Bertin’s forgotten typographic variables and new typographic visualization

ABSTRACT

Typographic variables were only briefly discussed by Bertin with no example applications. We review historic examples to extend Bertin’s framework with literal encoding, 10 typographic attributes, variations on scope including characters, words, phrases and paragraphs, and more layout types. We then apply the framework to Bertin’s population dataset to create 11 new typographic visualizations. The approach raises questions for new research such as readability, semantic association, interaction, and comprehension.

KEYWORDS:

• Text visualization
• thematic maps
• visual attributes
• visualization framework
• Bertin@50