Alessandro Segalini

Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. Being culturally literate means being able to get your bearings quickly in a book, adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books. I bet all cultivated people know culture is above all a matter of orientation. It's actually more important to know a book's role in our collective library than its details.

A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind; ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.

Writing allows even a stupid person to seem halfway intelligent; if only that person will write down the same thought over and over again, improving it just a little bit each time. It is a lot like inflating a blimp with a bicycle pump. Anybody can do it. All it takes is time.

The chief and most monstrous characteristic of our time is that the methods of manufacture which we employ and of which we are proud are such to make it impossible for the ordinary workman to be an artist, that is to say a man responsible not merely for doing what he is told but responsible also for the intellectual quality of what his deeds effect.

Calligraphy reveals such different aspects of the human being as moral virtues, personal opinion of the beauty, and also immediate feelings of the minute. It helps leave a large footprint on the sands of time.

There are five virtues: accuracy, literacy, a strong hand, industriousness, and the perfect writing utensils.

What designers do is to harmonize and optimize all the variables in a design. Real designers don’t design documents where type style may be changed willy-nilly: you change one thing, everything changes. What a designer needs is good taste, an eye for detail, and a sense of which way the cultural wind is blowing. It is the designer/typographer’s task to match form with content; to create an authoritative document.

Every designer or photographer should have an ongoing conversation with the word editor — you are all journalists.

It’s sort of the atomic level… It would be very unusual to someone to be able to recognize their suit thread by thread — in the same way people don’t recognize typefaces letter by letter on the page. […] The fact is that there are not many people who can space letters well, and those that can do it generally learnt it from making letters rather than using them.

… It has to do with ‘mood-setting’ before the message is delivered. Typography is a hidden tool of manipulation within society. All schools should be teaching typography; we should be fundamentally aware of how typographic language is forming out assholes.