A Quote by Ellen Lupton

Typography is what language looks like.

Ellen Lupton

Quote Topics

Language Like Looks Typography

Quote Author

Ellen Lupton
Graphic Designer
Born: 1963

Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society. All schools should be teaching typography; we should be fundamentally aware of how typographic language is forming out assholes.

Neville Brody

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

Robert Bringhurst

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Robert Bringhurst

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

Robert Bringhurst

Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

Robert Bringhurst

Typography needs to be audible. Typography needs to be felt. Typography needs to be experienced.

Helmut Schmid

Typography tended to alter language from a means of perception and exploration to a portable commodity.

Marshall McLuhan

Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing. No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.

Emil Ruder

People do not think in English or Chinese or Apache; they think in a language of thought. This language of thought probably looks a bit like all these languagesBut compared with any given language, mentalese must be richer in some ways and simpler in others.

Steven Pinker

The better people communicate, the greater will be the need for better typography-expressive typography.

Herb Lubalin

Chimps can do all sorts of things we thought that only we could do - like tool-making and abstraction and generalisation. They can learn a language - sign language - and they can use the signs. But when you think of our intellects, even the brightest chimp looks like a very small child.

Jane Goodall

Mitt Romney looks like a guy modeling briefs on a package of underwear ... He looks like a guy who goes to the restroom when the check comes ... He looks like a guy who would run a seminar on condo flipping ... He looks like he is the closer at a Cadillac dealership.... He looks like that guy on the golf course in the Levitra commercial.

David Letterman

Lyric poetry is, of course, musical in origin. I do know that what happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page. When it's a question of typography, why not? Poets have done beautiful things with typography - Apollinaire's 'Calligrammes,' that sort of thing.

James Fenton

I like that Sarah Palin. She looks like the flight attendant who won't give you a second can of Pepsi ... She looks like the nurse who weighs you and then makes you sit alone in your underwear for 20 minutes ... She looks like a real estate agent whose picture you see on the bus stop bench ... She looks like the hygienist who makes you feel guilty about not flossing ... She looks like the relieved mom in a Tide commercial.

David Letterman

If you love it, you don't know much about typography. And if you hate it, you really don't know much about typography either and you should get another hobby.