Johanna Drucker’s article is saying how and where you place things on a page is more important than the words. This is important because this determines how the consumer interprets the product. Also, these techniques are present to this day.

One important aspect of the article was the way these techniques has influenced advertising. The picture means more than the words on the page. Most advertising would be improved if the company advertising understood typography. Each advertisement needs a different typeface to display the message it is trying to convey. According to an article in 1913, “The judicious use of the space available in an advertisement is just as important as the phrases themselves, because the logical placement and presentation determine how the sentences strike the eye.” The appeal of the graphic arouses the consumers interest in ways the message could never do.

The introduction of graphics gave books their identity. This is similar to advertising. The cover of a book can draw the attention of a reader and influence a reader to read the book. The book still has an identity, but the images can give it even more of an identity. According to Johanna Drucker, “The ultimate importance of the Arts and Crafts movement as an influence on early twentieth-century experimental typography was not stylistic influence, but its self-conscious attention to the visual form in which literary texts were represented and the demonstration that, even in their ‘unmarked” form, type gave text a distinctly visual form and character.” Images give text character in ways that text could not establish without it, but images could establish without text. They say pictures are worth a thousand words.

Visualization was deemed important before images were implicated into readings. Gutenberg used two different types of prints to establish the way in which a reading was supposed to be read. According to Johanna Drucker, “On the one hand he printed bibles, with their perfectly uniform grey pages, their uninterrupted blocks of text, without headings or subheadings or any distraction beyond the occasional initial letter. These bibles are the archetype of the unmarked text, the text in which the words on the page “appear to speak themselves” without the visible intervention of author or printer. Such a text appears to possess an authority which transcends the mere material presence of words on a page, ink impressions on parchment.” According to Johanna Drucker, “Different sizes of type were used to hierarchize information, to create an order in the text so that different parts of it appear to ” speak” differently, to address a reader whose presence was inscribed at the outset by an author in complicity with the graphic tools of a printer who recognized and utilized the capacity of typographic representation to manipulate the semantic value of the text through visual means.” The way words are set up on paper may be more important than the message.

One thing that I did not understand was the differences between the Futurist and the Dada. I really do not understand the importance of this at all. The differences may be something that misinterpreted or missed, but I do not understand. Another thing I did not understand is why was there so much history. I understand that it was showing the changes through the time periods, but so much history can be overwhelming. Also it is suppose to help connect the dots throughout history, but it made it harder for me.

Has the ability to display graphics easier on technology made print less important today?