Conversation

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!
Image
Image
43
85
697
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."
6
10
97
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.
5
6
48