Having sat down and squint-slogged my way through the “Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works” book, which you have here freely available and lovingly rendered in PDF I am regrettably here to inform you that it is not good.
As a text, it is:
- Ableist in, and by, design,
- Patronizing in its text,
- Frequently and often profoundly wrong when it comes to technology,
- Deeply and pervasively incurious about practical questions in which type matters,
- Entirely too comfortable ignoring its own advice about basically everything,
- Makes only the barest nod to the idea that legibility matters, and
- Doesn’t admit the idea of accessibility at all.
The real quote from which the book’s title is born was an incident involving a type designer named Frederic Goudy who, sneering at the text of an award he’d just been handed, said “men who would letterspace lowercase would shag sheep”. Apparently in a later apology he said, I meant nothing by that, I tell everyone they shag sheep. So we’re here to think critically about the quality and utility of advice you’d get, not just from someone who’d call you a sheep fucker to your face over letter spacing, but from people who celebrate their doing that with such glee that they’ll make it the title of their book on the topic.
Have you met people in your professional life like that? I have. There are many, many infuriating passages in this book, where the author chooses to fully embody so many of the worst qualities of the soi-disant “designer” but this one is particularly choice, from page 23:
“You can bet there wasn’t one typographer or graphic designer in the group”, really? We’re to believe that Margaret Calvert and Jock Kinneir were busy every day from 1957 onwards?
“… so the outcome shows no indication of any thought toward legibility”, sir. Sir.
This is the exact opposite of true and there is no way, none whatsoever, that the author doesn’t know that. No type, anywhere, has been studied more thoroughly or more carefully, or at greater expense than the type used for road signage. But our author, reasoning from glossy-magazines-in-a-sunlit-studio-born first principles says, casually that
“Unfortunately, someone made the type much fatter – probably an engineer who thought that more weight is more legible. The opposite is true.”
Is it, though?
Is it true in the rain? Is it true at night? Is it true if you’re going 20kph over the limit? Is it true when oncoming cars use high beams, or too-bright LEDs? Is it true when the sun is in your eyes, or reflecting off the sign? Is it true if you have astigmatism? Is it true in the fog?
Bad road signage kills people. Of course there were engineers involved, of course there were administrators and accountants involved, because the choice of font and weight in traffic signs is a public policy decision with immediate human consequences, and bad road signage decisions kill people.
But our guy thinks it’s ugly, and thinking it’s ugly lets him sneer at those concerns, so he either doesn’t know the answers to any of those questions, or doesn’t care to acknowledge that they’re questions that need answering, or both.
None of those options are good and the whole book is like this, meticulously and methodically embodying so many of the worst qualities of modern design, reifying the smug sanctimony of its most obnoxious, incuriously detached devotees and wrapping all of that up in a PDF with the kind of aggressively abstruse layout that leaves you feeling like you’ve just smoked an entire copy of Wired Magazine In Its Prime.
But it does, at least, manage one genuinely remarkable feat: it is an entire 120+ page book about type that is only worth looking at for the pictures.
“When all right-thinking men and women are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook?”
– Foreword, “The Elements Of Typographic Style” by Robert Bringhurst.
If you’re looking for an antidote, though, I’m happy to report that there remains joy in the world. Good news, sheepfuckers.
Bringhurst’s Elements Of Typographic Style is such a breath of fresh are in this space, and he writes with a love of both craftsmanship and craft that it is impossible not to admire. Starting from first principles reading “Typography exists to honor content”, elaborated tactics that start “read the text before designing it”, just as a palate-cleanser this text is such a relief. And it is so much better than just that, not about how type works, but how a typographer can act as an interpreter and presenter of a text to an audience. I hesitate to even quote it – any paragraph in it that is worth quoting on its own would be diminished in standing it it up on a page alone. The reverence for words and language in this, as they appear on the page and the greater meanings and whys that brought them to the page, it all sings out of Bringhurst’s work. If you want to learn how type works, how you can make it work and what you owe it in the process, this is the book you want.