States of Design 06: In your face

This article was originally published in Domus 951, October 2011

Type design follows the history of the design of objects and buildings throughout the centuries, similarly reflecting social developments, advances in materials and means of production, cultural biases and technological progress. Just like the design of artefacts and buildings, in the past two centuries type design has grappled with the industrial revolution first, and the digital revolution later. Similar to architecture and object design, type design has had a modernist, a post-modernist and a digital phase. Like architects and other designers, type designers have felt the need to move beyond modernism and find new inspiration in traditional examples, in the vernacular and in popular culture. Type is a design universe unto its own, an essential dimension of the history of modern art and design.

Experimentation in the digital realm began in the 1960s, prompted at times by the problems faced when computers became mainstream. Businesses needed to find ways to process information efficiently, and in 1966 OCR-A (the first machine readable typeface designed by American Type Founders in the same year) was adopted as a standard. OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition, a technology that allows the electronic conversion of information from a printed source—a handwritten, typewritten or printed document read or scanned by a computer— into a workable text document by recognising and translating individual characters, so that the translated text can then be edited and manipulated. OCR-A was originally designed to reflect the standards set by the USA Bureau of Standards (now called National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST) for developing OCR technologies.

In 1973, OCR-A became the international standard and the typeface was expanded in 1977 to include enough characters to match the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) character set. In the 1960s, Letterpress and Linotype (hot metal) machines gave way to early CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) monitors and photographic reproduction technology. Another stand-out pre-digital face of the 1960s, Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet (1967), was almost a commentary on the disruptive potential of digital technology. In the infancy of digital typography, just when type was switching from being set by hand with physical lead pieces or lines, to being set on screen and then reproduced photographically, Crouwel recognised the limitation of CRT monitors, which could only render images by means of fairly large dots on a grid, otherwise known as pixels. Traditional letterforms with their curves were difficult to reconstruct with this grid, so in response to the new technology—in a way similar to experimental abstract typographic designs of the early 20th century—he redesigned the known alphabet using only horizontal and vertical.

In the mid-1980s, a new revolution spurred by the Macintosh home computer, introduced in 1984, took Crouwel's experiment further. A novel aesthetic, supported by the ability to create custom faces directly on the computer, came to light as designers produced typefaces made of pixels and composed of dots on a grid. The new wave began in the Bay Area and Susan Kare and Zuzana Licko were among the first to create the foundations for bitmap digital type design, the former with her milestone Chicago, Geneva and Monaco fonts for Apple (1983–84), and the latter with her innovative and expressive faces produced at the Emigre foundry.

Zuzana Licko emigrated from Czechoslovakia to America in 1968, received a degree in graphic communications from the University of California at Berkeley, and founded Emigre magazine with her husband, fellow typographer and graphic designer Rudy VanderLans, in 1984. The magazine became well known for its fonts, designed by Licko on an early Macintosh, and was lauded as a graphic design publication that paid attention to the profound changes in the world of communication design. With the Mac, Licko designed several typefaces, the unforgettable Oakland among them (1985), as bitmap fonts. They were designed with public domain software, intended for use on a low-resolution, 72-dots-per-inch (dpi) computer screen, and printed with a dot matrix printer.

Those were indeed exciting and euphoric times for designers, with heated debates firing up conferences and journals, often pitting the new generation, high on freedom and possibility, against the older, especially a very vocal Massimo Vignelli, ardent defender of a more traditional and rigorous approach to graphics and type design. However, some of the new adopters were bent on pushing the limits of visual communication one character at a time—as in the intentionally out-of-focus letters of Neville Brody's Blur (1992) or the randomised outlines of LettError's Beowolf (1989)— and defining post-modern in type design. Others, meanwhile, continued the modernist quest for uniformity and clarity using the new methodologies. Erik Spiekermann's Meta (1984) and Albert-Jan Pool's redesign of the German standard typeface, DIN (1995), were formidable successors to the "classic" and oft-used face Helvetica.

As computer programs for type design became more sophisticated in the 1990s, designers felt free to experiment in ways that had previously been impossible. For instance, Barry Deck created a typeface from a laundromat sign when he designed Template Gothic (1990), and Jeffery Keedy designed a new typeface in 1989 because the fonts available did not satisfy his needs as a graphic designer. Even the history of typography received special treatment in this era, becoming a repository of timeless and universal ideas ready to be updated, while popular culture provided familiarity, closeness and a collection of idiosyncratic curiosities ready to be re-imagined, from highway signs to punk leaflets. Just like in music and fashion, mash-ups of existing typefaces were mixed with homages to stonecutters of the past—P. Scott Makela's Dead History (1990) and Jonathan Barnbrook's Mason (1992) are good examples.

Nevertheless, the turning point in digital type design arrived with Verdana, the 1996 typeface designed by Matthew Carter. Matthew Carter is at the zenith among pre-eminent type designers of the 20th century, his career directly coinciding with dramatic technological developments in typeface design brought about by the spread of computers as universal design and production tools. He began when typefaces were families of lead blocks, one for each character or punctuation mark, and a series of blocks for each style and for each point size, and then moved seamlessly to the digital realm, compiling a checklist of the most important fonts of the turn of the century. He apprenticed in The Netherlands in the 1960s and learned the skills of a traditional typographer and punch cutter (the craftsman who cuts out the shapes of actual letters in steel, from which copper matrices are formed in order to cast the lead type for letterpress printing). After working for several companies, Carter opened his own office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, first in 1981 with colleague Mike Parker, and then in 1991 with his current partner Cheryl Cone.

While most of the digitally designed fonts in circulation are still meant to be used in print and read on paper, Verdana is designed specifically for use on monitors, its form classically dictated by its function, with simple curves and larger and more open letterforms that are easier to read in small sizes on a screen. The bold version of Verdana is easy to recognise and distinguish from the "regular" style of the face onscreen, and the letterforms are more spaced out on the monitor than they are when printed (with this stratagem, they do not look too crowded when displayed in computer applications that have no way to control the space between letterforms). Letterforms that look alike were designed to be as dissimilar as possible, contributing to legibility on the screen and at tiny sizes.

Verdana is a paragon for a perfectly executed functionalist typeface. While the design capabilities provided by the computer have also gone in the direction of formal anarchy, type design remains an exquisite exercise of balance between expressiveness and strict, almost scientific discipline. The Adobe Font Folio, today a mind-blowing collection of more than 2,300 fonts, has made this rationalised production process its modus operandi, bringing a highly diverse range of fonts to market so that they could be both an endless palette and a reliable source for designers. Adobe was also first out of the gate, beginning its release of digital fonts in 1984, and was responsible for setting most standards of format and language for all digital fonts.

Outstanding titans of the younger generation include Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. Highlights from their production comprise the hyper-functional Retina (2001), designed for the Wall Street Journal not only to complement rough newsprint, but also for increased legibility on the battleground of the stock ratings pages; HTF Didot (1991), a historical revival of revered historical typographer Firmin Didot's work that adapts, and does not directly copy, the master and which became the distinctive trait of a contemporary publication (Harper's Bazaar); and the vernacular Interstate (1993) and Gotham (2000), both conglomerations of the words and letters that we see everyday throughout the landscape in 21st-century America, refined into a versatile yet recognisable design.

Font designers who are able to marry critical and commercial success are a unique mixture of two basic clichés: the artist and the scientist. They are eclectic, curious, obsessive and absorbed, as well as rigorous, punctilious, enamoured of rules and limitations, and loyal to a higher code of design behaviour. They are an even more different breed among the many different breeds of designers working today. Contending now with the dynamic methods of communication provided by tablet computers, smartphones and other supports for text and brand, they deal with each family of fonts as if it were truly made of individuals, live characters that need to be able to fend for themselves once released into the wider world. In this vein, font design might just be the most advanced form of design existing today.
Paola Antonelli,
Critic and curator, MoMA