Robert Bringhurst Quotes

I'm huge on visuals. I love visuals.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

In a world rife with unsolicited messages, typography must often draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn. Typography with anything to say therefore aspires to a kind of statuesque transparency. It's other traditional goal is durability: not immunity to change, but a clear superiority to fashion. Typography at its best is a visual form of language linking timelessness and time.

The goal of art-making in general is communication.

Wherever there are words, let there be pictures.

A picture must possess a real power to generate light and for a long time now I've been conscious of expressing myself through light or rather in light.

To design is to communicate clearly by whatever means you can control or master.

I found a great many pieces of punctuation and typography lying around dormant when I came along - and I must say I had a good time using them.

Music is a kind of harmonious language.

Compared to the spoken word, a picture is a pitiful thing, indeed.

Poetry is a type-font design for an alphabet of fun, hate, love, death.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.

Styles come and go, design goes on forever: solving communication problems with new tools applied to the same old common sense.

Writing, the art of communicating thoughts to the mind through the eye, is the great invention of the world.

We are born into a box of time and space. We use words and communication to break out of it and to reach out to others.

Typography exists to honor content.

Symbols are nothing but the natural speech of drama.

Everything that can be said, can be said clearly.

No one for a moment can pretend that printing is so great a discovery as writing, or algebra as a language.

Art is a word which summarizes the quality of communication.

Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of a human need for it, and it has not changed except to become more needed

I think sometimes writers must attempt to communicate the incommunicable, because, whether they wish it or not, they're the ones to whom it falls.

It is music that, being the universal language, has no need to learn any particular language of the world.

We talk too much. We should talk less and draw more.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think is has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paints or marble, sure. But there are artists who work with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances.