I was surprised by some very odd typographic choices in Tufte’s new book. Halfway through, he explains: “Systematic regularity of text paragraphs is universally inconvenient for readers… Idiosyncratic paragraphs assist memory and retrieval” A fascinating idea—I’m not sure!
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The tyranny of the grid! The tyranny of text-in-boxes! The oppressive constancy of text-in-boxes-in-rectangles! It is good to see attempts to systematically break this.
“Nearly every paragraph in this book is deliberately visually unique."
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Unsurprisingly, he draws a great deal on typographic ideas from poetry, but his ideas about “text matrices” seem mostly influenced by principles of information architecture.
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This is a particularly dynamic page expressing some really lovely ideas along those lines.
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Frankly, it’s a typographic mess. It’s one thing to be unique. It’s another to be, well, sloppy. The number of typos I found was astonishing in a book about clarity of presentation.
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(Piling on) Also, meaning is created through the recto/verso of sameness and difference. If each thing is different, that difference is meaningless -- you may as well have everything be the same.
If some things are As and some Bs and some Cs, then the difference is meaningful.
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for a similar mindbender check out House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski
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Maybe, but so was the book years ago by P. Scott Makela which was a certainly new then, but still unreadable in my opinion. Swirled text is not communicating anything.