Typographic Meaning

research interests are multimodality, social semiotics and critical discourse analysis. 139 visual communication 4(2) 138 visual communication 4(2) INTRODUCTION I began studying visual communication as a linguist concerned with the discourses, genres and styles of media texts, 20 years ago. It had become increasingly obvious to me that it was no longer adequate to study just the linguistic aspects of these texts, and that the paradigms for studying images in media studies concentrated only on the connotative meanings of the people, places and things in images, and neglected the role of composition and layout as structuring devices, as a kind of 'grammar' for both images and many kinds contemporary written texts. This work resulted in Reading Images – The Grammar of Visual Design (1996), a book which I co-wrote with Gunther Kress, and which has now begun to find its place, particularly in areas such as critical discourse analysis and the analysis of educational materials. However, this work did not touch at all on typography, and it is only in the last few years that I have come to realize what a fundamental oversight this was, because clearly, it is above all and in the first place through calligraphy and typography that visual communication and writing form an inseparable unity. Designers have of course long known this. To take just two recent examples, Bellantoni and Woolman (2000: 6) have written that the printed word has two levels of meaning, the 'word image', the idea represented by the word itself, constructed from a string of letters, and the 'typographic image', the 'holistic visual impression', and Brody Neuenschwander (1993: 13, 31) calls typography 'a fully developed medium of expression', possessing 'a complex grammar by which communication is possible', and he quotes Hans-Rudolf Lutz who has said that 'Gestaltung ist auch Information' – 'design is also information' (p. 73). Linguists and semioticians are lagging behind here, and perhaps the delay in their recognition of the communicative role of typography is due to the fact that it is only recently, through the introduction of the word processor, that the means of typographic expression have become available to everyone, and entered everyone's consciousness. Beginning to survey the literature, it soon became obvious to me that the 'grammar' Neuenschwander calls for has yet to be written. Of course, there are excellent histories, overviews and critical discussions of typography (e., linguists and semioticians have ignored typography. So, …