"The signs I am fascinated by," says Stone, "are those in which text typography is required, such as street signs, directional signs, informational signs, memorials, inscriptions, dedications. These are all examples of public lettering."

We might think that narrowness is economical – and that’s obviously true at the level of single lines – but a paragraph is not a bunch of single lines, it’s a series of lines; a wider font can be set smaller, maintaining apparent size, and gaining vertical space in a paragraph. Furthermore, a wide & small font is less susceptible to the “wasting” effect of linebreaks: a narrow font that accumulates small amounts of gain per line can have all its savings trashed by a linebreak; while a smaller font will save space per line no matter the linebreaks. On the other hand, a wider font causes more hyphens (in inverse proportion to the column measure), reducing both readability and economy. So it depends on a number of factors; but it’s important to remember that narrowness isn’t necessarily more economical.

If you believe that a typeface carries emotional associations in its forms*, then you have to conclude that the conventional practice of having only italics for emphasis is one-dimensional. There can be many kinds of emphasis, many nuances a discerning typographer might want to give snippets of text. So what would be nice is a system of fonts than can nest into each other and convey various emotions, such as stress, sensuality, whatever.

The real gold is in the subconscious, in the potential for affecting the mood of the reader through text fonts, with no explicit realization by the reader; triggering conscious appreciation of the typography is sure to dilute the full effect of subliminal textual moods. So we have to find ways of “flying under the radar” of the reader, so to speak.

The typography attracts us to start reading so that then we can pass the baton on to the writer, the editor, to engage with us through the text.

[T]he more radical a change, the more it needs to echo and relate to pre-existing structures and affordances. The use of visual metaphors in interface design is a typical case of this mechanism.

With regard to document-level typography (from a periodical publication to newspapers to reference works) there is a critical transformation in progress, with inadequate response by education institutions globally.

The sequence in which complex documents are migrating to screens, and the way in which content is specified, has helped establish some basic parameters for on-screen typography that makers can refer to while maintaining the readability of documents, but lacking the skills and understanding to deal with more complex information structures.

There are operations capable of toggling between the two, representing content in an editorially-informed way when that context matters, and switching to a view that optimizes for timeliness when that takes priority. (Or, to use Madrigal’s artful turn of phrase, between “nowness,” and a, “network of many times.”)

“At first I was hesitant to do a revival of what I thought was a Helvetica knockoff,” said DJR, “but what made it interesting was learning to see what Roger sees in it and trying to bring that out in a modern design. It’s a revival of what he loves about Forma.

Repurposing and aggregating information is a different story, and it requires the information to be stored atomically -- and in machine-readable format.

But what I really want to be able to do is explore the raw facts of that story, one by one, with layers of attribution, and an infrastructure for comparing the details of the fire -- date, time, place, victims, fire station number, distance from fire department, names and years experience of firemen on the scene, time it took for firemen to arrive -- with the details of previous fires. And subsequent fires, whenever they happen.

A lot of the information that newspaper organizations collect is relentlessly structured. It just takes somebody to realize the structure (the easy part), and it just takes somebody to start storing it in a structured format (the hard part).

Journalists should have less of a concern of what is and isn't "journalism," and more of a concern for important, focused information that is useful to people's lives and helps them understand the world.

When I say "newspapers need to stop the story-centric worldview," I don't mean "newspapers need to abolish stories." The two forms of information dissemination can coexist and complement each other.

But the goal for me, a data person focused more on the long term, is to store information in the most valuable format possible.