The New Typography vs Typographic Space
ニュー・タイポグラフィ / タイポグラフィック・スペース
Both sit in Experimental Typography, so the question is not what they belong to but how they behave. Both are read here as layout. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
The New Typography
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Turned printed matter into rational information structure through asymmetry, sans-serifs, photography and functional hierarchy.
Typographic Space
Uses the blank of the spread, changes of size, leaps between lines and more than one typeface to lay out reading time and vocal dynamics as space.
| The New Typography | Typographic Space | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1920s–1930s | 1897– / modernist legacy |
| Family | Experimental Typography | Experimental Typography |
| Kind | Layout | Layout |
| Cues | Asymmetry / Sans-serif type / Photography / Functional white space | Sentences crossing the spread / Great blanks / Multiple faces / Nonlinear reading order |
| Best used for | Rebuilding letterheads and forms so they read in order without ornament · Fixing the hierarchy of headline, text and picture in a single decision | Print pieces where a poem or a manifesto must carry its own pace and pauses · Using the spread as one field where placement shows vocal dynamics |
| Type | One sans in two weights, with hierarchy carried by size alone | Assign faces and sizes as voices and switch them line by line |
| Composition | Drop centering, set a left axis, divide areas with rules and space | Let lines leap across the gutter and hold the blank as the largest element |
| Material | Black and red, halftone photography, plain rules, no ornament | White paper, one black ink, exact register, stock thick enough to stop show through |
| Caution | When asymmetry becomes the aim in itself the reading order is never settled, and the page ends up harder to read than the ornamented one it replaced. | Copying only the size of the blanks removes every cue about reading order, so design how blank, size and position govern both the speed and the sequence of reading. |