On the common swift

This short text was written in May 2015, in response to an invitation from Onur Yazicigil to contribute a statement on the theme of that year’s ISType conference. The theme was ​‘Swift’, which Onur introduced in these terms:

‘Swift is a movement; fast, but deliberate. It is a line of flight; unstudied, but graceful; light, but immensely multiplied. It is a process; unsettled, but transformative. Swift is a good companion for the stroke. The stroke tends to finalize and stabilize, whereas possibilities co-exist in the restless search of the swift. Metal letters were strong and solid enough to lift the weight of grand ideologies that unified cultures across bridges. Today’s technologies endow letters with swiftness, adaptable to new needs and complex functions. They can shift forms swiftly, respond directly, and embrace plurality.’

I was immediately inspired, and quickly wrote the following, which Onur was happy to accept and print in the conference programme.

Reflections on the common swift (apus apus)

The swift and the swallow have much in common. Both are highly aerial birds noted for their speed and agility. They are of similar size and shape, although the swift tends to be slightly larger. When we observe things—in nature or in typography—that appear so similar, we often suppose them to be related, and we invent systems of classification that capture these relationships. The history of typography is in part a history of typology, of attempts to make sense of the similarities between shapes and proportions and detailing in different typefaces, and so to fit them into categories of seemingly related designs.

The swift and the swallow are not related. The traits that they share are the result of evolutionary convergence, not genetic relationship. That is, they have similar shape and size and agility as a result of similar lifestyles in similar environments.

We can’t query the DNA of a typeface in the way that geneticists can examine that of a bird, but I wonder if we might usefully shift our attention from the traits of designs to the environments in which they evolved? In the course of this ISType conference, attendees have a chance to hear expert commentators speak on the mechanical, photographic, and digital environments of type. What are the traits that we can observe in the typefaces that evolved in each of these environments? Might ​‘swiftness’ be revealed as an emerging trait of today’s increasingly Web-based and responsive typographic environment?

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I considered expanding this text for publication here, but its brevity and open-ended questions seem part of whatever charm it has, and reflect the very swiftness of its composition. I was inspired to publish it today when reminded of it during a discussion of what it means to say things are unrelated, in the context of South and Southeast Asian writing systems, on the typo.social Mastodon instance.

The problem of categories is one on which this text touches. I have published it in the ​‘Making Text’ category of the self-imposed problem that is how articles are organised on this website, mostly because it didn’t less obviously not fit anywhere else.