Ecotopia wasn’t very good as a novel; I remember thinking at the time that it felt like an account by a college freshman of his discovery of a life wider and more exciting than the one he’d grown up in. (It reminded me of “encounter groups” that I experienced when I was a college freshman myself in the late ’60s.) But it carries you along, keeping you interested enough in the characters to enjoy the story, while mostly presenting the society of Ecotopia that he had envisioned and invented. That vision of a radically environmentally sustainable society was what got people excited in the later 1970s.

Not long after I moved to Seattle, I signed up for a class at the Experimental College, a sort of officially unofficial adjunct to the University of Washington, on the concepts of Ecotopia. In that class I met a lot of people who were involved in trying to create a sustainable counterculture and asking themselves serious questions about how to really live in a place in modern North America. It tied in with ideas that I’d been reading and thinking about through writers such as Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder, and with currents of thought that were rife in the Pacific Northwest at that time. The concept of “Ecotopia” was very satisfying: it was a country comprising Washington, Oregon, and Northern California that had supposedly seceded from the United States and set up an ecologically based society with very little communication with the rest of the US. The precept of the novel is that an American reporter is finally able to penetrate Ecotopia and make a journey of discovery there. The story is told as entries in his diary.

Ecotopia is a utopian novel; so is Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, which came out shortly before Ecotopia. Although they are miles apart in literary quality, I remember intending to write a comparative review of the two books, because they took different, perhaps complementary, approaches to creating a fictional utopia. Le Guin’s Annares was a world of scarcity; Ecotopia, by contrast, was a world of abundance (the rich economy and ecology of northern California and the Pacific Northwest). Comparing the utopias, if not the novels, would have been enlightening.

After taking that Experimental College class in Ecotopia, I was so moved by the energy and the excitement among such a bunch of creative people that I and two other students from the class decided to continue it by teaching it ourselves the next quarter; and when we had done that, a couple of our own students did the same, taking the class and its community to a third quarter. (I don’t think it went farther than that.) There was a ferment at that time in environmental and “alternative” lifestyles and ideas on the West Coast, and the connections made through that class fueled a lot of creative activity in Seattle and environs for several years to come. We certainly didn’t create any utopias, but the study formed some of our perspectives and assumptions about the land we lived in and how we intended to go forward in our lives. Much of it later fell by the wayside, but some of it has persisted.

I only met Ernest Callenbach once, when he came through Seattle and visited our class to see what he had wrought. He seemed an unassuming man, who had simply had some good ideas at the right time and succeeded in expressing them in a way that people responded to. Before he wrote Ecotopia, he was better known as a film critic and the editor of Film Quarterly magazine. I remember his telling us that what had led him to writing Ecotopia was living in Berkeley and simply asking himself questions about where the waste went to. When he followed its route (intellectually, I assume, not literally), he realized that he was discovering a whole way of looking at the world.

You might think that Ernest Callenbach and Ecotopia don’t have much to do with design, which is the ostensible subject of this blog. But in the larger sense that we live in a designed world and ought to get better at it, this is very much at the heart of design.

But that will change. In order for it to change in a worthwhile way, we have to spell out just what form these books ought to take.

So what’s needed? How do we make good e-books? What should a good tool for designing and creating e-books look like and do? What should the result – the e-book itself – be capable of? And what should the experience of reading an e-book be like?

Last question first. If it’s immersive reading – a story or narrative of some kind – then you, as the reader, should be able to lose yourself in the book without thinking about what it looks like or how it’s presented. This has always been true for printed books, and it’s equally true for e-books.

But e-books present a challenge that printed books do not: the page isn’t fixed and final. At the very least, the reader will be able to make the font bigger or smaller at will, which forces text to reflow and the relative size of the screen “page” to change. That’s the minimum, and it’s a fair bet already today. But the reader many read the same book on several different devices: a phone, a laptop, a tablet, a specialized e-reader, or even the screen of a desktop computer.

For a real system of flexible layout in e-books and e-periodicals that might be viewed on any number of different screens at different times, what’s needed is a rules-based system of adaptive layout. I like to think of this as “page H&J”: the same kind of rules-based decision-making on how to arrange the elements on a page as normal H&J uses to determine line endings.

The requirements for this are easy to describe – maybe not so easy to implement. We need both design & production tools and the reading software & hardware that the result will be displayed on.

A constraints-based system of adaptive layout

The interesting problems always come when you have two requirements that can’t both be met at the same time. (For example: this picture is supposed to stay next to that column of text, but the screen is so small that there isn’t room for both. What to do?) That’s when you need a well-thought-out hierarchy of rules to tell the system which requirement takes precedence. It can get quite complicated. And the rules might be quite different for, say, a novel, a textbook on statistics, or an illustrated travel guide.

OpenType layout support. This means support for the OpenType features that are built into fonts. There are quite a few possible features, and you might not think of them as “layout”; they affect the layout, of course, in small ways (what John Hudson has called “character-level layout”), but they’re basically typographic. Common OpenType layout features include different styles of numerals (lining or oldstyle, tabular or proportional), kerning, tracking, ligatures, small-caps, contextual alternates, and the infinitely malleable “stylistic sets.” In complex scripts like Arabic, Thai, or Devanagari, there are OpenType features that are essential to composing the characters correctly. None of these features are things that a reader has to think about, or ought to, but the book designer should be able to program them into the book so that they’re used automatically.

Grid-based layout. It seems very obvious that the layout grid, which was developed as a tool for designing printed books, is the logical way to think about a computer screen. But it hasn’t been used as much as you’d imagine. Now that we’re designing for screens of varying sizes and shapes, using a grid as the basis of positioning elements on the screen makes it possible to position them appropriately on different screens. The grid units need to be small enough and flexible enough to use with small text type, where slight adjustments of position make a world of difference in readability.

Media query. This is the name used for the question that a program sends to the device: What kind of device are you? What is the resolution of your screen? How big is that screen? What kind of rendering system does it use for text? With that information, the program can decide how to lay out the page for that screen. (Of course, the device has to give back an accurate answer.)

Keep & break controls. These are rules for determining what elements have to stay together and what elements can be broken apart, as the page is laid out. This means being able to insist that, say, a subhead must stay with the following paragraph on the page (keep); if there isn’t room, then they’ll both get moved to the next page. It also means that you could specify that it’s OK to break that paragraph at the bottom of the page (break), as long as at least two lines stay with the subhead.

Element query. I’ve made up this term, but it’s equivalent to media query on a page level. The various elements that interact on a page – paragraphs, columns, images, headings, notes, captions, whatever – need a way of knowing what other elements are on the page, and what constraints govern them.

H&J. That stands for “hyphenation and justification,” which is what a typesetting program does to determine where to put the break at the end of a line, and whether and how to hyphenate any incomplete words. Without hyphenation, you can’t have justified margins (well, you can, but the text will be hard to read, because it will be full of gaping holes between words – or, even more distracting, extra spaces between letters). Even unjustified text needs hyphenation some of the time, though it’s more forgiving. When a reader increases the size of the font, it effectively makes the lines shorter; if the text is justified, those gaps will get bigger and more frequent. But there are rules for deciding where and how to break the line, and a proper H&J system (such as the one built into InDesign) is quite sophisticated. That’s exactly what we need built into e-book readers.

In digital typesetting systems, the rules of H&J determine which words should be included on a line, which words should be run down to the next line, and whether it’s OK to break a word at the end of the line – and if so, where. A system like InDesign’s paragraph composer can do this in the context of the whole paragraph, not just that one line. A human typesetter makes these decisions while composing the page, but when the font or size might be changed at any moment by the reader, these decisions need to be built into the software. In “page H&J,” where the size and orientation of the page itself might change, the whole process of page layout needs to be intelligent and flexible.

Up until now, in the digital work flow, the software’s composition engine has been used in the creation of the published document; the human reader is reading a static page. But now, with flexible layout and multiple reading devices, the composition engine needs to be built into the reading device, because that’s where the final page composition is going to take place.

It’s easy to create a document with static pages that are designed specifically for a particular output device – a Kindle 3, for instance, with its 6-inch e-ink screen, or a 10-inch iPad. I’ve done it myself in InDesign and turned the result into a targeted PDF. But if that’s your model, and you want to target more than one device, you’ll have to produce a new set of static pages for each different screen size and each different device. Wouldn’t it be better to have a flexible system for intelligently and elegantly adapting to the size, resolution, and rendering methods of any device at all?

[Photo: a 17th-century Mexican handbook, about the size of a hand-held device, from the collection of the Biblioteca Palafoxiana, displayed during Typ09 in Mexico City. With ink show-through from the back of the page, which will probably not be a feature of e-books.]

Glenn Fleishman’s essay for Boing Boing is insightful and mindful of the cyclical development of typographic technology; he also mentions the current problems with trying to incorporate web fonts in e-books. Yves Peters in the FontFeed has more to say about the history of the typeface designs, and his illustrations cleverly show the fonts in all three of iBooks’ screen views or “themes.”

What I don’t understand is why Apple chose to drop three of the previous iBooks fonts (Cochin, Baskerville – really Monotype Baskerville – and Verdana). None of them were ideal for books onscreen, but why reduce the choices instead of simply adding to them?

And now the newly introduced Seravek is the only sans serif font available for reading in iBooks. It’s a nicely designed humanist sans, but it doesn’t have to be the only sans, humanist or otherwise, on the system. And the small eyes of Seravek’s e and a tend to visually close up under some circumstances.

[Image: one of the illustrations from Yves Peters’ review, showing Iowan Old Style. In the FontFeed original, you can click on any of the three sections to see the full page in that view.]

Four years ago, Mark Batty published a pair of books by me, Dot-font: talking about design and Dot-font: talking about fonts, which were intended to be the first of a series of small, handy books on typography and design. Last year, I made the first one (on design) available as a free download. Now, I’m posting the second book (on fonts) as well, also as a free download.

Please download the text of both books and enjoy them.

You can download the complete text of Dot-font: talking about fonts as a PDF, designed and formatted for onscreen reading; as a Word document; or as a text file. The illustrations that appear in the printed book are not part of these downloads; I don’t have rights to reproduce and distribute all of the images in digital form, so for the full visual effect you’ll have to buy a copy of the physical book (which of course I encourage you to do). Some of those images appeared online at Creativepro when the original columns were published, but there are quite a few original images that were created for the book: for example, the series of photos that Dave Farey made from scratch, to illustrate the process of cutting a letter by hand out of Rubylith in order to create a Letraset font in the 1960s.

This book, like the last, is published under a Creative Commons license. Please do not distribute it without that license information.

The Creativepro columns that seemed worth collecting into a book broke down naturally into three categories: design in general, typefaces or fonts, and typography or how type is used. So I’ve still got the material for a third book, Dot-font: talking about typography. Is there a demand? You tell me.

It’s small in extent (50 pages) but not in format: its pages are a generous nine inches square, as befits a book that’s got to show a lot of examples of the design of other books. Oddly, there’s no one named as author or editor, which will perplex book dealers and annoy librarians; it’s simply credited to Interval Press, Birchwood, Minnesota. My copy was sent to me by Cheryl Miller, Will’s wife, and the copyright is in her name. (The information page on the distributor’s website confirms that Cheryl is the book’s editor.)

This collection of essays and reminiscences by Will’s many friends and collaborators gives a kaleidoscopic picture of the man. Although by the time I first met him, he was living and working in Minneapolis, as design and production manager for the Minnesota Historical Society Press, Will had spent many years in the San Francisco Bay Area as a letterpress printer. He and Wesley Tanner printed Fine Print for several years, and Will also wrote articles and designed covers for that remarkable publication. Reading about those times now, with names of people I came to know many years later, makes me imagine an alternate history in which, when I was living in San Francisco after I got out of college in 1971, I had somehow made contact with the local printing community. But at that young age I had no idea that typography was going to be central to my life, and I didn’t meet any of those people, or stay in the Bay Area.

Type Works is a short-run book, printed by BookMobile in Minneapolis, who specialize in short-run and print-on-demand books (and who I know from experience can do a good job of it). Given the display purpose of this book, I could wish that it had a sewn binding that would lie perfectly flat, but that’s not an option in this short a run, unless you manufacture the book by hand. I also wish I could read every word on every printed example shown, but that’s just a reflection of how fascinating the texts that Will worked on (or wrote) tended to be. This is a fine presentation of examples of Will Powers’s excellent typography and book design, of the words written about him, and of a few of his own words as well. And I love the fact that the text uses Zuzana Licko’s typeface Journal, an idiosyncratic but very readable text face of the digital era.

“Responsive web design” is Marcotte’s term for what I first heard referred to as “adaptive layout” by Microsoft’s Geraldine Wade (now Banes) when she was working on the original New York Times Reader. I usually just call it “flexible layout.” (As the Times Reader app suggests, it’s not only applicable to web pages.) The essential idea is visual design that adapts itself intelligently to the size, orientation, and resolution of the digital “page” it’s displayed on. This can be done well or badly, of course, but first you’ve got to understand the importance of doing it at all.

Marcotte is cogent and persuasive about that. And he shows you exactly how to do it, step by step, even though this is not strictly speaking a “how to” book. More important, he shows you why to do it. His last chapter suggests a reversal of the notion of “graceful degradation” in onscreen design: instead of making a complex design for a big monitor and the latest, most capable software, and then figuring out how it should deal with smaller sizes or less capable systems, he suggests starting by designing a simple, uncomplicated basic design that will work on the tiniest mobile device (“mobile first”), then adding features as (and if) they seem useful in a more expansive environment. Both approaches are adaptable and responsive, but this one seems cleaner and more elegant.

Now the area that interests me most is text typography, which Marcotte doesn’t go into in any great detail. But this just means that there’s more to be learned and invented in this area.

I’m a fan of small, handy, precisely targeted books, and the Book Apart series is just that. These books are consistently designed (by Jason Santa Maria), readable, and easily portable (despite somewhat heavy coated paper). There are a few bits of sloppiness; the proofreader could have caught the glitches in the hyphenation algorithm that produced “wides-creen” and “in-teract” as word breaks, and a copyeditor might have questioned the author’s frequent use of “to better [do this]” or “to better [do that],” but these are quibbles. Responsive Web Design and its predecessors in this series are useful, well-done tools in their own right.

Powers’s images were almost never representational; they were dreamlike and evocative, with flowing shapes, curving lines, and polished surfaces, floating in a limitless space of the mind.

Poynor takes off from a reference in the Guardian’s science fiction issue, where the editors asked a wide range of science fiction writers to describe their favorite novel or author; Christopher Priest wrote about J.G. Ballard’s early short-story collection, The Voices of Time (left). The cover of that Berkley paperback was classic Richard Powers; so was the (different) cover of a later reprinting (also from Berkley). This provides Poynor with a perfect jumping-off point.

The image to the left is not a swipe from the Guardian, but a scan of the cover of my own lovingly tattered copy of The Voices of Time. The only time I met Ballard, on a reading tour for Empire of the Sun, I had the pleasure of getting his autograph on this book that I had kept with me since I was a youthful sf reader.

This invaluable guide, written and designed by Gail Anderson and illustrated by Bonnie Clas, could set you on the road to a better life. “This book will make you a winner!” exclaims the back cover, and who could doubt it? As the introduction explains, “The Type Directors Club is the first international organization to make public a genuine and authentic guide to the connection between typography and dreams.”

The contents include a list of dream types (“To dream of ligatures denotes popularity with the opposite sex”), a typographic horoscope (“As the most sensitive sign of the zodiac, Pisces is easily devastated by poorly drawn characters”), and small ads for everything imaginable (“Miracle Open Type Necklace,” “Go Away Comic Sans Cologne,” and “PROFESSOR INA’S Tattoo Type Removal Cream”).

Remember: “Madame Wahler’s Lucky Serif Dream Book will prove itself valuable as a reference because it uses small words and lists the meanings of many popular lettering dreams.”

The author clearly knows his stuff. According to his bio note, “Martin Pecina is a designer and typographer, enjoys reading and designs books.” An enjoyment of reading is a prerequisite for designing books, or at least doing it well. (I know that my own approach to designing a book starts with imagining how it would be to hold and read that book.) And an enjoyment of reading should also inform any design for electronic books, as Pecina points out in a rather severe critique of the current state of the art.

He doesn’t just show off bad examples – something that’s absurdly easy to do with almost any current form of e-reader – he spells out the kind of typographic decisions that need to be made in laying out a page of text, whether that page is fixed and printed or fluid and controlled by dynamic rules. Anyone working in digital book publishing today ought to read this article.

Pecina analyzes the problem by dividing it into two parts: basically, the hardware and the software. The hardware may be a “universal device” (a computer or phone that serves a number of functions, of which reading is just one) or a “specialized device” (a dedicated e-reader). He is scathing about the nature of most computer screens: “But – it is impossible to read well from a lit display. Sure, we read websites on them, even PDF documents, maybe annual reports, press releases and various corporate documents. But it’s no good for reading long passages of text.” He feels that the only reasonable future for digital books is passive display technology using e-ink and reflected light. “In terms of electronic books, the backlit display is a dead end and brutal debasement; devices with this technology will never fully replace printed books, no matter how many millions of titles for the iPad or similar devices end up being sold.”

In the long term, I’m sure, he’s quite right. The future of long-form reading may be a few high-quality printed books, supplemented by a kind of smart paper, where nanotech “ink” forms and re-forms the text as needed on a single page.

Most of the essay, however, focuses on the software used to create e-books, cataloging both what the currently available systems do and what’s needed to make them work right. He makes a distinction between a “final” document, a composed page (whether in print or in a fixed form like a PDF file), and an “unfinalized” document, where both the form and the content may continue to change. (He doesn’t give much attention to the idea of a document whose content is fixed – nobody’s going to change the words of a novel – but which might be presented in a fluid variety of forms.) And he raises serious questions about books with complicated multi-level text, such as scholarly publications, which may have footnotes and several layers of nested content. (Scholarly books would benefit most from electronic publishing, since the audience is usually small and the cost of printing proportionately high, but creating a system that can handle that kind of complexity in a flexible manner is not easy.) “Simple text,” he says, “is flexible, can easily flow from a small into a large format or from landscape into portrait orientation, all quickly and without losing a bit of its essential nature. The situation is perceptibly different for scholarly or professional texts.”

Pecina gives a nod to the two-page spread, so innate to the nature of a printed book bound at the spine. Digital books, of course, do not have any need for a spine, and therefore no need for facing pages, although some e-reading software tries to present a familiar-looking facsimile of an open book. He mentions the “scrolling” model, which we’re all used to from websites and word-processors; what he doesn’t mention is that before the codex form of the book, handwritten scrolls too were composed in pages – though not in two-page spreads. I remember how surprised I was when I learned that real-life ancient scrolls were held horizontally and read side-to-side, not held top-to-bottom the way you see in cartoons and historical movies. Perhaps a royal proclamation would be held vertically, but an actual book – the literature of the Greeks and Romans, or the religious texts of the ancient world – was held horizontally and rolled open enough to view a single, relatively narrow block of writing: a single page. Perhaps we’re coming back to an older tradition than we’ve been following for the last millennium or so.

Pecina also mentions the design problems of books with illustrations or other images, which a traditional book designer deals with in composing a page. What he doesn’t go into is the other kind of editorial design, which shares a lot of its DNA with the book: magazine design. There are books that revel in image and display type with hardly any traditional “text” content, and there are scholarly journals that are essentially books in periodical form; the boundary is very porous. Do magazines lend themselves to display on an e-ink device? How about sumptuous art or photography books? Is the dividing line the need for color? The balance between image and text? The ephemeral nature of the content?

I suspect that the problems of designing complex books for reading on a variety of screens are akin to the design problems currently being posed by magazines with digital editions. The answer requires truly dynamic layout, with all the careful thinking-through of hierarchy and if/then behavior that that implies. If such systems of design and production are sophisticated enough, they’ll be able to handle text and image of any complexity, and do so in a typographically elegant way that just seems natural to read. That’s where the future is, now.

[Image: cover of Typo 43, Spring 2011, with its witty commentary on fonts’ spotty support of Central European character sets.]

The play is Futura, written by Jordan Harrison, and directed in this performance by Kip Fagan at the Portland Center Stage. (I say “this performance” because the play was having a sort of parallax début: it opened simultaneously in Portland and Los Angeles, after being workshopped in 2009 at the JAW Playwrights’ Festival in Portland.)

The opening act is a lecture on typography – and a good one. In the best science-fiction tradition, you realize, as the lecture goes on, that there’s more to the context that you thought. When the lecturer whips out a genuine piece of paper, it is clearly meant to be a shock to her students. This is a world where physical books have been superseded, and banned, replaced by an agreed-upon digital library that keeps changing, and has no grounding in solid fact. The lecturer drops acerbic references to her late husband, who seems to have been murdered, apparently by the forces of imposed order.

The first act ends [spoiler here!] when the lecturer is suddenly kidnapped, blindfolded and hustled offstage.

The trouble with Futura is that it breaks down after that. The four actors seem good; it’s the writing that lets them down. The arguments between two of the main characters in the second act are true to life, the kind of half-thought-through emotional arguments that people really make. But the play itself doesn’t rise above them, or go any deeper. The logic falls apart at the slightest touch. The metaphor, reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, doesn’t really offer any more insight than a sort of worried extrapolation of Google’s attempt to digitize the world’s books.

The stage sets were wonderful. (I wonder what they were like in the LA performance.) I’m not at all sorry that I went to see this play; I’m just disappointed that it wasn’t better than it was. There’s a lot to be said about books, printing, digital literature, and society; but this play didn’t go beyond its own characters’ blinkered arguments.

Still: “Futura”? How could any typographer resist?