Typography as Punctuation

I am writing about the things that I am thinking about, and typography just happens to be one of the topics.

Typography is a beautiful art with thousands of beautifully designed typefaces at our fingertips. New designers learning how to use typography of necessity focus on the design of a typeface to carry a design. For many this is as far as they get. I propose that the thinking about typography as punctuation is one way to view typography that can provide concrete reasons for decision making in such an abstract art.

Punctuation adds breaks and breaths to written words through the use of a system of symbols. These symbols add and clarify the meaning of strings of words. If a designer thinks about typography from the point of view of adding meaning through space, weight, size, and other relationships, they have reasons for the decisions they make, and then readers are rewarded with texts that are more intuitive to decode.