Typography Theory Practice
Leeds Beckett University
Saturday 19 October 2024

In this paper I argue for the need to maintain rigour in a definition of typography that intentionally emphasises its limitations as a distinct and systemic area of practice.

The first reason for doing so is to draw critical attention to the limitations embedded within typographic practice, not only the implicit modular constraints of working with type, but also the wider production systems upon which professional workflows continue to rely, even as technologies have shifted. The second reason is to challenge the ongoing flattening of the boundaries between definitions of typography and lettering with a view to maintaining a space for acknowledging the skill sets of each, and more particularly, for re-evaluating the achievements of lettering.

To argue for difference within contemporary contexts is to go against a general trend of opening out definitions as a mechanism for facilitating inclusivity. Collette Gaiter makes a persuasive case for such an opening out of the definitions of typography in her 2021 lecture on the typography of civil protest. She argues that the lettering work characteristic of graphic resistance operating outside the professional workflows and systems of design should be acknowledged within the graphic design canon. And rightly so. But does lettering need to be reframed as typography to be more legitimate within the design canon? What might we learn instead from acknowledging the constraints that rendered the typographic inaccessible yet allowed lettering to flourish?

The title of this talk comes from a 1967 essay by Anthony Froshaug in which he proposes the admitting of constraints as a prompt for meaningful reassessment of the possibilities for practice. This talk builds a case for the reassessment of the dominance of the typographic voice over the craft traditions of lettering in the professionalisation of graphic design and its associated historiography.

A couple of years ago I was reading Matilda by Roald Dahl for my kids, when my daughter pointed out that the part I was reading had 7 hyphens in row, and 12 hyphens within 17 lines. I can’t remember to have seen anything quite like it, so I guess it’s an unofficial world record.

Based on this story I wrote a piece for the Norwegian literary journal BLA titled “Sitatstreker, tankestreker (–) og bindestreker (-)” (Dashes and hyphens). The text was written like one long dialogue, part based on reality and part fiction, where typographic mistakes occurred in the text where they were mentioned. I wrote the text directly into the layout of the journal – the only way to both control the language and the layout/mistakes. With the text I tried, in an unconventional way, to discuss challenges and issues concerning typography that I’ve faced in my work with graphic design and typesetting.

• different use of hyphens and dashes in different languages
• the use of single or double quotation marks, and other types of quotation marks in different languages
• the challenges with bilingual editions
• local vs. international standards within typography
• footnotes and endnotes, and Adobe’s limitations
• layout problems with foot notes when they appear too often in the text
• when rules become so complicated that neither the author/editor or reader know them
• mistakes in writing and typography, and how it can sometimes invigorate the design

Dear Amelia,

I hope my letter finds you well, wherever you are.

My name is Tomáš. I am your biggest fan!

Years ago, I saw you for the first time, in the Czech Republic, in the mountains called Jizerské Hory. I travel there annually for Christmas—I always pass by you while driving in a city called Tanvald on the way to my friend’s cottage, close to the border with Germany and Poland. Located in the darkest place in the Czech Republic.

But it is also a place with a dark history. One of many reasons why WWII accelerated so fast was due to this region. Not very nice things happened after the war either – it’s quite a complex and complicated story. Like the one with you. People don’t talk about things that happened there after the war. As they don’t talk about you. The poorest part of the Czech population live there. They have to feel a bit betrayed. Like you have to.

In Tanvald, your liquid shapes appear on a local shop that has, most likely, never been open—found on a busy road that snakes through the mountains. “Toys,” “Bags”, “Wallets”, “Textile”, “Shoes”, “Men”, “Women”, and “Kids” are typeset in Czech with accents that certainly don’t come from your father’s hand.

In February 2023, I was in publishing house in Amsterdam, randomly browsing through the books on their shelves. The right book fell into my hands and for the first time I saw you in a different form. My heart was beating fast and my hands were shaking! I rushed to the colophon and for the very first time got to know your name – Amelia. A moment I will never forget.

Punctuation is essential for comprehending written texts and conveying the accurate meaning of a sentence. The Chinese punctuation system has undergone significant evolution over a long period of time, encompassing various technological advancements including woodblock printing, metal type, and eventually digital formats. This paper provides a brief overview of the evolution of Chinese punctuation before and after the middle of the 19th century, as well as extensive comparisons to early 20th-century scenarios in Japan and the Korean peninsula.

It illustrates the development of the Chinese punctuation system, including the evolution of usage guidelines and typographic requirements that are currently in place. Additionally, this paper analyses the sequence of encoding, typeface, and typography, highlighting problems that arise with current typography usage. It explains the impact of Unicode during the encoding process and its introduction into the Chinese encoding standard, identifying residual problems in DTP software use. Finally, it suggests potential solutions for typeface design and the use of typography software features to address these issues.

This paper focuses only on the punctuation marks used in mainland China for Hanzi and Pinyin orthography. Additionally, it makes comparisons with the punctuation used in present day Taiwan and Hong Kong region, as well as the punctuation in Japan and the Korean peninsula in the early 20th century.

Computerised type design and page layout software have failed to outgrow the practices for measuring type size and typographic space that they inherit from the historic advent of printing with movable type. Correspondingly, notions of reasonable typographic hierarchy continue to reproduce Jan Tschichold’s arcane dictum that a “logical organisation of text” is achieved with “normally three … not more than five” different sizes of type (‘Die Neue Typografie’, 1928). This paper will present the results of a novel experiment in defining type size by the surface area of text content. During a seminar that I led at the HGB Leipzig in summer semester 2023, a set of crude typefaces were produced from the constraint that each glyph should occupy the same surface area. These typefaces could then be manipulated using a custom Adobe InDesign script, allowing the typographer to specify the size of the content of a text box in square millimetres. Various possibilities were explored, including: equalisation by size of text content across multiple text boxes (again, by surface area, not conventional type size); expression of typographic hierarchy in terms of the percentage of the page that categories of text content occupy; and control of the relative proportion of text and image in a layout.

@ is a challenging letterform. It’s commonly known that the symbol is much older than its 1970s revival by computer engineer Ray Tomlinson. Chosen then for its distinctiveness and to aid sending messages between computers, it’s thought it originally began life as a shortening of ‘ad’ (”at the rate of”) - looping two letters together to make a scribe’s job easier.

In Designing Type, Karen Cheng - Professor of Visual Communication at the University of Washington - explains that “[b]ecause of its density, the @ is difficult to design, especially in bold or condensed fonts.” She suggests practical solutions - lighter stroke weights, use of a narrower italic a, or drawing @ large.

Its peskiness is reflected in its contemporary ubiquity. When I type ‘@’ into the software I’m using to write this sentence, it disappears. Shortcuts attempt instead to direct me towards ‘mentions’, ‘people’ and over 43 other destinations; ‘@’ is replaced by an icon of a magnifying glass. As I’m writing about ‘@’ and not using ‘@’ - a symbol which might be taken as shorthand for connection - this diversion isn’t hugely helpful. Both ancient and contemporary usages share meaning in an embodied ‘at’ (whether locating a user at a place, or an item at a price), so why did the ‘@’ get lost in the first place? Further, how has its ubiquity made it so difficult to locate?

Text with typographic composition uses lines of texture created by the shapes of letters words, and sentences on paper. The textures of multiscript fill the design space and enhance the way words and paragraphs interact with one another. In this pluriversal context, the tones of the text’s form and meaning are intensified, and the interplay of visual conversation becomes a crucial issue that needs the designer's attention when two diverse scripts such as Arabic and Latin, meet on the same page or platform of communication.

Latin and Arabic scripts differ in form and system. Each has a set of guidelines that present ongoing difficulties for the typographer when it comes to bilingual design. In orchestrating the English text that reads from left to right, and the Arabic text that reads from right to leU, typographers are expected to think of more intricate design strategies than those required for a monolingual script because of the design challenges of working with bilingual scripts. What is the best way to organize and maintain the contrasted and dichotomous texts for visual communication? How to interpret typographic compositions for their unity, order, form and meaning. Gestalt and harmony are, after all, the goals that designers pursue in order to facilitate effective communication.

According to the following typographic models that I have defined in my book “Bilingualism in Visual Communication,” this paper re-examines these models for bilingual texts/scripts and advances the discussion on examples of bilingual texts that are classified under these three models:

The typographic equilibrium model
The ascending typography model
The typographic code-switching model

The study looks at and discusses the flow of multiscript texts in these three models, as well as grid systems, reading guidelines, and pace for sequential information in spreads for printed publications and self-contained information like poster designs. The aim of this paper is to inform and support designers in their multiscript layout strategies and practices on how to recognise and bring respect to each script principles, guidelines, value, culture, and readers. The typography agency respectfully brings cultures together.

I want to write about the footnote, covering a brief history and its consistent treatment within typesetting conventions (mostly at the bottom and usually smaller than everything else on the page), to propose that disrupting its standards can allow for alternative hierarchies that amplify context and a multiplicity of voices besides the author(s) of a text. This disruption is important because it questions the idea of a single truth, complicating knowledge production and ownership.

Footnotes get their name from how they stand on the “foot” of the page, while the body is bigger above, and a header is even bigger at the top. Sometimes when footnotes are too long they go on the back of publications as endnotes. These relationships of parts prioritize the text and its writer, leaving behind more information, sources, copyright notes, and most importantly citations—other authors and texts that influence the writing presented.

Nobody comes to an idea alone and there are many other ideas within new ones. How can the typesetting of footnotes emphasize this plurality to undermine authoritative discourse? This paper investigates what happens when content that lies on the periphery interferes with the main channel. I hope to encourage designers to challenge “correct” protocols to make roads for ourselves, rather than travel expected ones.

Urdu’s print culture is remarkable in that design strategies dating from 19th century Urdu manuscripts and lithographs remain widely in use across city shop fronts, posters, and books. This is most notably seen in the way contemporary Urdu newspapers are designed, using the same layout schemes as the ones used in lithographed Urdu and Persian periodicals, royal decrees, and newspapers. Newspapers are generally understood as ordinary and practical documents, designed, and printed under constraints of time and resources. Despite such constraints, each headline of an Urdu newspaper is individually designed, ornamented, kerned, and spaced in accordance with the rules of the Nastaʿlīq writing style in which Urdu is most often written. These modes of designing are both relevant and desirable to the modern Urdu reader because they are entangled with notions of national and communal identity. The continued importance of traditional and historical ways of arranging text also belies Urdu's fraught relationship with typesetting technologies. Urdu newspapers were handwritten and lithographed as late as 1981 because handwriting them made it possible to maintain the aesthetics readers had come to expect. These expectations remain unmet in digital environments, forcing readers to Romanise Urdu or circulate images of text. Text on websites and apps display a range of typographic failures that impede reading: irregular font sizing, broken words, diacritics colliding into each other, and cramped line heights. In this talk Abeera Kamran will discuss how the design of print Urdu newspapers keeps archival modes of reading and seeing alive and vibrant for the Urdu reader, and how inadequate digital technologies threaten this sophisticated design tradition.

In the early days of printmaking, craftspeople were not only printers but had many professions — often one person was all at the same time: publisher, compositor, designer, and printmaker. The relationship between the makers, their tools and their creations were intrinsically linked. Through the years as technology and industry evolved, labour got more distributed: type was cut by someone else than the printing machine was operated, type was set by someone else than the page was designed.

In recent years, with the introduction of desktop publishing, this trend has been reversed. Personal computers brought a new and accessible freedom for designers, as one person could simultaneously draw their own typefaces, layout the page, print it at home, bind the book, and distribute it — much of which has been a foundation to counterculture. In parallel, the tools used became increasingly opaque in their construction, produced by less and less companies. The type we use — bought up by a handful conglomerates. The publishers reduced to only a few. This monopolisation led to dependency. The sparser a choice of tools gets, the higher the dependency to the ones remaining — no matter the cost. No choice for designers but to play this system.

While the tools got monopolised, their architecture became increasingly complex. As opposed to understanding how a letterpress printing machine works or how type gets cut, the understanding of layout software has threaded in a layer of opaqueness. It thus has become almost impossible for designers to fix things themselves, if something does not work, or to extend their tools to their needs.

However, recent tendencies might hint at alternatives: the rise of self-publishing, open-source tools becoming more popular in their use, and distribution of labour by means of digital communication.

As a team of two designers working from two countries, we regularly experiment with new software and spend time to share our files, working geographically distributed, and being involved in teaching practice.

In our talk we will argue for:

• Open standards for our files to reduce the switching costs when changing software.
• Extendable software.
• Hacking as a design technique.
• Working in distributed teams.
• New forms informed by self-made tools.
• Breaking the perpetual matter of course of teaching the ever-same design software.

This paper presents a counterpoint to the androcentric history of early-modern Venetian printing by examining the printed outputs produced by the nuns of the convent Santa Maria Maddalena alla Giudecca – colloquially referred to as delle Convertite. This convent was founded as a religious community established specifically for non-virgins. The women who were permitted entry to this convent were reformed sex workers and those who engaged in sex outside of marriage, whether consensual or non-consensual, or were in a concubinage relationship. The press was in operation from 1557 to 1561. During this period, the nuns produced twenty-five printed works of various lengths in both Latin and the vernacular. This little-known group of women was among a group comprised of just five other women in Italy who were engaged in printing before 1560 and produced the second largest output of this select group. Unlike their other women contemporaries, they did not operate the press as widows following a husband’s death but worked collectively as a part of a religious community; they are the sole female-operated printing press at this time to do so.

‘Bodies’ and ‘surfaces’ come together in this research to form a historico-theoretical inquiry into the prototypographic practices of nuns working in early-modern Italy, mapping a history of typography, female subjectivity, ritual practice, and a capacity for freedom within institutional constraints. These codices, the nun compositors, the typographic forms, and the institutional frameworks are studied both within and against their sociohistorical context. When drawn together within this framework these constellations of printed works and archival sources become relational configurations of objects that transcend their existing spatial-temporal locations. They are more than their subject classifications and the subsequent place they hold within institutional archives.

This research examines the development of modern Hebrew book faces and how they were harnessed to express the national values of the Zionist movement, established in the very beginning of the 19th century. Before print was invented, and ever since 13th century, Hebrew typefaces were designed according to the visual standards of different Jewish communities across the world. Specific socio-geographical groups used these faces for a long period until a need arose to create a face that addressed wider audiences unifying and uniformly. While the national idea came among the Jewish community, a visually-designed approach was necessary to create a neutral surface. The Zionist movement had a core value—to establish the ‘New Jew’, who is not motivated by and concerned only with the sacred, while making a cultural, creative, inclusive nationalism after the denial of the exile. This need was intensified with the Israeli Declaration of Independence, in which a ‘Melting-Pot’ policy was decided—a monocultural approach to the variety of immigrants came from different cultural and physical regions, creating a hegemonic society.

The proposed paper presents the parallels between the principles of the Zionist movement during the making of a national character of Judaism and between new approaches to drawing modern Hebrew typeface. A typographical thriving that occurred starting at the end of the 19th century came across with the revival of the Hebrew language, which until then was used only as a written and biblical language, as a living spoken language in the Land of Israel. Through analyzing the design structure and history of the faces ‘Frank-Rühl’, ‘Hadassa’, ‘Haim’ and ‘Ha'Tzvi’, I will argue that the changes in their style reflect the national ‘Melting-Pot’ policy as well as a possibility of a universal identification for Jews in the land of Israel.

A significant share of the history of Western graphic design has been shaped by dual conflicts between opposing figures: Herman Muthesius vs Henri van Velde (1914), Jan Tschihold vs Max Bill (1946), Jan van Toorn vs Wim Crowel (1972), among others. In subsequent decades, individuals such as Dutch typographer Walter Nikkels emerged who embraced traditionalism from a postmodern perspective.(1) That is to say: upholding the role of the designer as an individual within a broader tradition, while simultaneously disavowing the fundamentalisms that establish the “falsch” and the “richtig”.(2)

Through this study, I would propose that certain characteristics arising from Nikkels ideas and practice deserve more space in the historiographic canon of typography. This study proposes to delve into one of these characteristics in particular: the attempt to find balance in the use of typography as both text and image. From a traditionalist perspective, the content of the text was always the primary focus.(3) In contrast, from a modernist standpoint, the text becomes an image when subjected to pre-established typographic norms (grid, fonts, formats, proportion).(4)

Through an investigation into the typographic work of Walter Nikkels and Wigger Bierma (teacher and pupil respectively), I will focus on the use of the opening pages in book design: title page and table of contents. In the majority of the works of these three book designers, the traditional page number 3 (title page) and page number 5 (table of contents) are dealt with as double page spreads. Thus becoming both text and image simultaneously (fig. 1, 2, 3). These examples serve as formal and functional bridges between different historical western currents of typographic design. From them, a theoretical and formal historical study is proposed, eventually encompassing testimonies from the designers themselves. Furthermore, this study attempts to emphasise the value of contemporary typographic critical positions that seek to re-establish contact with traditions.(5) It is also intended as a modest contribution to the inclusion of such practices and ideas in the canon of the history of typography.

1. Walter Nikkels, Der Raum des Buches, 1998
2. Jan Tschihold, Meisterbuch der Schrift, 1952
3. “I once read that Tschichold, when he had to design an illustrated book, first selected the typeface and then – based on the chosen format – decided on the line length and the line spacing, which produced a type area with a certain tone of grey, and then commissioned the illustrator to produce drawings that related to this tone of grey. For him it was clear: the content is the text and everything has to conform.” Wigger Bierma in Walter Nikkels – Depicted, 2013
4. Wim Crouwel’s 1963–1985 catalogues for the Stedelijk Museum represent a significant example of this kind of practices.
5. “ … in my opinion, contact with tradition has been broken, we have to reformulate it, as it were, but this is an extremely difficult process.” Walter Nikkels in Walter Nikkels – Depicted, 2013

In typographic practices a lot is talked about rules, conventions and best practices. Several books are written about those and lively debates about typographic do’s and don’ts are happening daily. While a certain set of “rules” can be proposed, in a daily practice designers are constantly breaking them in order to reach their desired goals.

This way of working is similar to how the relativist philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend describes the application of scientific methods. In his seminal book Against Method (1) he proposes the notion of “anything goes”–when it comes to building or defending a scientific theory, scientist tend to use anything that helps them reach their goals.

The same applies to typography. When designers are working with typography, they will have rules and conventions in mind, but those are/should never be treated as ends in themselves, but as means to reach certain goals. We might say that “anything goes” here as well, as it often might be more practical to break a rule, then follow it blindly.

This fluidity of rules and conventions has interesting implications to the concept of functionality. When speaking of goals in previous paragraphs, we were simultaneously talking about functions. In that sense functionality is not something pregiven, or universal. Instead, it is something that reveals itself in practice.

This is meant in the spirit of late-Wittgenstein and his concept of “meaning as use”.(2) It shows that whatever we “do” with typography can be seen as functional if we understand the meanings that a certain typographic act is driven by. Taking this into account it makes no sense to talk about universal principles of legibility. Instead, we should look into particular cases of typographic acts (by designers) and evaluate them from the perspective of what that particular act is trying to do. Here I am not saying that “universal” or general rules and conventions are meaningless or useless, but that they are secondary in understanding what a certain typographic act does, what it means, what its function is.

I will illustrate these ideas by two case studies: 1) contemporary poetry and it’s treatment of typography; 2) the conflict of ortography vs typography, which manifests itself in the common tendency in typesetting to intentionally elude the rules of ortography in order to maintain typographic hygiene.

1. Paul Fayerabend, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, 1975
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, 1953

In academic papers within the humanities and history disciplines (literature, linguistics, scripts, archaeology), there is often a need to describe and cite non-Latin scripts. Most of the time, authors choose to present these scripts using images or graphical abstracts. Thanks to the efforts of Unicode, more and more writing systems can now be input as text. As a result, scholars can easily insert non-Latin scripts into citations within the text.

As Paul Luna describes in his book ‘Typography: A Very Short Introduction’
“…The coexistence of different scripts on the page or screen raises the umbrella of ‘harmonization’… ” With the increasing standardization of academic paper templates, there is a risk that relatively harmonious typesetting may be disrupted again.

This paper explores the practice of mixed typesetting of English and Anatolian language, specifically examining how Iron Age scripts can be inserted into academic papers in a “relatively harmonious” way, despite the annual emergence of thousands of new Unicode scripts and the lack of corresponding harmonious fonts by typographers.

I will analyze case studies of the entire Anatolian language family and propose specific typesetting strategies, with particular consideration for settings in Microsoft Word, a commonly used text editing software by scholars. The aim is to maintain visual harmony between Latin and non-Latin scripts. Additionally, I will collaborate with professional type designers to conduct user tests to evaluate the effectiveness and usability of these strategies in academic contexts. By addressing these challenges, this research aims to provide practical insights for scholars and typographers working with multi-script documents, ultimately contributing to the development of more integrated and harmonious typographic practices for “The Missing Scripts”.

I would like to propose a paper for the Typography: Theory and Practice Conference to be held at Leeds School of Arts that might appear wilful and contentious. Based on my observations as a tutor of graphic design for twenty years, I do not believe in a set of unified theories of typography that can be simply transmuted into my students’ practice. For every possible solution to a visual communication problem as experienced on a daily basis by student graphic designers, there is no one-size-fits-all set of theories that can be utilised – each solution is relational, contingent and requires distinct approaches, particularly at a time when digital technologies have radically transformed both the production and consumption of the written word.

To use an analogy, I am also a musician but have never been taught music theory, cannot read music and would have actively resisted if someone had attempted to teach me this. School managed to put me off music by taking this route – I needed to physically play an instrument, to make a sound. I am aware that perhaps my understanding and love of music might have been deepened by learning musical theory and it would have allowed me to work more confidently with other musicians. For my students learning typography, I would like to inhere a love for the discipline first, that brings with it a sense of responsibility for that discipline. For many art students, this process of learning through osmosis seems to work best in my experience – that learning to really see type, like I taught myself to really listen as a musician, are gains that are both hardest won but most significant to the student and that become truly embodied skills. This is perhaps when theory becomes praxis and real learning begins.

*Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations

This research explores typographic adjustments, specifically letter width, and their impact in patients with various underlying visual conditions within three groups of interests: blurry vision (N=15), central vision loss (N=11) and peripheral vision loss (N=15), along with a control group of normal vision participants (N=14). In an acuity experiment, six variations were tested across 120 trials. Participants reported when they could read a non-sense string of letters that gradually increased in size on the screen. Reaction times were used as a measurement of acuity. The results revealed a difference exerted by larger letter widths, which differs for each group. Wide shapes proved to be more beneficial for patients with central and peripheral vision loss, while even wider ones were advantageous for those with blurry and healthy vision. The findings align with recent literature, which highlights that typographic variables exert different effects depending on the reader.

Donis A. Dondis's theory of the felt axis, introduced in A Primer for Visual Literacy (1973), remains underexplored in contemporary typography education. This theory, which describes the intuitive sense of visual balance, is particularly useful when teaching typography and grid systems to students with artistic drawing and painting backgrounds.

Dondis's term, the felt axis, describes the embodied sense of equilibrium in visual composition. Dondis asserts, "The extraordinary fact is that while all visual patterns have a center of gravity which can be technically computed, no method of calculation is as fast, as accurate, as automatic as the intuitive sense of balance inherent in man's perceptions." This concept aligns with Gertrud Grunow's teachings at Bauhaus, who states in her essay The Creation of Living Form through Color, Form, and Sound (1923), "The supreme law, according to which all order is structured, is called equilibrium." It also echoes A. Tolmer's assertion in Mise En Page: The Theory and Practice of Lay-Out (1931) that visual balance cannot "be expressed merely as a mathematical calculation," and that "the most satisfactory way of combining the elements of a theatre set, the page of a book or a poster, all these things are essentially a matter of feeling."

Drawing from personal teaching experiences at Parsons and Pratt, I observed that talented students, particularly those with strong drawing and composition skills, often possess a highly developed felt axis. Their intuitive sense serves them well until the information hierarchy becomes too complex, at which point a more systematic approach, like the modular grid, becomes necessary. Unfortunately, these students struggle to transition away from following their embodied sense of equilibrium because it has historically served them well. Often, they attempt to employ both intuitive and systematic approaches simultaneously, which contradict each other and lead to frustration.

Bridging the gap between embodied and systematic approaches to design involves teaching students to identify and understand their embodied sense of balance. Encouraging students to set aside the felt axis in the initial stages of a complex layout allows them to concentrate on organizing information systematically before refining the aesthetics. Case studies of student projects demonstrate how mastery of both modes and the ability to flip-flop between them substantially improves their designs. the felt axis aids in intuitive, pictorial composition, while grid systems manage complex content.

To effectively integrate this knowledge into typography classes, educators should clearly distinguish between more embodied Renaissance approaches to layout, such as the Van de Graaf Canon, and more rational modern systemic approaches, like Bauhaus, New Typography, and Karl Gerstner’s modular grid. By designing projects that encourage students to consciously switch between these modes of thinking, rather than attempting to reconcile them, students can bring their artistic strengths to the design process. This approach allows students to leverage their strong compositional skills to enhance complex layouts, rather than being told to abandon their intuitive sense of balance altogether.