Information Design as Typography
There’s a great article up on Information Architects Japan regarding Information Design as Typography. Don’t worry, it’s not just talk of which font to use or how to kern your letters. It actually gets into the ideas behind using text as a user interface, and right thinking in design.
This sums up the article’s main point pretty well:
“It is the information designer’s task “to divide up and organize and interpret this mass of printed matter in such a way that the reader will have a good chance of finding what is of interest to himâ€?. Macro-typography (overall text-structure) in contrast to micro typography (detailed aspects of type and spacing) covers many aspects of what we nowadays call “information designâ€?. So to speak, information designers nowadays do the job that typographers did 30 years ago:
‘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. A printed work which cannot be read becomes a product without purpose.’“