Bertin’s forgotten typographic variables and new typographic visualization

Typographic variables were only briefly discussed by Bertin with no example applications. We review historic examples to extend Bertin’s framework with literal encoding, ten 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 eleven new typographic visualizations. The approach raises questions for new research such as readability, semantic association, interaction and comprehension.