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February 9, 2016Quinnipiac

Quinnipiac Assignment 02 – ICM 502 – Information Design Common to Biblical Texts

ICM 502 – Information Design Common to Biblical Texts

Biblical texts are fascinating, as are their designs.

What we today might consider to be problematic designs were much more typical years ago, particularly in the area of holy texts. That’s not so surprising when you consider that bibles were in far wider circulation before the printing press (scribes knew their buyer persona). And that, even after it was invented, there was still a great deal of illiteracy.

The two factors created a condition where there would be lettering or printing of a lot of prayer books. And there would be a lot of illustration so as to help the illiterate faithful follow along.

Modern Design Issues

Design requirements are different now. For one thing, only maybe 14 percent of the US population is illiterate. While that figure is higher than most of us would like, it’s a lot better than it was after the Roman Empire fell, and literacy was a feature of no more than maybe 30 – 40 percent of the populace.

Because we don’t need so many pictures to help us along, Rebecca Hagen and Kim Golombisky, in White Space is Not Your Enemy, offer a list of layout sins on pages 31 – 42:

13 Amateur Layout Errors

  1. Things that blink. Incessantly.
  2. Warped photos.
  3. Naked photos (e. g. they need a border).
  4. Bulky borders and boxes (use hairlines).
  5. Cheated margins.
  6. Centering everything.
  7. Corners and clutter – don’t fill the corners! Instead, group similar visual information together.
  8. Trapped negative space – keep the negative space at the edges.
  9. Busy backgrounds.
  10. Tacky type emphasis – reversing, stroking, using all caps, and underlining.
  11. Reversing – white copy on a dark background
  12. Stroking – outline characters
  13. All caps
  14. Underlining
  15. Bad bullets – use real bullets, not just asterisks or emoticons, and align them.
  16. Widows and orphans.

  17. Justified rivers – don’t use fully justified (both sides) blocks of type. Help eliminate this by increasing column width or reducing font point size, or both. Or just don’t do it!

Biblical Texts and Their Designs

When it comes to biblical texts, violations of sins 4, 7, 8, and 9, seem to be common. I chose images outside of the readings as these designs seem to be ubiquitous for older religious texts.

Gutenberg Bible

In this image from a Gutenberg bible (Genesis 1: 1) currently housed at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, a lot of these sins come to the fore.

Biblical Texts
Gutenberg bible (Genesis 1: 1) currently housed at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek
Biblical Texts
Koran currently housed in the David Collection at the Park Museer NE in Copenhagen, Denmark

The border, though lovely and possibly unique, is also bulky (#4) and busy (#9), and clutters the corner space (#7). Negative space is trapped within the border (#8).

Furthermore, the lack of paragraph or verse breaks makes the columns look uniform but uninviting to read. The text feels unapproachable and forbidding.

Koran

There’s another bulky border in this image. It’s from a Koran which is currently in the David Collection at the Park Museer NE in Copenhagen, Denmark.

This one has a lot of white space, with no visible spacings between sentences, except for the gold circles. The border feels imperfectly drawn although not freehand. Perhaps someone traced it.

At least there’s no corner clutter, and the border is relatively simple and not busy. But the design still commits the sin of bulky borders (#4). The large amount of margin space also appears strange. Because this is a holy text, it probably wasn’t for taking notes or annotating the text.

So why did the writer(s) waste so much of the space? Contrast that with what’s inside the borders. There the text is cramped. And it takes up nearly all of the real estate.

The Gutenberg bible seems to be saying with its design is that illiterate parishioners can follow along. So can young children. The Koran, in contrast, is instead telling its reader to focus on reading and not view any graven images.

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