It’s telling how telling a telling can be

In 2023, I attended an online design symposium on reading and writing the history of graphic design pedagogy. In one of the sessions, scholar Audrey Bennett spoke about graphic designers who had been marginalized from the canon. At one point, she brought up the book Type and Image by Philip B. Meggs, a designer and author who is very much in the canon, and pointed to an attribution to Milton Glaser, another canonical designer who did the I <3 NY logo, among many others. 

Meggs’ mention of Glaser is footnoted, and following the footnote to the endnotes provides further context for Glaser’s attribution. But in the next column over from Glaser’s mention, there is a superscript number attached to an idea with no name connected to it. That footnote leads to a citation of Sylvia Harris, an influential Black woman designer best known for her work on public information systems in the US. Bennett’s question was why one of these designers was unsparingly credited while the other was buried in the footnotes. In her closing remarks, Bennett asked students to “mine the footnotes.”

Texts become canonical because they repeat a dominant view and marginalized because they challenge it, presenting possibilities for difference. Bennett’s lecture title was The Difference It Makes Who is Speaking. Her point was that who does the telling plays a role in how the story is received, documented, and shared over and over. In her slides, she showed many examples of main texts, central to the page of a book, and footnotes, where peripheral but important information lay smaller than everything else. 

Even though I had been a graphic designer for years, it wasn’t until seeing this lecture that it fully struck me how much impact typographic hierarchy — the organizing of information, a.k.a. the job of a graphic designer — had over how we see or don’t see people, events, and ideas. It isn’t just who tells the story that makes the difference, it also has to do with how the story is told on the page. The Sylvia Harris example reveals how the people who are “marginalized” in our design histories are also, quite literally, sitting at the margins of our historical texts — in smaller print, at the bottom or end of the book, in places you have to actively seek out.

I was still thinking about this a year later when I applied to give a talk at a design conference in the UK titled Typography Theory Practice with the abstract Desire paths: the potential for different footnotes. Interested in what marginalia does to authorship and power, I wanted to present on the footnote and its treatment within typesetting conventions. My view is that subverting design standards can make us aware of those standards. Once we see them, we can push for their disruption and establish alternate narratives that resist the status quo. 

Around the same time, I was finishing a booklet for the exhibition Threads to the South at The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) in New York, where I was the graphic designer in residence. The show celebrated Latin American textile artists who had been pushed to the sidelines, their work often categorized as craft as opposed to art. Evoking the exhibition, I designed the booklet to challenge expectations: notes deemed not important (craft) came to the foreground, interfering with the main writing (art). I included a scan in my conference application showing a spread with footnotes —  in red and in the same type size as the main text — woven into the curatorial essay.

Footnotes explain, give credit, share an anecdote, help define something. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines footnote as “a relatively subordinate or minor part,” and marginalia as “nonessential items.” Although many artists and scholars explore annotation practices in their work, I’m interested mainly in the form it takes. My continuous investigation of typography in the margins comes from a desire to deliberately consider whether something is essential or not — and essential to whom? for what? — rather than automatically relying on protocol. 

In October 2024 I bought a ticket to Leeds and set out to learn all I could about ways that footnotes were designed. I was inspired by Audrey Bennett’s love for autoethnography, a research method that uses personal experience and reflexivity to examine a certain subject. I started by exploring mainstream publications on footnotes, but I came to rely on my network of designer peers, friends, and fellow typography enthusiasts to show me the way. I let my intuition and cultural biases have a say. There’s no such thing as a perfect telling, and I don’t wish to claim this as one. Here I present you with some of my findings while I was looking for non-traditional footnotes and instances of design that challenge convention, covering some historic examples along the way.

Like all things having to do with printed matter, this narrative starts with the church. The Glossa Ordinaria was a collection of biblical commentaries in Latin where the main text appears in the middle of the page with the glosses (or commentary) around it. In the 12th Century, these were handwritten by catholic scholars. This book was heavy and difficult to handle, made for lecturing not for personal use.

The Great Bible was the first edition of the Bible in English authorized by King Henry VIII. This is church and state in the 16th Century. The passages indicated by the manicules were not to be contested. I find this funny because calling attention to sections makes me want to contest the text. Is it just me?

Still in the 16th century, many new interpretations of the Bible proliferated, each with different sets of footnotes that told readers how to make sense of the words. This was due to the Protestant Reformation which aimed to reform the Catholic Church from perceived errors.

The Geneva Bible, a Calvinist Bible, was the most popular of the time. It was considered the first study Bible because of its affordability and small size, which meant people could carry it around or read it at home outside of the congregation setting. It also has many reading aids such as prefaces, maps, illustrations, and even a dictionary. This was also the first Bible to number its verses and chapters so readers could reference them easily, a move still in use to this day.

For a long time I thought of books as static, “set in stone” with their printed information. Books in different editions with different notes make it clear that pages are settings for conversation and debate. Footnotes can add, interrupt, or contradict the main text.

As print production picked up, setting metal type had to be as efficient as possible. The motto was to fit the most on each page to print more for less. From the 16th Century onwards, we see footnotes consistently smaller and at the bottom of the page to minimize text disruption. The image above shows a spread from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (this title gets me every time ever since the TikTok meme) written by historian Edward Gibbon in the 18th century. 

I share this example to present a dilemma in my research: it’s a good thing, I think, for historians to include notes that reference other voices and events, crediting others, pointing to the idea that nobody makes anything alone. At the same time, the text hierarchy, to minimize waste and avoid clutter, makes it so the other voices are smaller, less important than the main text.

Moby-Dick has a footnote that includes an image inside it. It’s an engraving by Barry Moser. 

This poem by John Updike is blank. In the footnotes we can read, “The empty space between the title and the first footnote is where the reader imagines the poem.”

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake has (music) notes on the sides and bottom of its pages.

In Species of Spaces, Georges Perec contemplates the many ways in which we occupy the space around us, including the space of the page. This reflexive footnote reads, “I am very fond of footnotes at the bottom of the page, even if I don't have anything in particular to clarify here.”

**

How do we decide what to do with footnotes? I guess it’s a case by case thing, dependent on priorities… I learned that most publishers are fond of endnotes because they make it faster to edit and design a book with everything tucked in the back as opposed to handling page-by-page space negotiations. Authors and designers will have their own opinions. So will readers. With no one-size-fits-all, as I carried on researching, it became clearer to me that we shouldn’t take for granted the traditional placement of footnotes just because it’s the rule. In view of the danger of minimizing important information by using the default, my take is that everything is up for grabs when typesetting a page. If the standard doesn’t serve the project, switch it up. 

Danielle Aubert collected, scanned, and compiled 100 used copies of Ursula Le Guin’s 1970s sci-fi novel The Dispossessed to make Marking the Dispossessed — a version of the book that features annotations and marginalia only. We don’t see the words so we can focus on how others have experienced them in the past instead. 

Jenny Boully’s The Body offers another example of secondary information being transformed into primary as a result of the absence of the text. The back of the 2007 edition of the book published by Essay Press says, “The reader can only fantasize about the original contexts that might have made such information significant to its author, and ultimately, implies that the body of any text consists of nothing but a void — filled with the exegetical projection of our own imagination.”

Footnotes can sometimes take over, leaving little space for anything else. The ones in Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine conjure up the feeling of intrusive thoughts taking over one’s mind. 

The footnotes in Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox serve as a protected space — purposefully hiding from the main text and taking advantage of their expected secondary nature — for telling another story.

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Two years after the anecdote that started this essay, in a surprising turn of events, I find myself teaching at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) where Philip B. Meggs wrote Type and Image and worked from the ’60s until his death in 2002 and where Sylvia Harris graduated from college in 1975. I feel compelled to elucidate what I find Meggs has overlooked and bring to the foreground Harris’ voice alongside many other marginalized designers. I agree with Audrey Bennett when she says that who speaks matters. To this effect, in addition to giving voice to designers who lack representation, I want to help my students find their voice too. 

In the syllabus for my first typography class here, I wrote, “We will explore typography with the two-fold goal of uncovering and understanding our specific approach to visualizing language as designers across media, as well as investigating how this approach is informed by, works with, or pushes against typographic standards of clarity and efficiency. We will work towards type that is idiosyncratically ours, whether that’s readable or unreadable, to find out what makes it so and how it plays with others.” If designers speak through typography the question isn’t only about what we are talking about but how we’re talking about it.

My students and I looked at many treatments for footnotes: up, down, big, small, legible, and illegible. Fraser Muggeridge, a designer who experiments a lot with marginalia, page furniture enthusiast, and the organizer of the design conference where I presented this research, designed this publication where the footnotes wrap around the text block on every spread.

The idea of simultaneity was a recurring topic of the class. We were excited about non-linear typographic layouts, where readers can decide what to go for. Going back in time again, some Islamic law commentaries from the 17th century demonstrate this quality of everything happening all at once, showing us that unconventional roads have existed for ages.

To end, I’ll show you a spread from a book by Corita Kent where there is a conversation between footnotes (small text) and headlines (big text borrowed from advertisements), but it's not always evident which one takes the lead.

My advice: keep them guessing.