Modernity, Method and Minimal Means: Typewriters, Typing Manuals and Document Design

Abstract

This essay is about the contribution that typing manuals and typists have made to the history of graphic language and communication design, and the role that typewriter composition has played in typographic education and design practice, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s. The limited technical capabilities of typewriters are discussed in relation to the rules in typing manuals for articulating and organising the structure of text. Such manuals were used to train typists who went on to produce documents of considerable complexity within what typographers would consider to be minimal means in terms of flexibility in the use of letterforms and space.