Despite his commitment to a modernist aesthetic, the Swiss typographer Emil Ruder also argued against a rigid or mechanical application of proportion in typography. Ruder thought that the well-spring of sound proportion lay in feeling and intuition alone. In creating shapes and delimiting spaces for letterforms, typographers must intuitively gauge the rhythms and the kinds of harmony that such shapes and spaces will create. Clarity Finally, there is consensus among typographers on the nature of the ideal reading experience for the long texts that are embodied in books. The simultaneous liveliness and quiescence of book pages, achieved in part through the exercise of proportion, succeed only when they produce an optical dynamic that fosters clarity in the act of reading.
Clarity is the prerequisite of comprehension.
Perhaps the most forceful articulation of this principle to be found in the literature comes from the English typographer Stanley Morison. Elsewhere in the literature on typography, such words as simplicity, solidity and orderliness surface time and time again as writers attempt to define the requisite typographical groundwork for the clarity that facilitates comprehension. Experientia docet . Ibid. , p. 15. Morison, First Principles of Typography , p. 24.