Web design is 95% typography. No really!

Web design is 95% percent typography. This comes from the blog of a Japanese design firm called Information Architects. The name of the page itself is "the web is all about typography period." The article goes on to try and make its point that typography is the most important aspect of web design. The article focuses on typography as information architecture, something which a lot of people have disagreed with before. And the comments that follow the article pretty much disagree as I do. Type is only 90% of web design. The rest is using images and color theory. I haven't ignored graphic design, something several of the critics of the article mention. Graphic design is typography, derives from typography, and can't exist without typography. If a designer is good at using type they can design. Someone who isn't good with type — and there are a lot of people out there calling themselves graphic designers who aren't — isn't a good designer. In my career as a designer I've had to clean up after some of them. I even had a client give me a job that someone else had supposedly "designed" and then revealed that they didn't know anything about type or about printing. And this person had "graphic designer" printed on their business cards, although I don't know how they even had business cards if they knew so little.
Yes, web design, like graphic design, is largely typography. All the illustrations, pictures, and colorful shapes don't do the job that type does. And type can do the job without the illustrations, et al. So what's more important then?

There is old (incorrect) saying about a picture being worth a thousand words. But a picture only has meaning if you understand the context, what it is a picture of. Without that a picture will tell you very little. When i was a child I saw a series of four photographs in Life magazine. They were of a Mig pilot bailing out of his jet fighter using an ejection seat. The caption to the photo explained that until these photos were taken people didn't know that Mig fighters had ejection seats, and further mentioned that the photos had been taken with a gun camera. I was still confused mainly because, being a small child, no one had bothered to tell me there was a war in Korea and that the photos had been taken by the U.S. pilot who had shot the Mig fighter down. It was actually a couple of years later that the whole story was made clear to me. Were the four pictures worth a thousand words to me? Only if there had been another 10,000 words of text to go with them.

Some of the article's critics also argue that it's not about type it's about the text or it's about writing. The written word was a wonderful invention, but typography is what made the modern world what it is. The mass production of information through the medium of type made a bigger difference in the world than the invention of letters and alphabets. Type could not exist without the invention of writing, but writing is the first step of type, not something separate from type. Whether anyone realized it or not, typography was the goal when writing was invented. Writing existed to support an oral culture. That is, people wrote down what was said in order to preserve it. The majority of people didn't learn to read because someone who could would read a text to them orally. Typography was more useful because it solved some of the problems with writing, its reliance on an original version that was oral. If we were still living in the writing world most of us wouldn't know how to read or write simply because there wouldn't be enough books around for us to bother learning. And there wouldn't be enough books because there would be no way to duplicate written works. Even now, when we can reproduce writing without the use of typography, we generally don't. And it's not because most of us have poor handwriting. It's because type works better than writing for this purpose.

So when someone says graphic design or web design is mostly about type, they're right. Our world is mostly about typography.