my research

I’m currently completing a book manuscript for an alternative history of typography, the working title for which is The Typography Surface. My claims about the significance of surface in typography (and our consequent misunderstandings about the glyph), are guided by a fundamental presupposition. That the understanding of things that pepper our daily lives abides not only through the commonly agreed upon and the explicitly expressed, but also the rare, the odd, the subtle and the quirky. And as such, these forms of understanding, while still highly influential, are nonetheless uncommonly held. This work then seeks to tell a subtler story of type. A story that necessarily remains largely unsung. 

The claims I make about the unsung in typography are guided substantially by the theories of Charles Sanders Peirce. Many in graphic design associate Peirce, and Ferdinand de Saussure, with semiotics. A field of inquiry that enjoyed wide application in graphic design education around the end of the 20th century. Given the relative dominance of scholarship informed by Saussaurean semiotics however, the implications of Peirce’s ideas to type, especially of what he called “the index,” remain largely unexplored. In addition, then, to generally “singing the unsung” about a quotidian thing, this book is also offered as a remedy to this lack in the scholarly record. 

The order of the book’s chapters, as they are described on the chapter synopses page, can generally be understood as a progressive exploration of the index in typography.