that based on her conclusions of her research, most likely she would agree with the hypothesis of the logic of Lexend being applied to Arabic would yield similar results in Arabic. I reached out to her, presented to her the main pitch.
Thomas Jockin:And long story short, she signed off on it. And when Google signed off on the expansion, we got to do that. Obviously, it needs to be empirically tested to validate that thesis, that the intervention of hybrid expansion within the Arabic script, which is spacing between and inside the glyphs, would yield improved fluency measurements by reason of visual acuity improvement. From the research we've seen in the Latin script system, it does seem like it's likely the case. But the fonts exist, so if any researchers, any universities or researchers would like to validate that thesis, the fonts are open source, so please go ahead and get back to me.
Arthur Attwell:It would be absolutely fascinating to know. And one of the reasons I'm especially interested is because what little I understand of the Arabic script is that the letters in many ways join to form what I would call ligatures, and that presumably would affect the way we perceive the spacing between either the individual glyphs or the combined glyphs, are those the kinds of challenges that a project like that would have had to grapple with?
Thomas Jockin:So a couple of notes. One was part of my thesis obviously, again, because I'm not a proper researcher. I have to use a lot of arguments by analogy to justify a hypothesis. So in this case, when I presented this idea to Google and Dr Nadine Chahine, one of the arguments I made was that there's something called 'Kashida' in Arabic.
Thomas Jockin:That is the extension of letters, of glyphs to fill a measure in a justified text block. If you have a justified text block and your last word did not meet the end of the line, Kashida would be an extension of the glyph to fit. And sometimes at the end, other times it's between units, it's between glyph elements. So Arabic does have a logic of extending characters in a way that does not break legibility.
Arthur Attwell:Fascinating.
Thomas Jockin:Yeah. So that was part of my argument by analogy to say that Arabic could benefit from this intervention. It would not be so wild to present this. Now as I worked with Nadine on it, we both commented as we did it, it is for anyone reading Arabic, when you see the hybrid expansion property, it is very alien as an experience.
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Thomas Jockin:Arabic is semi-connected. Some glyphs do connect, others don't, based on rules of the grammar logic of Arabic. But this hyper expansion, yeah, what it does is between letters, basically, you have this kind of, the connection unit has to extend out, but it has to work in a certain proportion to maintain the kind of logic of the negative space between and inside letters. And Arabic has a lot of logic based on that where they have these gem measurements where they measure the kind of spacing inside an element, for example. And ayn, for example, has a certain size on its upper bowl versus its bottom descender bowl has to have a certain ratio between them.
Thomas Jockin:The logic is as long as you basically try to maintain that proportionality as you do the hybrid expansion, it should hold up. But it definitely was a challenge. I remember me and Nadine working together on it. It was very much, we laughed about it when we first started working, I was like, 'my God, this is so alien as an experience.'
Thomas Jockin:But again, it's you know, it works. It follows the logic. Now we're at the point where the fonts are open source, so we're hoping to get validation by empirical study to validate that this works for improving fluency in Arabic readers.
Arthur Attwell:It reminds me of an exercise that I did in early learning about type, which is to take a letter, capital A is always a good one to go with, and I suggest this to the person listening to us right now, try this out for yourself, is you take the letter and you try to draw it in more and more radically different ways and find the point at which it ceases to be an A. And what you find is that you can actually do some really wild designs that are clearly recognizably an A and other things you can do that don't seem like a major change to the design that immediately mean it's no longer an A, and no one would recognize it as an A. And it's almost as if as a type designer you need to understand the rules that are almost intangible about what makes a letter that letter. And I imagine working in different scripts, understanding what those rules are, and being able to push them about as far as they can go is part of being creative with type.
Thomas Jockin:That's an excellent point, Arthur. I would say, yeah, and I spoke with many designers at different script systems, we all come to that same agreement. This part of your training is to gain an understanding of the essence of things —
Arthur Attwell:Right.
Thomas Jockin:— the essence of the letter. And that's the point is that there are certain modifications you can do that have no effect on our understanding of it as a letter. And there's other things you do that completely destroy it instantly. And a very nuanced point too is that a lot of times too, even if you destroy the individual letter, but because it's part of a word, it can still survive.
Thomas Jockin:It's a very fascinating, almost ethereal practice. It's a dance in a play. You know, it's very nuanced because sometimes you can violate a rule but uphold the principle.
Arthur Attwell:Kind of related to that and something perhaps a little technical, I wanted to ask you about variable fonts, which you mentioned in passing earlier. My rudimentary understanding is that variable fonts are ones that change not only their size based on how you're using them in design, but their actual shape. So as a designer, you use a particular font, and you set these rules for how it will morph.
Thomas Jockin:To make it really simple, the basic property of variable fonts is that what was once basically discrete units, so actually that example before about typeface and font. So before, when you would have, like, weight, you would have bold and regular, right, and maybe something thin. Those would be discrete options. So you would just go from your dropdown menu and you would pick out which one individually you wanted, discreetly. But let's say, hypothetically, you wanted something between a bold and a regular weight.
Thomas Jockin:In the past, you'd be out of luck, there's nothing you can do. Variable fonts allow typographic properties to go from discrete to continuous. You can get, you can fine tune an exact weight between the two that you would like. The use case that is relevant to this conversation is, for example, with Dr Bonnie Shaver-Troup, where she had basically seven very discreet jumps and intensification of spacing between and inside letters. By there being a variable font, now she could, with her patients, fine tune the exact spacing that's right for that particular subject.
Arthur Attwell:Amazing.
Thomas Jockin:But you also hinted out something called optical size, where as a variable font and optical size, there are fonts that have that feature where the font automatically changes its presentation based on what setting of size you set it at. So if you set a font at 120 points, you're going to get the display version of it.
Thomas Jockin:It's very high contrast, higher spacing, usually maybe a little narrower in proportion versus if you drop it to ten points, it will automatically switch to the text face setting, lower contrast, wider spaced, looser space, usually a little wider, for example. So this happens automatically on the fly in web browsers and in some applications like InDesign, for example.
Arthur Attwell:They can actually support those, and I've seen some fairly radical uses of this where the shape of the letters change so much, you get these kind of wild designs for really, quirky uses, I suppose.
Arthur Attwell:I wanted to ask about an essay you wrote for Laura Scherling's book called Digital Transformation in Design, in which you explain that we're seeing the arrival of what you've just described in the readability work of technology that can adjust a font for an individual reader on the fly, adjusting from anything, from the lighting in the room to the patterns of their eye movement and how they read. And it made me wonder whether designers, not just type designers, but all designers are increasingly asked not just to lay out static shapes, text and images in a fixed space, but actually to create a set of rules within which their text and images will resize and reflow in different contexts. And I can't tell, for designers, is that exciting or is it completely overwhelming to have to design systems rather than images?
Thomas Jockin:Yes. I would say the fundamental – as I say in that chapter – the fundamental transition in design has been relationships. You're designing relationships that have increasingly become more and more variable in response. It was not like designers didn't do this in the past. It was just that it was fixed.
Thomas Jockin:You would do it for this output and this viewport and like a very individuated particular context. The nature of higher levels of abstraction require much more flexible universal properties that you could change. Basically, the same design, the relationships that you're building can work at a TV size versus a laptop versus a tablet versus an iPhone, for example. Those changes in viewport dimension context have to be responded to. So usually what is the relationships you build for one viewport relationship may not correspond to another. You just change the relationships.
Thomas Jockin:So when we say system, I think sometimes the language to kind of bridge the gap of the overwhelm for designers is to save our relationships. That's what you're designing: those relationships. Now, systems get involved because of things like function of usability and function. Like, that's one of the concerns we're thinking about too more.
Thomas Jockin:So you have to treat design as becoming more and more these rule sets of relationships oriented around the functions of the artifacts we're producing. And ultimately in the past, and I would say in the 2000s, unless you're really in the weeds of the historical context of design development over time, it was a lot of anxiety about the introduction of CSS, HTML and JavaScript, where the main premise was that the form and the content were now being divorced from each other. They were separated. You could, basically every piece of content, you could just swap out the CSS code, put it in another one, and ta da, you got a whole other presentation.
Thomas Jockin:That was very alienating for designers. I remember this. Because of that concern, we were so worried about, we thought the form and context must be put together, but the transition in time has been to the void, has been separating it. Ultimately, the real test of this is to make a, and because the main concern, by the way, was that we can no longer make beautiful things because we lost that power of direct context. Which is understandable because the, usually, the beautiful is usually something that responds to the particular circumstance. So when we go to utter abstraction, it becomes much more difficult to get that penetrative eye grabbing, that really strike of beauty when you see a finely printed piece of book setting.
Arthur Attwell:Mhmm.
Thomas Jockin:It's a real attention to the detail and the particular articulation of this book with this type and this paper that this divorcing of content to form would seem to prevent you from even getting access to. So the challenge in the 21st century is how could we, in the state of divorce, separation of content and form, create logics and relationships that respond to the particular reader whom we'll never meet. And is, as I say in that essay, absolutely must be individual beyond, and as you said, beyond just the fact that the same person might read a piece of text in different lighting conditions, with different abilities of attention, reading cognitive function, different languages. How could you produce systems of relationships to respond to those in a way that is efficient and effective, and beautiful? And as we said, doing this somehow with utter transparency so that no one even knows it's happening. A good principle in design is, usually the most beautiful things in design, they seem so effortless. They just seem to work. And it's only because it's transparent to the user. We're not there yet, but the promise is there. And the technology is, I argue in that paper, is very much there.
Arthur Attwell:There are implications in that paper, and you've spoken about in other places as well, for the moral decisions that we make as designers given the impact our work has on society. For instance, how much do we know about that individual? How much do we care about their reading comprehension? And I'd like to quote something you wrote in the essay, which struck me as really important and insightful and useful. You were talking about the impact that design decisions have on society, and you write: 'moral problems in design are not singular and deliberate immoral choices, but rather a multitude of questionable choices repeated over a long period of time.' And I love that, thank you. It does make me think about design as a discipline in the classical sense of being disciplined. It makes design hard work if you care about the world.
Arthur Attwell:I hope it's also happy, fun work. How do you find it?
Thomas Jockin:Well, yes. I mean, because what you're quoting from is part of the paper or the chapter where I was talking about, ultimately, one of the things designers are doing, we're working with attention. And because it's very easy to, by the nature of design being so abstracted, there's so many players involved and so many mechanisms in play between the maker, the designer working on it, and the user using at the end, it could seem like there's no consequence. But in reality, as I say, there's a lot of small decisions that tip the scales in one direction or the other ultimately in the end. When we take that seriously, I guess the responsibility of what we do, which is great, but it also can be a little terrifying when you realize that.
Thomas Jockin:And I think especially when we realize that in design, it could be very easy to say, 'well, I'm just doing my one little part, there's someone who needs bigger things that I'm not part of.' But when we look at it from this context of this ethics, we see that we do have a part to play. And our role does, very small and very imperceptibly, add into a larger whole that can have consequences that we may not agree to in the end.
Arthur Attwell:Yeah. As we wrap up, I do wanna ask you about boxing. I believe you're a keen boxer. Does that take the careful thought of type design, or are you there just to escape all the heavy thinking?
Thomas Jockin:Well, that's fun. Okay, so boxing came up when I was around twenty-five. I picked up boxing around that time. I was looking for something to get me in shape. I would say it was probably both, to be honest. So obviously, it's a lot of fun, especially once you get good at it, and blowing steam off. But there's an incredible amount of craft. It's very much a sensitivity of spacing and timing and rhythm that gives you a kind of, as I hinted at with this idea of rules and principle, that it works exactly the same way in boxing.
Thomas Jockin:In my mind, it's actually a physiological analogy to the training in the arts. So I find that it's very, very, you know, very much a gift in my life to be able to have boxing part of my life still.
Arthur Attwell:Fantastic. Love it. Thomas, it's been such a pleasure. I've learned a load, and I really appreciate your work and the time you spent with me today. Thank you so much.
Thomas Jockin:Thank you too, Arthur. It's a real pleasure.
Arthur Attwell:This episode was edited by Helen le Roux and researched by Klara Skinner. How Books Are Made is supported by Electric Book Works, where we develop and design books for organizations around the world. You can find us online at electricbookworks.com.