Vessel.

Ty­pog­ra­phy isn’t in­vis­i­ble. By em­brac­ing that fact rather than deny­ing it, we can cre­ate bet­ter typography.

Warde pro­poses that on the printed page, the text is like a fine wine, and ty­pog­ra­phy is the ves­sel that con­tains it. She ar­gues that the ideal ves­sel for wine is one that shows rather than hides the wine’s virtues—the tit­u­lar crys­tal gob­let. Ac­cord­ing to Warde, ideal ty­pog­ra­phy should like­wise be in­vis­i­ble, let­ting the in­trin­sic virtues of the text show through.

An ap­peal­ing metaphor, but to­tally in­apt. As I said in WHAT IS TYPOGRAPHY?, ty­pog­ra­phy is the vi­sual com­po­nent of the writ­ten word. But the con­verse is also true: with­out ty­pog­ra­phy, a text has no vi­sual char­ac­ter­is­tics. A gob­let can be in­vis­i­ble be­cause the wine is not. But text is al­ready in­vis­i­ble, so ty­pog­ra­phy can­not be. Rather than wine in a gob­let, a more apt par­al­lel might be he­lium in a bal­loon: the bal­loon gives shape and vis­i­bil­ity to some­thing that oth­er­wise can­not be seen.

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