When what you see is what you read

The visual dimension of writing is an unquestionable fact, made especially obvious by manuscripts. Awareness of this visuality has perhaps decreased with the development of systematic writing and with the evolution of printing. With the exception of the various movements of concrete poetry, with their definite aesthetic and social agendas, we are often confronted with the argument that the printed text should be practically invisible, as if it were transparent glass (as was stated by Lindekens in 197 1), so as not to interfere negatively in the reading process. Nevertheless, communication design and, more specifically, typographic design have increasingly emphasised the importance of the visual word: posters, postcards, book-covers, records and CDs, and printed publicity material have provided examples of this for decades. Indeed, they continue to do so, with varying degrees of impact, with varying disruptive force. They foreground a logic that makes form depend on intention; or conversely, they bring out an ignorance of that very logic by subordinating intention to form, in subservience to vogues or in the individualism of one's likes or dislikes. The Cranbrook school has made a break with the systematic, in the printed word, by definitively establishing the text block as an object of non-linear visual perception. What we are suggesting is that the printed page (which includes the text in partnership with the image), in the particular case of literature for children, is built not only to be read, but also to be seen (often in ignorance of the reading process). The text thus takes on the condition of an image as well - an image that evades the systematic constraints of graphemes and creatively converts semantic contents into images capable of telling stories. This text-image, which mingles illustration and written word, has the extra advantage of walking hand in hand with icons and symbols whose role has always been that of (con)verting a printed text into a visual narrative. We will explore some of the strategies used by graphic designers that work on the text block, line and isolated characters, paragraph capitals or the interior of the text to make our reading of children's stories unsystematic and exquisite.