Visit Visible Language Journal at our new home: www.visible-language.org, or stay and browse the archives and past issues. Visible Language is the oldest peer-reviewed design journal. It advocates the teaching, research, and practice of visual communication design to enhance the human experience. Published by the Myron E. Ullman Jr. School of Design at the University of Cincinnati, Visible Language balances artfulness with science, innovation with respect for human patterns of use, evidence-based research with intuitive exploration, and technology with humanity. - published 3 times a year: April, September, December - double-blind peer review - open-access 12 months from publication - searchable database of all back-issues on-line - acceptance rate below 20% ISSN 0022-2224
The editorial goals of three editors for Visible Language are discussed sequentially, showing the development of the journal over 58 years of continuous publication. Particular attention is paid to research in communication design, a goal of the current editor. Several suggestions regarding the interdisciplinary nature of the journal and its future are discussed.
Copyright (c) 2025 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
Nineteen Questions to Evaluate Typographic Research: Chaff and Wheat
The number of experiments that investigate the “readability” or “legibility” of texts is very substantial. Literature reviews of these studies appear regularly, and many publications refer to these experiments to suggest evidence for claims. Some of these claims have led to usable recommendations. However, most of these recommendations are often hard to apply and unhelpful. When we are teaching typography, we struggled to explain why the recommendations are difficult to use, why many reviews are uncritical, and why experiments rarely provide reliable evidence to support design decisions. A literature review, guided by experience in both ­commercial practice and university level education, lead to a list of themes and issues. There are at least 19 reasons why the results of many typographic experiments need to be questioned. This article provides 19 guidelines that could be used to evaluate experimental research into the ways in which texts are read. This list of reasons can be used as a checklist to assess and guide new typographic experiments. We hope to make sure experiments are worthwhile, future reviews are based on reliable sources, and recommendations are effective.
Towards Interdisciplinary: Juggling Similarities and Differences
This (ashamedly) autobiographical account of my research career describes my journey from psychology to what might be described as psychotypography. A key aspect of the narrative is the means by which I sought to integrate into a design environment. I explore the notion of interdisciplinary research, an important feature of this journal, reflecting much of the current landscape of design education, research, and practice. The juggling of similarities and differences occurs at the level of disciplines and as part of my research methods. A common thread through most of the research is evaluating how people respond to visual material, to create findings that can be used in design practice and education. Broader implications are that many factors, within and outside our control, determine the course of research.
Second only to the invention of typography itself, digital typography has been the most transformative of the technological changes that have taken the hand setting of hand-cast and hand-printed type — the standard for 450 years — to worldwide ubiquity on the glowing screens of billions of smart phones and personal computers. Like its predecessor font technologies, digital typesetting began as a way to set text faster, but it has posed several challenges, of which the first and overarching one is resolution. Technical, perceptual, and economic in its aspects, resolution is the consequence of rendering traditionally analog forms as digital information, from pen, to punch, to photo, to pixel. Since 1980, we have designed digital type during its hegemonic advance toward world domination of literacy. That sounds scary, but the numbers seem benign: more people can now read more languages in more writing systems in more countries on more devices than ever before. The task of the type designer is to face the challenges of digital type and create the fundamental forms of what are often called fonts. We present many of the challenges we have confronted, and how we met them.
A Shifting Practice Paradigm Meets a Persistent Curriculum Paradigm
There is little debate that the demands of professional design practice and design research today are significantly different from the 20th century when modern graphic and industrial design programs first entered liberal arts colleges and universities. Currently, there is much academic discourse regarding the new outcomes for which today’s designers are ­accountable under an ongoing shift in the nature of professional practice. However, design cannot fully address a new practice paradigm if design educators do not also rethink a persistent curriculum paradigm from the industrial era. This article argues that new course outlines alone are insufficient in overcoming the implicit messages about design practice delivered through the historical structure and pedagogy of college and university design programs.
Design research now has an established history extending over more than 60 years. The current robust state of the field indicates that there has been real development and consolidation, including the establishment of academic journals. Most significantly, design is now recognized as an academic discipline. Disciplines need good journals in order to flourish — research has to be made visible.
“Out with the old. In with the new!” — this is how Mike Zender finished the editorial of the last issue of volume 58 and how I start the editorial for the first issue of volume 59. Issue 59.1 (2025) marks the start of the new Visible Language Consortium of three universities: University of Leeds (UoL in the UK), North Carolina State University (NCSU in the US), and University of Cincinnati (UC in the US).
The Human Touch(point): Recommendations for Thoughtful AI Feature Design
This article examines the evolving responsibilities of designers in an era of explosive AI growth. AI is a horizontal technology affecting nearly all industries, and designers must position themselves as stewards of the “human in the loop” to balance technological capabilities with human needs. Three core principles can guide ethical AI design: First, AI features should solve specific user problems rather than being implemented for novelty or marketing purposes. Second, strategic friction can serve as a beneficial design element when deployed at consequential decision points, encouraging users to engage thoughtfully with AI-generated content. Third, robust user feedback mechanisms should be prioritized to ensure continuous improvement based on real-world usage. Generative AI should facilitate — never replace — human expertise to avoid the centralization of ideas and displacement of creativity. Drawing from industry examples, the article demonstrates that successful human-AI collaboration depends not on technological sophistication alone, but on thoughtful design that empowers users as active participants rather than passive consumers of AI outputs. Eight recommendations are provided to ensure that the three core principles discussed are incorporated into a product’s design.
The Changing Definition of Designers in the Age of Generative AI
As generative AI transforms the boundaries of creativity and intelligence, the role of the designer is undergoing a profound redefinition. This article explores how design practice must evolve in response — not by resisting AI, but by reshaping how it operates within human systems. Drawing on two decades of fieldwork, product development, and leadership in conversational and multimodal AI, the author proposes four emerging identities for designers: advocate, curator, orchestrator, and mediator of emotion. Each represents a distinct but interdependent response to AI’s strengths — and its blind spots. Designers must now move beyond aesthetics and usability to safeguard meaning, ensure ethical alignment, and preserve emotional resonance in systems that otherwise optimize for efficiency alone. The author argues that design’s most vital role is to act as a counterforce to algorithmic reduction. In a moment defined by speed, scale, and automation, we must ask not just what AI can do — but what it should do, and for whom. The future will be automated. But it must also be human.
A Seat at the Table: Designing for AI with Strategy, Vision, and Collaboration
The speed at which artificial intelligence technology is integrated into products to ease user flows is redefining the role of designers, giving rise to specialized “AI designers” or “AI design specialists.” In this article, I explore the evolving responsibilities of designers in the AI landscape, emphasizing the critical need for deep collaboration with engineering, legal, and product teams. Drawing from direct experience, I highlight the challenges of translating complex AI capabilities into user-centric, valuable product features, especially within established organizations grappling with legacy systems and lengthy development cycles. Key takeaways underscore designers’ need to possess strong data literacy, continuously learn in a fast-paced field, and strategically advocate for AI applications that address genuine user needs. I outline the essential skills designers must cultivate, the opportunities presented by adaptive AI interfaces, the high stakes involved in ­responsible AI development, and the pressing questions the design community must address to shape a human-centered AI future.
Reflecting on the August 2025 Issue — Considerations Nowadays and Implications For
What are we? As Maria dos Santos Lonsdale (2025) revealed in the April issue’s introductory editorial, this issue takes as its consideration the present, following that issue’s consideration of the past. The articles reveal various perspectives on our present. Well, “our” depends upon who is doing the reflecting. Ramanathan (2025), Zhang et al. (2025), and Medley and Haddad (2025), all in rather different ways, discuss cultural or personal identities that must be addressed in the things we design and the ways we go about designing them. An outsider might think that these external factors are what our field would struggle with — as we do — but that we would have internal clarity about our field’s identity. Speaking for myself — as an editor of a journal in the field, and as a senior faculty member who instructs graduate students on the nature of the field and its scholarship — I have no such clarity.
Addressing Uncertainty in LLM Outputs for Trust Calibration Through Visualization and User Interface Design
Large language models (LLMs) are becoming ubiquitous in knowledge work. However, the uncertainty inherent to LLM summary generation limits the efficacy of human-machine teaming, especially when users are unable to properly calibrate their trust in automation. Visual conventions for signifying uncertainty and interface design strategies for engaging users are needed to realize the full potential of LLMs. We report on an exploratory interdisciplinary project that resulted in four main contributions to explainable artificial intelligence in and beyond an intelligence analysis context. First, we provide and evaluate eight potential visual conventions for representing uncertainty in LLM summaries. Second, we describe a framework for uncertainty specific to LLM technology. Third, we specify 10 features for a proposed LLM validation system — the Multiple Agent Validation System (MAVS) — that utilizes the visual conventions, the framework, and three virtual agents to aid in language analysis. Fourth, we provide and describe four MAVS prototypes, one as an interactive simulation interface and the others as narrative interface videos. All four utilize a language analysis scenario to educate users on the potential of LLM technology in human-machine teams. To demonstrate applicability of the contributions beyond intelligence analysis, we also consider LLM-derived uncertainty in clinical decision-making in medicine and in climate forecasting. Ultimately, this investigation makes a case for the importance of visual and interface design in shaping the development of LLM technology.
Research-Led Pluralist Typographic Practices: Case Studies from South Asia
This article is grounded in an exploration conducted by the author on publishing as a platform that brings intercultural communication, pluralism, graphic design and typography into productive dialogue with each other through engaged (in social and political issues; in creative, educational, and critical practice) and situated (local communities; international networks of editors, translators, designers, illustrators, publishers, and readers) design research frameworks and practices. This has resulted in an exploration of spaces in which new kinds of documents can be created, with, by and for marginalized publics, and, conversely, how the production of new texts and images creates spaces that enable emancipatory, temporary, or subversive practices to occur that suggest new directions for the practice of typography and typographic frameworks. This exploration through design research and practice, is framed by the author’s own context, as that of a South Asian designer and researcher, working in the Global North. Some of the initial thinking in this article was explored in a chapter for The Routledge Companion to Design Research — 2nd Edition. The article takes a holistic, post-disciplinary approach to graphic design and typography aiming to challenge notions of graphic design as purely aesthetic or craft-based, or as concerns of form and function. It calls for a shift in considering the wider politics and contributions of visual language — graphic design and typography specifically — to societal change. Additionally, it reframes research-led practices (and thereby visual language and typography), not as an elite activity but as a human practice that emerges as curiosity and intent. Such an approach is critical to undertake considering a global health crisis, climate emergency and with issues of conflict and social injustice where communication plays a pivotal role. The article concludes that how we approach design research and practice needs to be rethought so that it makes a meaningful contribution to planetary issues.
The Disciplinary Status of Visual Communication or Graphic Design
This opinion piece reflects on the disciplinary status of design, focusing on visual communication, or graphic design, within academia. It responds to optimistic assessments of design’s progress by highlighting persistent challenges and opportunities for strengthening its disciplinary identity.
Recent Trends in Academic Publishing: Open Access, Predatory Publishers, Plagiarism, Citation Format, and Service to the Discipline
This editorial introduces Visible Language’s Volume 59 Yearbook. What is a “yearbook” for an academic journal? Instead of stopping at a straightforward explanation of how we decided to print a compilation of the three issues instead of printing them individually, I can do something more valuable. It turns out that the full answer touches upon trends in academic publishing that are helpful to reflect upon.
Professor Michael Twyman, who has died aged 91, pioneered the study of typography as an academic discipline in a British university. His vision for the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading intertwined history, theory and practice in graphic design, typeface design, information design and book design. It was innovative in its interdisciplinarity, drawing on linguistics, psychology, social and economic history and other social sciences and humanities to address ‘design for reading’.
James Mosley, who died on 25 August 2025, was a historian of letterforms, type, typography, and printing. From 1958 until 2000 he was librarian of the St Bride Printing Library in London, and from 1960 until 2021 he taught at University of Reading in what became the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. Underpinning both roles was Mosley’s peerless scholarship, which was both expansive and distinguished by the particular attention he devoted to cultures of letterforms in Britain and two other countries for which he felt a great affection, Italy and France. As teacher, advisor, and mentor to students and colleagues at Reading, he brought to these roles his knowledge and the exemplary research, writing, and publishing that were features of it. The remarks that follow offer a brief account of Mosley’s work at the place of learning where he taught for more than six decades, with the intention of memorializing his contributions and their lasting value.
Word | Image | Space | Materiality | Experience
We last published a special issue (52.3) devoted to student research in 2018. That issue focused on participant research and encompassed studies of a range of artifacts within typography, illustration and communication design (including: handwriting and branding, posters, maps, eInk displays, resources for people with aphasia, garment label design, storytelling with new digital tools, live art and social media spaces). They shared an engagement with everyday contexts for human-centered design.
A Profession Provoked: How Meta-Font Struck a Nerve
Knuth’s Meta-Font appeared at a pivotal moment in late twentieth century design discourse, at a time when the field was beginning to grapple with computation in the context of wider (and longer, more entrenched) debates around intuition and craft versus system and rule. Upon publishing Knuth’s (1982a) paper in issue 16.1, Visible Language solicited responses from notable design luminaries (extending to Knuth himself, a computer scientist at Stanford University), that would appear in issue 16.4 (Baudin et al., 1982). Their responses—16 in total—reveal a rich snapshot of a field deeply concerned with maintaining its aesthetic authority under conditions of technological inevitability, even as its practices were increasingly becoming mediated by code. Together, these letters depict a profession that was simultaneously fascinated, alarmed, and introspective.
Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics: Comments on Donald Knuth’s Article “The Concept of a Meta-Font” [Reprint]
It is argued that readers are likely to carry away from Donald Knuth’s article “The Concept of a Meta-Font” a falsely optimistic view of the extent to which the design of typefaces and letterforms can be mechanized through an approach depending on describing letterforms by specifying the settings of a large number of parameters. Through a comparison to mathematical logic, it is argued that no such set of parameters can capture the essence of any semantic category. Some different ways of thinking about the problem of the “spirit” residing behind any letterform are suggested, connecting to current [c. 1982] research issues in the field of artificial intelligence.
What’s old is old. But what’s new is also old. One could argue that there are a limited number of concepts in our world and that time simply rehashes new iterations of existing concepts. And while one might argue that’s not proof that it’s true, Douglas R. Hofstadter’s article reprinted following this introduction is one data point of evidence to support that what’s new really is old. It is 44 years old but explains something important unfolding today: AI.
The Editors Introduce the April 2026 Issue
Welcome to the first of three issues in volume 60. We would first like to pay tribute to all the editors, authors, reviewers, copyeditors, and designers who have contributed to Visible Language over the years and enabled us to meet this milestone of 60 years of publishing.
Detailed descriptions are given for three fonts of letters. Letter shapes are entirely described by numbers. The basic vectors are in a general form so the fonts may be easily drawn on a variety of computers and cathode ray tubes. The fonts include both upper- and lower-case Roman letters, mathematical signs, and upper- and lower-case Greek letters. Digital type design is described. However, the principal contribution is the fonts themselves.
Automation and Artificial Intelligence in the Type Design Process: Insights from an Industry Survey
This article investigates how automation (both deterministic and artificial intelligence–based) is integrated into professional type design practice, a field with exacting standards of craft and which relies on specific and long-established working methods. Drawing on an online survey conducted in early 2025, alongside detailed follow-up interviews with select type practitioners, we map current practices and attitudes, as well as the perceived risks and opportunities in the field of automation for type design in general, and the implementation of artificial intelligence (AI) in particular. Data analysis established that deterministic, rule-based automation is ­near-­ubiquitous in type designers’ workflows, and is already used for a variety of tasks such as interpolation, glyphset expansion, and various font engineering tasks. In contrast, AI tools have currently only been adopted by a minority of practitioners, and are largely being used for adjacent tasks such as writing code, gathering project documentation, or generating proofing strings. The majority of respondents expressed strong resistance to automating what they identify as the creative core of their work (e.g., sketching, drafting a basic alphabet, marking proofs), but show willingness to delegate the most labor-intensive, technical operations to software, with kerning repeatedly identified as the leading candidate for further automation—provided that human oversight and decision making remain throughout the process. Ethical concerns (such as training data provenance, lack of transparency, and environmental costs) lead to a cautious attitude towards generative AI, a position also fueled by some expressed anxieties about corporate concentration. We argue that sustainable and worthwhile innovation in typeface design should prioritize assistive tools that are transparent and encourage human decision-making, in order to optimize routine work without compromising iterative practices through which designers acquire judgement. Such tools would ideally balance streamlined workflows with the acquisition and reinforcement of highly specific skills, which in turn enable designers to preserve qualitative typographic standards.
Scripts in Dialogue: Reinterpreting Visible Language Covers through Bilingual Design Workshops in Kuwait
This study investigates how postmodern graphic design strategies can be critically reimagined — reframed through the lens of bilingual design pedagogy to engage issues of cultural identity, script interaction, and typographic experimentation — within Arabic–English bilingual contexts. Using the Visible Language journal (late 1960s–2025) as a foundational reference, the research was conducted over three academic semesters with 90 undergraduate design students in Kuwait. Through a structured practice-led research methodology, participants analyzed historical cover designs and developed original bilingual compositions inspired by postmodern aesthetics. The project addressed typographic challenges, including directionality, visual hierarchy, and the interplay between Arabic calligraphic and Latin modular forms. Design strategies — including layering, fragmentation, and grid disruption — were systematically explored to facilitate visual integration across scripts. Outcomes ranged from cohesive bilingual compositions to instances of double monolingualism reflecting varied levels of synthesis. Cultural motifs and script-specific conventions emerged as influential factors shaping design decisions. The study concludes that adapting postmodern design principles to bilingual contexts requires more than stylistic translation; it entails critical negotiation of cultural identity, linguistic equity, and the visual dynamics of multilingual communication.
The Visual Language of Textile Tickets in 20th-Century British India: A Collection from B. Taylor and Co.
This essay examines the visual language of textile tickets — small, printed labels used on cotton bales and fabric lengths — produced by British printers for export to colonial India between the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Emerging amidst expanding colonial trade and advances in printing technology, these ephemera evolved into vivid, ideologically charged artifacts. Focusing on a collection of textile tickets produced by Manchester-based printing firm B. Taylor and Co., this study explores three recurring visual themes: empire, religion, and gender. It argues that these images did more than advertise textiles: they glorified British imperial authority, appropriated Indian religious imagery, and idealized women as passive ornamental objects to enhance appeal in a male-dominated trade. Through visual and contextual analysis, this essay demonstrates that textile tickets — often valued only for aesthetics — also functioned as everyday instruments of colonial control.
Sensational Design: Layout and Typography in the Visual Rhetoric of Information Disorder
Political communication in the United States today is often characterized by ‘information disorder’. However, studies of information disorder do not take into account the role of design in contributing to this phenomenon. Through a visual analysis of American political communication, specifically 19th-century sensational newspapers and 21st-century post-factual websites, this paper addresses gaps in current studies by analyzing two design elements: layout and display typography. In doing so, this study demonstrates how it is possible to use visual analysis to uncover the various presentations of the visual rhetoric that characterizes information disorder. This paper begins by situating sensational design within literature on design theory and visual rhetoric, sensationalism, and political aesthetics. The paper then examines layout and display typography in case studies of American political news from both 19th-century sensational newspapers and 21st-century post-factual news websites, two periods of ‘information disorder’ in American media, to understand how the visual rhetoric of ‘sensational design’ manifests differently in the two eras of ‘information disorder’. The paper concludes with a discussion of how layout and typography ‘act’ as elements of visual rhetoric, how design can be incorporated into current conceptions of political aesthetics, and the implications of such a relationship.
The Terminological Development of Graphic Design: Between Office Art and Social Purpose
The origins of the term graphic design are typically framed through reductive, canonical narratives that trace its emergence to a singular event. This paper challenges such accounts by tracing a more complex and layered trajectory. Focusing on the neglected yet significant 476-page handbook Graphic Design by W. G. Raffé—the first book to feature the term in its title—it situates this text within a broader history of Anglophone design discourse. A close reading of this 1927 work reveals three key insights. First, Raffé conceived of graphic design as a socially engaged practice with a civic mission, foregrounding its communicative role in mobilizing the public—this orientation contrasts sharply with dominant, aesthetically driven definitions. Second, he articulated print reproduction as the essential enabling technology that distinguished graphic design from fine art and empowered visual communication to reach the masses at an accelerating speed and scale. Third, he attempted to codify graphic design as a professional discipline, using diagrams and schemas to reify the practice and articulate its principles. This was an important intervention prior to more formal attempts to professionalize graphic design in postwar Anglophone contexts. By recovering this overlooked text and locating it within a longer-term trajectory of development, the paper argues that the term graphic design did not emerge from a single moment or figure but evolved through decades of dispersed adoption. Revisiting Raffé’s foundational work offers valuable historical perspective on ongoing debates about the discipline’s identity and purpose in the post-digital era.
Constructing the Hypertangible Novel: Writing and Design as Process
As the printed book co-exists with the influence of the digital, narratives become hybrid and are transformed into documents in which the content can very easily flow from one form to another. As a result of this, the first decades of the 21st century have seen the emergence of publications that challenge traditionally orthodox reading practices. This article examines the response to the digital development in novels that foreground the material dimension of the narrative and are print-specific. These works do not reject the digital realm but absorb its characteristics and expand the possibilities offered by the material dimension of the book. By analyzing Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World and its process of creation through the collage and cut-up techniques, this article aims to show how design can contribute to foreground the physical dimension of literature in novels with hypertangible qualities. This examination draws attention to design being embedded in the writing process that constructs both material and narrative dimensions. Findings show that these novels can be a product of a ‘designwriting’ process, in which design serves both as a tool to shape a narrative, and as a process that expands it and creates an object that offers an embodied reading experience. Ultimately, this highlights the importance of physical reading in the age of digital media.
Augmented Reality for Campus Wayfinding: Enhancing Navigation Efficiency and Student Social Engagement — A Case Study of Leeds University Union
This study designed and evaluated a user-centered augmented reality (AR) wayfinding prototype for Leeds University Union (LUU), aiming to improve student wayfinding efficiency and encourage social exploration within a particular campus environment. A site-specific field study involving photographic documentation of existing wayfinding aids, such as signage and maps, was conducted to investigate the current design. Five semi-structured interviews were carried out to gain students’ experiences and opinions, complemented by behavioral observations of three participants navigating the LUU with existing wayfinding aids to explore common challenges and dilemmas. Results showed that the existing design did not consistently support effective navigation, with participants relying on assistance from others. Furthermore, all of the students reported using the LUU mainly for social and recreational purposes, indicating that integrating navigation with real-time event information could enhance campus community engagement. In response, a prototype mobile navigation application named LUU MATE was developed that integrated AR with social exploration features to enhance both wayfinding and engagement in campus life. The iterative optimization of the prototype was based on usability tests conducted by four participants. Subsequently, a second behavioral observation was conducted with three participants using LUU MATE to assess its navigation effectiveness and potential to foster social engagement. Comparative analysis with earlier observations showed that LUU MATE reduced the time required to complete the navigation tasks and stimulate participants’ interest in campus life. This study indicates that both navigation efficiency and social engagement are essential considerations in campus wayfinding design. Future research should involve larger and more diverse participant groups and apply the design across varied campus sites to validate its broader applicability.