Typographical Portabilities: The Designer and User inCommunication Technologies

This thesis investigates how the gradual shift from print to portable screen based technology has impacted typographic communication. The transition from print to portable screen based devices, from material to virtual space, and from the textual to the visual has inevitably altered our relationship to type, as readers and as designers. Virtual typography can be defined as a new form of typographic communication that is reimagining the way we understand type as a visually communicating medium; we have moved from viewing type in print as “voice” to increasingly regarding type in screen based environments “as image”. This thesis takes the form of practice-led research conducted as a comparative study that explores the nature of virtual typography, counter to formalised models and established print based frameworks, in order to demarcate the nature of virtual typography in its current form and how this affects the activity of reading and design practices. Virtual typographic communication exhibits a tendency to suspend the constraints underlying conventional understandings and approaches to legibility and readability, suggesting that the communication process is undergoing a paradigm shift. Print typography has been guided by the ideological tendency to fulfil the role of mediator between author and reader; driven by the sole purpose of imperceptibly transmitting authorial messages to a reader.
Virtual typography has redefined these parameters in its ability to convey and go beyond the remit of textual language; it has formed a direct relationship between designer and reader and has gone from transmitting messages to acquiring the capability of generating its own messages, partaking in the activity of narrative construction. Virtual typography is neither invisible nor silent rather, it reveals and informs the complex cognitive and perceptual processes involved in communication and the reciprocal relationship between designer and reader. Kinesis combined with interaction in virtual typography escapes the fixity of meaning without suspending it; in contrast it generates the conditions, which enable the creation of a multiplicity of meanings. The original contribution to knowledge and argument of this thesis is that mobile technology has reinvented typography and as a result, the changing landscape and conceptualisation of typographic practices are in turn, redefining the communication process.