“Display” names both function and category. It signals intensity. Display work is what captures the first glance—the poster on the wall, the cover on the shelf, the opening of a film. Its task is not subtlety but magnetism. Display operates through scale, contrast, and immediacy. Ephemeras of visual cultural techniques, sometimes affording exaggeration for its life is short: headlines read in seconds, billboards glimpsed at from a distance. Display can be a result of condensation (to concentrate energy into a form that holds attention instantly) but also the art of sophisticated distraction (a punchline hitting your brain with power of an Tysonesque uppercut). A threshold of design, a first encounter with the audience. A failed display, and the rest of the work remains unseen. A strong one, and meaning cascades inward. Display is a design’s first blast, second step, and its declaration of presence.

Display denotes a style made for large sizes: headlines, titles, posters. Display styles often stress features: thinner hairlines, sharper serifs, higher contrast, narrower spacing. They prioritise impact over long, continuous readability. While text styles focus on durability and comfort, display styles are here to stand out. Historically, display type could be sketched at small scale but ultimately was always realised and so to say drawn at large style. Today, a typeface can be printed, plotted, projected or displayed detached from its “drawing-size”. Nevertheless, his drawing embodies the ideal size for realisation, similar to the manifold shades of vision.