Systematizing the platypus, A perspective on type design classification

An extended essay (13,500 words) on contemporary issues within typeface classification.

This essay takes as its starting point an unpublished text written in 2000. In revisiting this text after such a length of time, my aim has been to adjust and finish it as a piece of writing, while retaining a clear sense of the spirit of the thinking it gave account to, and without imposing any subsequent insights on the ideas that were then being explored. I have put these new thoughts in an afterword, which brings the story up to 2017.

The purpose of the essay is to set out the rationale informing a new description framework integrated within Typeform dialogues and the approach to typeform description it models. The mechanical operation of this description framework and the specifics of its application within the interactive environment of Typeform dialogues are explained in the User’s Manual. Within this essay are examined the objectives and contextual circumstances informing the work undertaken and the shaping of the arguments put forward. It is an attempt to ground classificatory ideas about typeface design in a real situation, in response to an observed tendency within the field to indulge in less purposeful debate often lacking any specific practice focus.*

Key features of the work presented include a renewed emphasis on the activity of typeform description within the context of classification; the building of a descriptive framework based on observed models of adherence and divergence in practice; and the positioning of the description framework outcome as a tool for knowledge-building and for facilitating the formal understanding of typefaces. In so doing, this work pays homage to a series of classificatory heroes, not least Walter Tracy and Nicolete Gray. The true hero though is perhaps the platypus of the title. A mammal variously referred to as mole-like, egg-laying, semi-aquatic, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed and otter-footed, the platypus is an animal descriptively made up of the parts of others, an essential metaphor for the classificatory challenge this account sets out.