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On October 7th, 1930 � slender and bright; like a string tense and silent in anticipation of the purpose of her note � Beatrice Warde was introduced to the British Typographer’s Guild. The speech she gave would change the way people thought about type for the next fifty years… and should be burnt into the flesh of anyone who is making a gadget to this day.

Warde’s message was as clear as the theory of type she espoused. She described print collectively in its many facets from typeface to layout as a crystal goblet, but a better analogy would be a window. A stained glass window might be a work of art in and of itself, but it hides the dynamic, changing world on the other side; it is a living vista obscured by the lurid but unchanging overlaid upon it. It has forgotten its true purpose. To reveal. To let in light.

“The most important thing,” Warde said, “is that [printing] conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds.” When layout, font or type becomes more noticeable than the message they convey, it’s an abomination. And though Warde said all of this in a pleasant, instructional lilt cast in an educated American accent that has since gone extinct, the fierceness of her passion, the righteousness of her belief still growls and pulses in the text of her most famous broadside, which once hung on the wall of almost every printer in England:

THIS IS

A PRINTING OFFICE

CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION

REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS

AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME

ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH

AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR

INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE

FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD

NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND

NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND

BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF

FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE

I only read about Warde recently in Just My Type, Simon Garfield’s compelling book about the history and philosophy of font. Even across most of a century, Warde’s the kind of woman who fascinates: she is like a firework exploding in your hand.

But the thing that most struck me about Warde’s message wasn’t how it applied to type or printing. If she were alive today, you wouldn’t find her in a printing office, her fingers smeared with inky metallic lilac. You’d find her at Apple or at Google, because print would no longer be her passion. Her passion would be the Internet, which is the new and better pane through which we now view the world of images and ideas; its the fusion of computer design and that of their operating systems which would now be her crystal goblet.

Last week, Google unveiled the Cr-48, the obsidian plinth that will support the rollout of their new Chrome OS. It’s an intriguing machine that willfully and defiantly eschews every notebook convention possible. It is literally a blank slate. It even looks like one. The notebook itself is uniformly black, unslathered with stickers or logos; it’s specs are an absolute mystery; the operating system itself something completely new that aims to be a transparent window to the Internet and the cloud, but not a world unto itself.

There’s a lot of criticism of Google Chrome OS by the old vanguard of legacy computer users. “We already have netbooks, and those netbooks already run more full featured operating systems like Windows or even Ubuntu that everyone’s already familiar with. Chrome OS is a backwards step: why would you give up local storage and backwards compatibility with older programs to be in the cloud when you can use a proper operating system and still be in the cloud too?”

These people are missing the point. Chrome OS has its problems, and the Cr-48 has its quirks, but it is clear what Google is trying to accomplish here. The Cr-48 is a machine for the conveyance of thoughts and ideas. Chrome OS is a pane of glass, and has no goal besides transparency; the netbook itself is simply a handsome but unadorned window frame. If not for just a few niggling technical issues � the trackpad sticks, video runs sluggishly, it’s a little too heavy � the Cr-48 would be the perfect gadget. Why? Because it’s one of the few gadgets that can forget itself in favor of its purpose.

Warde would be proud. Think of what Chrome OS represents: the bare minimum operating system necessary for tapping into the living ebb of the Internet. Google has polished this window thoroughly. Chrome OS is mindless to administer. The UI is uniform. Legacy support has been thrown out the window. It’s immune to malware. Battery life is extreme. It’s even immune to system failure; if your computer breaks, your operating system corrupts, all you’ve lost is the glass and a frame, and the world it conveys still exists outside it. All you need to do is find another window.

The Cr-48 is almost perfect in the purity of its unadorned blackness and the single-minded transparency of its operating system, but it’s also a device not widely available for sale. The first commercial Chrome OS netbooks are due out early next year from Acer and Samsung, and you can expect those companies to spooge their branding all over their machines, like a window frame covered with bubblegum stickers. Way to miss the point. A few Acer logos and Intel stickers won’t cloud the glass, of course, but it will make it seem somehow dirtier and less pure by the juxtaposition.

It’s too bad, because Apple � by controlling their hardware and reinventing their software through iOS � is the closest thing to Warde’s Crystal Goblet as exists in mainstream tech… and that’s why they’re the most profitable computer maker and one of the most sought-after brands on Earth.

It’s less true on the Mac side of things. Mac OS X, while an incredible operating system, is still mired in the conventions of the past (although far less so than, say, Windows). It assumes the necessity of backwards compatibility with the Power PC architecture, and local storage, and compatibility with plugins, and interaction with networks and legacy third-party hardware. It’s Mac OS Ten for a reason… nine versions came before, each passings its genetic kruft down the line as a slowing DNA junk.

iOS is a different beast, though. It’s an operating system birthed to be mobile, and therefore singular of purpose. It was built from the ground-up to be a magic, portable window to a world of information � voice and internet � that was ethereal and existed unsolipsistically beyond its own boundaries. An iPhone is a limpid version of one of Acme’s Portable Holes: it was one of the first truly mobile device that you could pull out of your pocket and both absorb and exude the Internet with a minimum of compromises.

Look at an iPad and you’ll see Warde’s window, if she could have imagined it. The iPad’s design is attractive, but without flourish or adornment: masterfully subtle construction and invisible tech forms a unibody frame to a vaster world that it both conveys and crystallizes. Every iOS device features only a single interface button, so it’s minimalist to the extreme. With every app you call up, you gaze into a different world… sometimes local to your device, sometimes transient, sometimes alien and far beyond. The device itself, though, is only meant to be a complimentary and attractive frame, perfectly realized to the purpose of conveyance. An iPad, or iPhone, or iPod Touch has nothing superfluous about its design. Where these devices have advanced technologically over the generations is all in the aim of becoming a clearer glass to the world of communication � whether by grafting on a Retina Display, shifting from EDGE to 3G or upping the CPU � not making the frame more showy and ornate.

Obviously, there’s a lot of difference between your modern Ive-hewn Apple gadget and Google’s Cr-48, but the pulse of the the design code the two share is one that Warde would have instinctually felt. The world is wide, the future bright, and we can only view it one small window at a time, so the glass must be clear and the frame must be sturdy and not garish. Think of the passion pulsing off the page when Warde defended (in centered Albertus) the righteous sanctity of just one printed page. Now think of the Internet as it exists today, and you can see how just 80 years would have shaped the woman she was… and how defiantly she would have railed against today’s over-engineered, over-designed crap gadgets.

Stretching the analogy between gadgets and type any further is a bit hazardous (although I can’t help but think that the engineers behind Sony’s Vaio would sympathize with these sentiments of Eric Gill, the creator of Gill-Sans: “Continued experiment with dog… and discovered that a dog will join with a man.”) Even so, is it so hard to imagine the text of Warde’s broadside, subtly manipulated, hanging on a wall at Cupertino or Mountain View?

THIS IS

WHERE THE INTERNET STARTS

CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION

REFUGE OF ALL THE ARTS

AGAINST THE RAVAGES OF TIME

ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH

AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOUR

INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE

FROM THIS PLACE WORDS MAY FLY ABROAD

NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND

NOT TO VARY WITH THE ARTIST’S HAND

BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF

FRIEND YOU STAND ON SACRED GROUND

THIS IS THE INTERNET

Because it should… and everywhere else besides.

* * * * *



Unevenly Distributed is a weekly column written by John Brownlee fusing the week’s most interesting tech stories with history, context, weirdness, humor and vision towards the future. You can drop John a note by writing to john AT gearfuse DOT com.