Thinking with Type

Although Bodoni and Didot fueled their designs with the calli­graphic practices of their time, they created forms that collided with typo­graphic tradition and unleashed a strange new world, where the structural attributes of the letter—serif and stem, thick and thin strokes, vertical and horizontal stress—would be subject to bizarre experi­ments. In search of a beauty both rational and sublime, Bodoni and Didot had created a monster: an abstract and dehuman­ized approach to the design of letters.

With the rise of industrialization and mass consumption in the nineteenth century came the explosion of advert­ising, a new form of communi­cation demanding new kinds of typo­graphy. Type designers created big, bold faces by embellishing and engorging the body parts of classical letters. Fonts of astonishing height, width, and depth appeared—expanded, contracted, shadowed, inlined, fattened, faceted, and floriated. Serifs abandoned their role as finishing details to become indepen­dent archi­tectural structures, and the vertical stress of tradi­tional letters canted in new directions.

Lead, the material for casting metal type, is too soft to hold its shape at large sizes under the pressure of the printing press. In contrast, type cut from wood can be printed at gigantic scales. The intro­duction of the combined pantograph and router in 1834 revolution­ized wood-type manufacture. The pantograph is a tracing device that, when linked to a router for carving, allows a parent drawing to spawn variants with different propor­tions, weights, and decorative excresences.

This mechanized design approach treated the alphabet as a flexible system divorced from calligraphy. The search for archetypal, perfectly propor­tioned letter­forms gave way to a new view of typo­graphy as an elastic system of formal features (weight, stress, stem, crossbars, serifs, angles, curves, ascenders, descenders). The relation­ships among letters in a type­face became more important than the identity of individual characters.

“Printing, having found in the book a refuge in which to lead an autonomous existence, is pitilessly dragged out into the street by advertisements.... Locust swarms of print, which already eclipse the sun of what is taken for intellect in city dwellers, will grow thicker with each succeeding year.”

— Walter Benjamin, 1925

Some designers viewed the distortion of the alphabet as gross and immoral, tied to a destruct­ive and inhumane industrial system. Writing in 1906, Edward Johnston revived the search for an essential, standard alphabet and warned against the “dangers” of exagger­ation. Johnston, inspired by the nineteenth-century Arts and Crafts movement, looked back to the Renaissance and Middle Ages for pure, uncorrupted letterforms.

Although reformers like Johnston remained romantic­ally attached to history, they redefined the designer as an intel­lectual distanced from the commercial main­stream. The modern design reformer was a critic of society, striving to create objects and images that would challenge and revise dominant habits and practices.

The avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century rejected historical forms but adopted the model of the critical outsider. Members of the De Stijl group in the Netherlands reduced the alphabet to perpendicular elements. At the Bauhaus, Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers constructed letters from basic geometric forms—the circle, square, and triangle—which they viewed as elements of a universal language of vision.

Such experiments approached the alphabet as a system of abstract relation­ships. Like the popular printers of the nine­teenth century, avant­garde designers rejected the quest for essential letters grounded in the human hand and body, but they offered austere, theoret­ical alternat­ives in place of the solicitous novelty of main­stream advertising. Assembled like machines from modular components, these experi­mental designs emulated factory production.

Yet most were produced by hand rather than as mechanical type­faces (although many are now available digitally). Futura, completed by Paul Renner in 1927, embodied the obsessions of the avant garde in a multipurpose, commercially available typeface. Although Renner disdained the active movement of calli­graphy in favor of forms that are “calming” and abstract, he tempered the geometry of Futura with subtle variations in stroke, curve, and proportion. Renner designed Futura in numerous weights, viewing his type family as a painterly tool for constructing a page in shades of gray.

“The calming, abstract forms of those new typefaces that dispense with hand­written movement offer the typographer new shapes of tonal value that are very purely attuned. These types can be used in light, semi-bold, or in saturated black forms.”

— Paul Renner, 1931

Responding in 1967 to the rise of electronic commun­ication, the Dutch designer Wim Crouwel published designs for a “new alphabet” constructed from straight lines. Rejecting centuries of typo­graphic convention, he designed his letters for optimal display on a video screen (CRT), where curves and angles are rendered with hori­zontal scan lines. In a brochure promoting his new alphabet, subtitled “An Introduction for a Programmed Typography,” he proposed a design method­ology in which decisions are rule-based and systematic.

In the mid-1980s, personal computers and low-resolution printers put the tools of typography in the hands of a broader public. In 1985 Zuzana Licko began designing typefaces that exploited the rough grain of early desktop systems. While other digital fonts imposed the coarse grid of screen displays and dot-matrix printers onto tradi­tional typo­graphic forms, Licko embraced the language of digital equipment. She and her husband, Rudy VanderLans, cofounders of Emigre Fonts and Emigre magazine, called themselves the “new primitives,” pioneers of a techno­logical dawn.

By the early 1990s, with the intro­duction of high-resolution laser printers and outline font techno­logies such as PostScript, type designers were less con­strained by low-resolution outputs. While various signage systems and digital output devices still rely on bitmap fonts today, it is the fasci­nation with programmed, geometric structures that has enabled bitmap forms to continue evolving as a visual ethos in print and digital media.

“Living with computers gives funny ideas.”

— Wim Crouwel, 1967