More is not always more

You’ve heard this before: ‘less is more’. It applies to design, fashion and technology.

Sometimes more is not more.

We’re surrounded by typography and script. Printed words on bags, on billboards everywhere we go, ads of all sizes following us around like Pullman dæmons. That doesn’t make us more literate.

More text doesn’t make us more textually-minded. It simply makes us more visual. My grammar won’t get better if I read all the ads on the street. I won’t stop making typos for all the typo on my T-shirt and tote bag.

The writing on the wall doesn’t necessarily make us more cautious, either. It stands witness to our relative blindness, however much visual we may become in our post-literate culture.