Layout as punctuation

We’re taught about punctuation at school. We know it can be used to:

• Show chunks of text – sentences have a full stop at the end. Clauses may be separated by commas. Paragraphs start a new line.
• Show sequences: commas or semicolons can separate equivalent clauses.
• Interrupt the flow for a moment: we put things in parentheses or between dashes.
• Express a tone of voice: question marks and exclamation marks do this.

Well, typography does all this at a broader level.¹ Except that you use layout to separate and relate chunks of content, show sequences, and float content in text boxes so it doesn’t interrupt the linear flow. And you can use font variations to express personality.

Understanding punctuation means you are well on the way to understanding how typography works.

The tricky part is that you can’t just press the full stop key to end a chunk of content in a layout, as you can with a sentence. You need to understand how our perceptual systems govern how we see structures on a page. This is summarised in the pages on gestalt principles.

Robert Waller (1980). Graphic aspects of complex texts: Typography as macropunctuation. In: Kolers, P.A., Wrolstad, M.E., Bouma, H. (eds) Processing of Visible Language. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4684-1068-6_17