4.3 In Retrospect
Taste and associations may change, which probably accounts for the continued productivity of type designers now and in the future. Societal change and cultural integration are likely vehicles of change in preference and connotative meaning. Companies are increasingly aware of the trend towards displaying individuality and invest more in logotype design and related aspects. People are becoming more aware of the existence of many typefaces because of the popularity of word-processing and desktop publishing and because of the availability of numerous fonts for use on personal computers. These developments could be a sign that readers in general will in the near future become more sensitive to nuances and differences in type. It seems sensible, therefore, to pursue the investigation of personality and aesthetics with regard to typography to refine the use of second-level communication through print.

At the beginning of this chapter, two questions were posed, focusing on how we can achieve the second level of expression in type and how much we can actually communicate through a text. Although various examples have provided an indication of the answer to both questions, exact answers are still difficult to give. It might be that the reason for this is that people are reluctant to ‘demystify’ the subject of personality. Perhaps many people feel that congeniality is a matter of craftsmanship, which can or should not be studied. Likewise, the objective study of aesthetics is also regarded with some suspicion, especially experimental aesthetics. Possibly, such problem-oriented ways of investigating are considered a threat to the designer’s creativity, whereas theory can never be threatening simply because it does not test or correct common practice in the way the experimental approach tends to. It seems that, if we want our insights to become deeper still, the reluctance mentioned here will have to be forgotten.


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