We could lay the same complaint against written letters: before the standardization of typography and letterforms, people might have made determinations about the author based on his penmanship rather than the character of his text; they might assume prejudices against him because of what region his letters identified him as being from. They might allow their visual impressions of a page to sway how they felt about the content.

Of course, that’s the purpose of design. The difference is that a designer’s manipulation of a reader’s emotions is intentional.

I recognize that the relationship between objects and culture is reflexive: culture determines how we make and use things, and the things in turn change our culture. Even so, its seems remarkable to me that anyone place the craftsmen beneath the rulers—the policymakers, the kings, the legislators—since the “people of brass and iron” are the people that take our internal dreams and project them into external space.