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Design Systems

Invisible to Whom

·7 min in full, in the book·PagePerfect Journal

Also available as a typeset book

The case against ornament in a book interior usually rests on three names and on a measurement it implies without citing. The names are Loos, Tschichold and Warde, and the measurement is a cost in the reader’s attention that no study among our sources puts a figure on.1 Those names deserve their place. But the argument usually built on them leans on the measurement, and without it what remains is a craft tradition, which is how we treat it here.

The rest of this essay is in the book

It goes on to cover:

  • Three names and two wrong dates
  • What Tschichold asked for, and what he took back
  • The glass belongs to somebody
  • How far the reading studies carry
  • The Swiss kept the pictures
  • The removal test, and the bill this book pays
  • Keep the removal test, and the label on it

About the book

Notes

  1. That ornament takes a fraction of the reader’s attention and gives nothing back, and that the fractions accumulate across a long book, is our argument rather than a finding. We traced no study that measures the attentional cost of a decorative element, accumulates such a cost over a book, or relates either to book abandonment. Evidence E: the journal’s argument.

Further reading