OUGD503 - Roses Awards - Nonversation - The Crystal Goblet (Beatrice Warde)

The balance between form and function is going to be particularly important in this brief, as the final outcome needs to display the text clearly, but in a way that still makes the way it's positioned and what it's positioned in have meaning.

The Crystal Goblet, Or Why Printing Should Be Invisible (Beatrice Ward 1930)

"Imagine you have a flagon of wine... ...so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble and transparent... ...For if you have no feelings about wine one way or another, you will want the sensation of drinking stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe , the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than to hide the beautiful thing that it was meant to contain."

"Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a 'modernist' in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of this particular object was not 'How should it look?' but 'What should it do?' and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

In this passage, it is suggested that the typography is the container, and the meaning of the words is the wine. In my case however, given that the typeface has been decided on already, the passage applies to the typography being the wine, and the speech bubbles being the container, which is admittedly a much more literal interpretation.

The speech bubble needs to be crystal like the goblet, as the only way that it should be known that the speech bubbles are there are because of the text in it. In a similar way, the only way you'd know the crystal goblet was there is because you could see the wine inside it, rather than the wine being a mess on the surface.