Peter Norton is a talented self-merchandiser, but once in a while even
Peter misses the mark. The Norton Disk Doctor advertisement, which featured
The Peter in one of his pastel shirts with a stethoscope draped rakishly
around his neck, skirted some ancient societal taboos, but those of us who
actually cross over into the medical world found it amusing rather than
obnoxious because it was so ignorant. In the Byzantine world of medicine,
there are many subtle signals and class distinctions associated with even
so commonplace an article as a stethoscope. Not only is the "scope
around the neck" style a hallmark of insecure interns, but the prospect
of being seen in public with the $5 plastic stethoscope in Peter's outfit
would gag any self-respecting physician, nurse, or medical student.
Anyone can walk into a medical supply store and buy a stethoscope, but an
"appropriate" stethoscope can only be selected with the aid of
unwritten rules and tradition of the medical subculture, while interpretation
of the data you can acquire with a stethoscope requires years of study and
experience. Self-evident, you may say, but consider some cases that may
hit a little closer to home. Many purchasers of painting or drawing programs
have discovered, to their regret, that the acquisition didn't make them
any more creative; true artists can work wonders with these programs, but
the rest of us only produce computerized scrawls. Similarly, possession
of a computer, a WYSIWIG word processor, a laser printer, and a battery
of fonts does not magically turn one into a graphics designer or typographer--but
while society is protected from ersatz physicians by law and from nonartists
by visual common sense, our defenses against brain-damaged desktop publishers
are much flimsier.
We've all found ourselves on the receiving end of memos, newsletters, and
manuals, produced with personal computers, that would easily qualify as
felonious acts in the world of "real" publishing. At one extreme,
we've got the Sir Edmund P. Hillarys of word processing who jam each page
with as many different typefaces as possible "because they are there."
At the other extreme, we've got aberrations like the 1000-bed hospital I
work in, Los Angeles's Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Cedars-Sinai owns scores
of PCs and Hewlett Packard LaserJets, but views them only as typewriter
replacements--all documents are printed in 12 point Courier. Somewhere in
between, we've got the villains who use fancy fonts and "chartjunk"
to disguise lack of content--a practice also known as "garbage in,
gospel out."
Typography is a subtle art and is not intuitive (at least for most of us);
consciousness-raising is needed. Digital Typography: An Introduction
to Type and Composition for Computer System Design summarizes its own
premise with these words:
The ability to create typeset-quality documents easily may well change people's attitudes about type and printing. For example, a merchandising executive relates how he can no longer gauge the metaqualities of memos. When memos were typed on conventional typewriters, he could hold the document up to the light to see how much correction fluid had been expended. The more corrections, the less the sender must have cared, or else the memo would have been retyped. With computers, only the uncorrected errors show. For this executive, word processing has meant the loss of some information that used to come with his interoffice mail....Digital Typography addresses itself to four major topics in turn. It begins with a history of letterforms and the technologies for their production, ranging from the clay tablets of yore to the digital typesetters, laser printers, and CRTs of today--explaining along the way the origins and meanings of many common publishing and typesetting terms, such as leading, fonts, typefaces, points, and joins. With this groundwork laid, we're introduced to the bewildering variety of typeface designs and taught how to categorize them, with many beautiful illustrations as examples. The section on letterforms concludes with a fascinating discussion of what typographers have learned about reading over the centuries, and how intercharacter spacing, the presence or absence of serifs, and other qualities interact with the structure of the eye and the characteristics of the visual system to affect legibility.
A similar situation arises out of expectations about the quality of printing itself. Through experience, most people associate typesetting with a good-quality document. After all, much care, attention, and revision are required to put a document into typeset form in a book, journal, or magazine. But now, memos, drafts of articles, and business letters enter homes and offices in near-typeset form. Unconsciously, people attribute quality to the content, based on the form.
The reverse also happens. Non-specialists with no flair whatsoever for typographic design are designing and producing documents that have worse form than content. Our high expectations for graphic quality from commercial printing will be brought to bear on everything printed. The same thing has happened with film and television. We are so used to a high level of production quality in movies that even Grade B movies must rise to this level. Amateur productions can scarcely be shown on television today unless they meet minimum professional standards of production quality.