“Type is a microcosmic representation of culture,” says Paul McNeil in his book The Visual History of Type. The evolution of type is a remarkably accurate representation of cultural change and the influence of technology and ideology on visual form, from the Middle Ages through modernity up to today, “wherever we are now”.* Erik Spiekermann confirms that cultural differences have always found expression in how people wrote. Thus, when writing was still a more exclusive activity, European court clerks developed complicated representative forms of writing. In the course of the increasing literacy of the broader population, formal priorities in writing have also shifted and a personal, pragmatic and faster forms of writing were developed.* According to Spiekermann, typography is “an excellent indicator of what happens in a society – at least as good as the styling of mobile phones and car radiators”.* The designer Michael Rock also takes the view that the “form itself [...] is indexical” as a product of the designer’s intimate, physical attachment to his work. Therefore it is “inevitable that our work bears our stamp”. Creative decisions and procedures are the direct expression of personal interests and inclinations, “testimony of a philosophy, of an aesthetic position, they are argument and criticism”.*
The political dimension of design reaches far beyond economic aspects, writes Philip B. Meggs in The Politics of Style. Not only are people with strong aesthetic or philosophical viewpoints often intolerant of other positions, but the conflicts between different creative groups represent nothing less than a “struggle for the heart and soul of a culture. Together with music, theatre and art, design is a manifestation of the values, concerns and dreams of a time and a place”.* And Silja Bilz writes that every historically evolved written form reflects contemporary architecture as well as technical and cultural achievements, which are closely linked to the human spirit of the respective age and convey a sensual-aesthetic insight of the time.* Also, according to Fred Smeijers, “quite abrupt changes in the social and cultural structure [...] entail changes in the form and use of writing”. For example, “the reform of writing by Charlemagne, the rise of the sans serifs in industrialized cultures, the Nazis’ Schrifterlass, or the spread of Cyrillic writing in the course of the expansion of Russian communism”.* As a result of the fact that type design always expresses a personal taste “which is shaped by the environment, one’s own culture, education, and contexts,” reading a script is always not only a physical, visual experience but a cultural one.*
The connection between designed form and the designer’s mentality is also brought up by Robert Bringhurst, who recommends that typographic disputes should be submitted “to the higher courts of language and thought”, because (printed) writing is idealized writing and its function is the recording of an idealized language.* The style of a time is moulded by its spirit, by the thinking and feeling of the creative and culturally significant people of that time, writes Max Bollwage. He describes a collective urge to oppose the prevailing established forms, which would lead to similar formal manifestations simultaneously emerging in different areas of design and in different places.*
“We no longer live in the same societies as our predecessors. The world-view of Giambattista Bodoni, for example, does not necessarily align with our own.” With regard to this circumstance and his argument that typefaces would always speak of the priorities and aspirations of a culture, type designer Kris Sowersby concludes a constant need for new typefaces.*
The dogmatic-reactionary traditionalists, according to Fred Smeijers, oppose this idea. They felt attacked by the urge for renewal and by new technical developments, which would encourage to disregard the traditionalist’s time-honored laws.* But this opposition proofs the point of the temporal nature of type, by rejecting innovation and novelties not only in the field of design but in culture and politics altogether.
The culture of Roman antiquity is the cradle of the Latin alphabet. The emperors’ inscriptions of the first and second centuries are the starting point and formal climax of the Western Latin writing culture.* The ancient letterforms, such as those of the Trajan Column, which is frequently referenced in typographic history, were defined by the three basic Archimedean geometric forms: Circle, square and triangle. In a similar fashion the Pantheon building in Rome also bears witness to a construction on a strictly geometric basis. It was a “emergence of architecture and writing from one mind”, how Max Bollwage puts it.*
In Von der Entwicklung der Schrift (On the Development of Type) Peter Behrens illustrated the narrative quality of the written form on the basis of the typography of Roman antiquity: “An ancient writing carved in the stone of Roman monuments often appears to us, even without us understanding the meaning of the words, as a last artistic necessity for the final completion of an entire work of art. It seems like a precious ornament, symbolic, in a preferred place. The arrangement of the crossbars to the steep ground strokes, the connection by regular arcs, the filling strokes, the separating points, everything is grouped like finely structured architecture. And if we read the contents of the words, they speak to us in this form, as clearly and dignifiedly as beautifully built sentences and phrases from the mouths of Roman speakers might have convinced us once. […]”.*
We will encounter that in the subsequent course of Western cultural history, antiquity regularly served as a reference model and projection surface for both conservative and progressive worldviews and hence design movements.
Type design in our modern sense first appeared in Europe in the Renaissance with Gutenberg’s letterpress printing and the punchcutters around 1450. That is why we jump to this next decisive point in the history of typography: the Gothic period.
In the Gothic period, which stretched from the 12th to the 15th century, architecture and writing were dominated by an intellectual-spiritual attitude, “which no longer regarded the cathedral or the sacred writing as purely utility objects”.* Both buildings and type were accesses to higher spheres. Here the earthly human and the “expediency of the building or legibility of writing” played subordinate roles; instead, a “spiritual, solemnly structured sense of space and a strongly ornamental typography [...] stood in the foreground”.* In addition, a spatial separation of two different styles of writing could already be discerned at this time, determining a symbolic charging still in effect today: In German-speaking countries – especially in liturgical texts – the strict Gothic Textura dominated, whereas in Southern Europe the softer Rotunda was more successful.* The latter already bore a clear resemblance to the Antiqua that would soon emerge from it.
Humanism spread from Italy to Western and Central Europe in the 14th century, and its way of thinking still shapes European modernity today. In this revolutionary movement, it was no longer the dogmatic authority of the Church but the human mind that was the supreme good. The city state of Venice inherited in many ways the Eastern Roman Empire, of which it had been a part and which had existed continuously since antiquity, until 1453. Ancient Greek and Roman culture, architecture, art, and attitudes were rediscovered, reinterpreted, and added to the dominant Christian tradition. The study of ancient heritage served as a new source of moral values, intellectual development, and aesthetic ideals.* Humanism and its enthusiasm for the spirit of classical antiquity in the 14th and 15th centuries gave rise to the culture of the Renaissance, in which the motto was “the antiquity is the novelty”.* In this sense, modern Italian humanists were particularly interested in cultural renewal and change. Their scholars and writers rejected the outdated writing style of the Gothic black letter script with its heavy broken letters, turned to “Lettera Antica” and developed a new style that reflected the new mentality.**
In retrospect, this trend turned out to be one of the most severest steps in the history of the development of the Latin alphabet. Our current alphabet today with its combination of upper and lower case letters came into being. Previously, the alphabet of capital letters and the alphabet of minuscule letters were two different scripts. The former was based on the ancient Capitalis. The latter was Humanistica, the humanistic, calligraphic lettering of the Latin alphabet, which had been in use since the middle of the 14th century. Typographers at first used the Capitalis to mark initials to give the design an antique appearance. From then on it became increasingly integrated and the two different spellings merged to form the new, bicameral Antiqua.*
Whether or not our resulting alphabet of today was based on a fallacy, however, seems undecided in current type design theory: While many experts describe the situation at that time in such a way that the humanists – fascinated by antiquity – mistakenly identified the traditional late Carolingian minuscules as Roman script and therefore combined them with the Roman Capitalis in order to arrive at their new style*, Fred Smeijers describes that it must be assumed that the contemporary scribes were very well informed about the origin of their sources.* But above all, the new northern Italian type variant, the humanistic minuscule, represented a counter-draft to the aesthetics of the Gothic minuscule, which had a lasting influence on the further development of typography.
One of the humanist pioneers was Nicolas Jenson, a native Frenchman who had learned the art of printing in Germany. Around 1469, he founded a printshop in Venice, where he developed typefaces that mixed the properties of the Gothic script, which he was familiar with from Central Europe, with the new, round, lighter forms of Italian taste. The type he cut, such as Jenson, were among the first and, according to Ellen Lupton, “still the best antiqua fonts”.*
[info: Nicolas Jenson (1420 – 1480), stamp cutter, typographer, calligrapher, printer, publisher]
Manual typesetting based on Gutenberg’s invention was the predominant printing technique from the 15th to the 19th century. While the printing types used by Gutenberg still formally imitated the handwriting of monastic scriptoria, Jenson designed an “Antiqua that was already quite independent of the manuscripts and more in keeping with the requirements of punchcutting”.* Jenson’s model influences type designers ever since.
Other notable and highly influential protagonists of this era were Aldus Manutius, Francesco Griffo and Geoffroy Tory. Tory studied at the Faculty of Philosophy in Bourges, France, back then the center of humanist culture. He played a leading role in the popularization of the Antiqua (as opposed to the predominant blackletter) and the establishment of typographical elements such as accents, apostrophe, the cedilla, and punctuation marks.* From today’s perspective, an amusing example of the interpretation of humanist ideals in type design is Geoffroy Tory’s theory on the proportioning of letterforms. Tory believed he had found the ideal relations in the form of the human body and in 1529 he published a series of diagrams comparing the anatomy of letters with the human anatomy. He wrote about the letter A: “The horizontal bar covers the man’s organ of procreation in order to show that modesty and chastity are needed to recognize the essence of well-formed letters.”* A year later, in 1530, François I, King of France, appointed him “Imprimeur du Roi”, royal printer. Tory’s conceptual derivation of letterforms from human anatomy reflects the humanistic view of the explainability of the world and the firm belief in causalities and laws given by nature.
[info: Geoffroy Tory (1480 – 1533), humanist, engraver, printer, scholar]
In 1540, François I also commissioned the type designer Claude Garamond to design a typeface that we know today under his very name. Garamond was at the time a good example of how a typeface could grow into a representative symbol of a certain philosophy, ideology, institution or nation, and how this symbol could be embraced or rejected with what it represents. Garamond’s type developed into the distinctive sign of the French Enlightenment and served as the first standardized, proprietary brand typeface for use in all official state papers of France. In contrast, at the same time German King Maximilian rejected this kind of Latin Antiqua and preferred to use blackletter instead.*
[info: Claude Garamond (1499 – 1561), type founder, typographer, stamp cutter, publisher]
In accordance with the humanistic Enlightenment ideal, the typeface was “desacralized” at that time by being used by printers for the widespread dissemination of non-religious literature. This contributed to a quick and lasting cultural establishment of these new kind Latin typefaces, leading this type to survive “the centuries as the basic structure of our occidental writing”.*
The production of type, printing, the commercial and cultural world as a whole were closely intertwined. The type cutters of the 16th century were active participants in cultural, political and religious life. One of the best of them, Pierre Haultin, was a punchcutter, printer, publisher and convinced Protestant. Thus as a protestant – in France of his day – he belonged to a forbidden sect. Fred Smeijers speculates that the constant danger of persecution might have prompted Haultin, in accordance with the typical Protestant pragmatism, to look into the search for the acceptable minimum fontsize. The design of a small and efficient type served him in turn to produce easily transportable pocket bibles as a counter-draft to the expansive representative bibles of Catholics that had previously existed.*
Letterpress paved the way for the scientific revolution of the 17th century. It also promoted literacy, which led to the development of a growing popular culture with the spread of the holy christian scripture in various languages. The market for affordable texts and documents grew, and this was accompanied by the remarkable invention of the printed political pamphlet. This again laid the foundation for the formation of critical public opinion in the early 16th century.* The medium of the book became increasingly important. At the end of the 16th century it was customary for the printed word to be the primary source of education and information and to make a significant contribution to personal world views of the readership.*
According to Max Bollwage, “nothing was to be expected for the development of the Antiqua in Germany in the 17th century”.* On the one hand, the Thirty Years’ War had destroyed the country, bled it out and left behind wounds that had not healed even after decades; on the other hand, the Protestant Reformation had declared war on the Latin language and script – this was the Antiqua form – as an expression of the Catholic foreign power. Instead, German Protestants set their texts with conviction in blackletter.* This transformation in meaning of the Antiqua is exemplary for the fluidity of the symbolic expression of typefaces in the course of time. While in the Renaissance intellectuality and progressiveness were associated with the Antiqua, in Protestant Germany two centuries later it was regarded as repressive-conservative, influenced by the association with the Catholic Church.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, standardisation, uniformisation and stylistic refinement were the overriding motifs in the evolution of type design.* Until the middle of the 17th century, most typefaces could be traced back to handwritten forms.* However, in the age of scientific and philosophical enlightenment, in accordance with the idea at the time of the calculability of all phenomena, it was decided with scientific thoroughness that a typeface should be constructed in a mathematically precise fashion.
In 1693, as part of an extensive encyclopedia, which intended to record all knowledge, in case there would be a great catastrophe, the Sun King Louis XIV commissioned a committee to design a typeface with letters aligned to a fine grid. This Romain du Roi, the king’s alphabet, and its construction should also be comprehensibly documented. In contrast to Geoffroy Tory’s diagrams, which were produced as woodcuts, engraving was used for the blueprint of the Romain du Roi.* The quality of improved writing nibs and improved printing technology had a great influence on the appearance of the new typeface.
The construction according to mathematical principles led to the reintroduction of mistakes in type design, which had long before been taught to be avoided by “eye-thinking” Renaissance punchcutters. “The whole alphabet [of the Romain du Roi] looked as stiff and circumscribed as a French garden of the time,” Max Bollwage describes the grid-aligned illustrations of the Romain du Roi.* The actual printing letters, however, were saved from this mathematical-planned lifelessness and the lack of consideration of optical corrections by the punchcutter Philippe Grandjean by following his own mind and deviating from the rigid construction template when cutting the type.*
[info: Philippe Grandjean (1666 – 1714), letter engraver]
After the luxuriant and exuberant epochs of the Baroque and Rococo periods, classicism returned to the fascination of an image of antiquity that was attached to the supposed grandeur and simplicity of ancient buildings and sculptures. It awakened “in the observer accustomed to rococo the desire for austerity and simplicity in art [...], but also for solemn pathos.”*
[info: Baroque (about 1575 – 1770), Rococo (about 1720 – 1780), Classicism (about 1770 – 1840)]
The outstanding type designers and typographers of classicism, such as Giambattista Bodoni, Firmin Didot and their predecessor John Baskerville, banned the ornament of previous epochs from type and the printed page. The classisist movement rejected the use of initials, grand decorative initial letters, and reduced any ornament to a minimum.** Their ideal was clarity, which expressed in type design by sharp-edged printing letters with high contrast in line width and centered, dark text blocks, surrounded by generous, undecorated white space.
While John Baskerville’s proto-classicist style seemed to be ahead of his time, Bodoni and Didot heralded a new era and found great recognition. It has already been Baskerville’s goal to surpass Caslon by developing sharply engraved letters with greater contrast between bold and thin elements. But while Caslon’s letters were widely used, Baskerville’s works were considered amateurish and too extreme in his time.*
Giambattista Bodoni created his famous classicist Antiqua “out of the spirit of the nation and the century,” as he put it with an attitude that characterized the stylistic sense of classicism. He explained that “in the Humanities, as in philosophy, the taste of connoisseurs has turned more and more to the simple, to the austere, preferring a beauty without any ornament, which would be nothing but borrowed afterall, to any other”. *
[info: Giambattista Bodoni (1740 – 1813), stamp cutter, book printer, typographer, publisher]
Firmin Didot’s clear letterforms reflected the ideals of the Enlightenment and were a symbol of objectivity and rationality.* The socio-economic circumstances in which these designers found themselves also favored the realisation of their outstanding and uncompromising innovations. Bodoni was in the service of the Duke of Parma and did not have to deal with the profitability of his work. Didot was also very privileged as a member of the most prominent French printing family of the 18th century. The predominance of classicist typography lasted until the beginning of the following century, when the industrial revolution entered the processes of type design and typography, triggering an explosion of new typefaces.*
[info: Firmin Didot (1764 – 1836), typographer, writer]
Towards the end of the 18th century, commercial pressure began to effect type design. The rise of advertising typefaces with their endless variations in form had begun. They had only limited similarities with typefaces for continuous reading. In the second half of the 19th century, type foundries began to reuse older matrices and revived earlier forms, thus coining the term “old style”. With the mechanization of type production and mechanized typesetting and printing, the effects of these developments spread widely. The typeface revivals, which were mostly based on models from the first 150 years of printing with movable type, were not only designed for use in plain reading, but were also conceived and developed for use in commercial advertising printed matter. By fattening and enlarging, attempts were made to inflate text fonts to display fonts, with unsatisfactory results. The perception of what constitutes a typeface began to change. *
Industrial production changed the market and led to the need to advertise competing products. The increasing number of printed advertising materials and the popularity of poster advertising in cities had a great impact on the typographic canon. * The existing fonts of book typography could not meet the new needs of advertising. * Up until now, the task of typography had been to point readers in the right direction, but from now on, the rich and competitive range of reading material was primarily concerned with attracting the reader’s attention rather than guiding it. Striking, bold letters were introduced into the typesetting material, letters for billboards with extreme proportions were developed, with depth effects and eccentric decoration. *
These were joined by the sans-serif grotesque typefaces, with their space-saving forms, and the Egyptienne typefaces, with consistent line widths up to the serifs.* Typefaces with reversed-contrast were designed to consciously attract the reader’s attention by challenging the familiar and expected. Strokes that were thick in classic letterforms became thin and vice versa. A “cheap trick” to obtain strange letters that stood out even in a world increasingly saturated with commercial messages.*
The first half of the 19th century started out as an era of unprecedented and never since achieved technical design quality, both in book production and in stamp cutting. Typographic products of this time strongly followed established typographical conventions and were perfect in terms of craftsmanship. But then the 19th century brought with it social and typographic change, in a form that prompted subsequent critics to view this period as “the worst epoch in typographic history”.* This was related to the emergence of the advertising industry and the democratization and precarization of design and print production processes through industrialization. The aim was: quantity instead of quality, experiment instead of convention, extremes instead of harmony, decoration instead of clarity. While up to this point the traditional artist was responsible for capturing beauty and avoiding ugliness, this image changed abruptly in 19th century historicism – with new technical possibilities, new fields of application for typography and the invention of kitsch.**
The constructed classical forms of Bodoni and Didot had distanced themselves from the typographical tradition of the stamp-cutters and opened the gates to a world in which the formal elements and factors of the letterform – serifs, strokes, widths, heights – were free for experimentation. “In search of rational and sublime beauty, Bodoni and Didot created a monster: the abstract and dehumanized access to the design of a typeface,” writes Ellen Lupton.* The changes in technical, social and economic conditions – industrialisation, advertising and mass consumption – in the 19th century meant that nothing was sacred about writing.
The explosive emergence of advertising was a new form of communication that required new typography. New letters were designed by distorting, alienating, shading and decorating the anatomical elements of letters. Serifs took on independent architectural-decorative functions. The search for a perfectly proportioned alphabet was abandoned in favour of a typography that understood the letters as part of an flexible system of different independently transformable features: cut, emphasis, stroke, crossbar, serif, angle, curve, ascender and descender.* For technical reasons, commercial advertising consisted primarily of typography. In order to attract the best possible attention, advertising posters turned the characteristics of book typography upside down. Advertising graphics challenged the limits of traditional typography. The typographic vocabulary was expanded: “bold, ultra bold, bigger than big”. Serifs were split, broken, cut or removed completely. Letters bubbled over with decorations, illustrations and floral elements.*
Under an increasing economic pressure of mass production, the quality of workmanship and design declined, and instead it became a priority to demonstrate the new formal possibilities. Enthusiastic supporters of historicism celebrated their stylistic independence and, supposedly freed from the former technical limitations, saw themselves at an advantage over past epochs: “It is precisely because we are not tied to one specific contemporary style, but because we are able to master and execute all historic styles with spirit and understanding, that we are in the fortunate position of seeking and applying the appropriate form for every content.”*
About the pantograph: Traditionally, typography and typeface design was the domain of a small elite of highly specialized craftsmen. In the 19th century, this field was radically changed and democratized, among other things, by the introduction of the pantograph. This device for the production of large wood type letters made it possible to create all kinds of letter variations, which led to an explosive growth of new typefaces.* Wood type was predestined for wear and tear due to the high pressure in the printing process. In 1887, the American William Hamilton Page patented his wooden typefaces, all of which are characterized by the same approach: dull edges, little contrast and soft contours. Because of these formal characteristics, wear and tear was much less noticeable than would have been the case with a fine, sharp-edged Bodoni.*
About lithography: Lithography is a planographic printing process invented by Alois Senefelder in 1798 and was common until 1930, when it was replaced by offset printing. Lithography made it possible to produce large, eye-catching printed matter in colour, which had previously not been possible with letterpress or copperplate printing. It favoured artistic originality and virtuosity on the one hand, but also the proliferation of lush and wild typefaces. With lithography, “expensive new lead type and elaborate copperplate engravings were no longer necessary for printing eye-catching and individual business and advertising printed matter. Everything had become possible. The most lavish and wildest typefaces could be drawn and printed in this way. The discipline of the stamp cutter was no longer necessary; a state of affairs comparable to that of today,” writes Max Bollwage.* Now it was possible to exceed the limitations of book typography and the letter form was no longer bound to the shape of the stamp. This made it possible to treat type as an illustrative image.*
From the second half of the 19th century onwards, movements developed which criticized the disastrous social developments of their time – particularly related to advancing industrialization – and represented a return to pre-industrial values, “progress through recourse”.* Ulysses Voelker writes that some developments at the beginning of the 20th century demonstrated in exemplary fashion how social processes and typography interact.* Thus the industrialisation of the 19th century would have lastingly changed the politics, culture and economy of the industrialised nations. It was at this time that artistic movements emerged that emancipated themselves from traditions and postulated new values with a new and vivid formal language.
The various forms – Arts-and-Crafts in England, later around the turn of the century Art Nouveau in France, Art Nouveau in Germany, Stile Liberty in Italy and Wiener Secession in Austria – did not mark a political revolution, but united social upheavals that changed the visual language and produced new moral and aesthetic values. They had an influence on typography within Europe between the early 1890s and the First World War. Designers such as Georges Auriol, Eugene Grasset, Peter Behrens, and Otto Eckmann filled type specimens with curvy alphabets with eccentric calligraphic pride. The return to nature played an important role. The depiction of previous visual taboos – including an “astonishing degree of nudity,” as Steven Heller and A. M. Cassandre write* – pushed all conservative artistic representations and values aside. The motif of eroticism was taken up in a comparable way in winding and lolling ornaments and letterforms.*
The restorative Arts and Crafts movement, the British predecessor of German Art Nouveau, developed against the backdrop of the socialist struggle against ruthless capitalist industrialization. The movement rejected the poor quality and inhumane working conditions of industrial production and stood for typographic renewal through a return to the old masters. Their efforts for “the good form” and for bringing art and everyday life together continued to have an effect on the german “Kunstgewerbebewegung”, the “Deutscher Werkbund” and later in the Bauhaus.**
The most important personality of the Arts and Crafts movement was the “English innovator of design”* William Morris. In 1890, as an alternative to the qualitatively inferior typefaces of historicism, he developed the “Golden Type” based on the designs of William Caslon and Nicolas Jenson, whose aesthetics of book pages in their “dark and solemn density” he wanted to imitate.** Morris criticized the “erosion of craftsmanship” and the destruction and “uglification” caused by exploitative industrialization in England. He published the utopian novel “News from Nowhere”, which illustrated his political ideals. In it he wrote, for example, “England has become a place of communistic freedom and genuine equality between men, women and children. There is no private property, no money, no divorce courts since laws of sexual ownership have been overthrown. Schools, prisons and central government are obsolete.” His views and design skills made him a role model for future generations, including Eric Gill. He described Morris as “that most manly of great man, as sensitive and passionate as he was fearless and hot-tempered”.*
However, the affluent William Morris, whose political criticism came from an economically very privileged position, failed miserably in one major goal: a method of book production that unifies high design quality with affordable prices for a broader mass. His works remained luxury goods, his political sphere of influence modest. “The purpose of art is to show the worker the true ideal of a fulfilled and rational life, a life in which the perception and production of beauty, the actual indulgence in real joy, will be felt as necessary for man as his daily bread.” Thus Morris is quoted by Max Bollwage. Thereupon Bollwage criticizes that this statement came from someone “who was financially independent and who, as a painter and poet in protest against ugly industrial products, was engaged in the artisanal production of expensive furniture, wallpaper, carpets, and glass windows that no factory worker ever saw.”*
After the pioneering English Arts and Crafts movement, the Jugendstil movement gained a foothold in continental Europe around 1900. This movement established itself mainly in Germany, Austria, France and Belgium under different names. The avant-garde style, represented by Otto Eckmann among others, was a declaration of war on artistic historicism and classicism. The quote from 1894 by Jugendstil representative Henry van de Velde, who worked as a painter, architect and theorist, comes from the year 1894: “What benefits only one person is almost useless, and in the future society will be respected what is useful for all.”* The beginning of the 20th century modernism was rooted within these socialist ambitions of Jugendstil.
Peter Behrens contributed significantly to the image and self-conception of the modern designer. His work for the “Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft”, AEG, probably represents the first holistic corporate design ever. In this context, he not only designed the building, interior design and advertising, but also AEG’s corporate typeface.
In Behrens’ book “On the Origin of Writing”, he expressed his ideas on the relationship between writing and social development: “Writing is one of the most eloquent means of expression of every stylistic epoch. Next to architecture, it probably gives the most characteristic picture of a time and the strictest testimony to the intellectual development stage of a people. As the architecture reflects a full glow of the whole wave of a time and the external life of a people, so their writing tells us about signs of inner will, it reveals pride and humility, confidence and doubts of the sexes.”* On another occasion he notes that a “new character of writing [...] can only develop organically, almost imperceptibly out of tradition, in harmony with the reshaping of the spiritual and material matter of time.”*
It can therefore be assumed that Behrens also ascribed great importance to the conception of his own type design and that their forms must have been well-considered. This possibly also contributed to their longevity: The Behrenschen letters were serving in the AEG logo for over 100 years, from 1912 to 2016. The American historian and media theorist Stuart Ewen writes critically about this AEG typeface, that it is exemplary of how modernist corporate design aestheticizes and glorifies the “overpowering, omnipresent corporate structure” and at the same time eliminates every trace of individual autonomy within this structure.*
In this critique of Ewen a complicated potential of modernist design becomes discernable that will play a greater role in the dawning 20th century. Its universality – valued for promoting the common good through accessibility – facilitated the metamorphosis of modernist design from a socialist-public to a corporate-commercial tool. The latter became known as the infamous “International Style” in the second half of the 20th century and its symbol was the all-consuming Helvetica. Therefore a strong ideological connection can be drawn from Behrens AEG typeface to Helvetica, which was only developed half a century later.
The British artist Edward Johnston was also an early modernist and intellectual heir to the Arts and Crafts movement. He shared an aversion to the development of historicism, which he even felt was “repulsive and immoral”. At the end of the 19th century Johnston warned of “the ‘dangers’ of typographic exaggeration” and resumed the search for a generally valid, standardized alphabet. Like Morris, Johnston remembered the Renaissance and the Middle Ages with their supposedly pure, unadulterated letterforms. Johnston coined a new, revolutionary self-image of the designer. The contemporary design reformers – like Johnston – remained romantically connected to history, but redefined the graphic artist as an intellectual who stands apart from the commercial mainstream. The modern design reformer was a social critic who strove to create objects and images that challenged prevailing habits and practices. The subsequent modernist avant-garde artists who followed Johnston rejected his historical formal ideals, but took up the idea of the critical outsider.* An idea that prevails up to today in some design schools and institutions.
His search for the ideal proportions in the pool of classical type design is also expressed in this quote from Johnston’s 1910 book “Schreibschrift, Zierschrift und angewandte Schrift”: “[…]our task is also quite simple – to make beautiful letters and arrange them pleasingly. To make beautiful letters, it’s not necessary to redesign them – they were designed a long time ago – but to take the best letters we can find as a model and to make them ours.”*
Later on a stylistic rupture in Johnston’s work – and especially the reactions it provoked – exemplify how strongly different typefaces were symbolically charged in the debate at the time. In 1913, Johnston began designing his first sans serif typeface. It was Johnston Sans for the London Underground, which has been in use since its publication in 1916 and is one of the longest used corporate typefaces ever.* This dramatic shift from the historical type model, which he had propagated until then, to a modernist-industrial aesthetic was strongly criticized by one of his students in a private letter: “In Johnston I have lost confidence. Despite all he did for us ... he has undone too much by forsaking his standard of the Roman alphabet, giving the world, without safeguard or explanation, his block letters which disfigure our modern life. His prestige has obscured their vulgarity and commercialism.”
Only one year after the First World War (1914 – 1918), the Bauhaus opened with its social-artistic agenda. The Bauhaus was a school of the avant-garde, which was linked to the Werkbund, Peter Behrens and the socialist Arts and Crafts movement. Due to its progressive and international orientation, the Bauhaus was from day one described by right-wing parties as “utopian and Bolshevik”.* The school rejected the elitist thinking of salon art; instead it supported the idea, that design in the form of democratized art was to serve human needs. William Morris’s socialist ideas and the discussion about the merging of art, work and technology, which had already begun with the Werkbund and was increasingly influenced by Russian Constructivism, were further developed here. The ideology of Constructivism, which said that it was only the connection of the apparent antitheses of art and technology that made the decisive contribution to a decent and just life, must be understood against the background of Bolshevik Russia, writes Jean Ulysses Voelker in his book “Read+Play”. The interplay of technology, art and industry was intended to bring about ethical and aesthetic standards for the benefit of society.*
What Walter Gropius rejected, however, was Morris’ attachment to the past, his affinity for pre-industrial craftsmanship, and his hostility to industrial production. Instead, the Bauhaus regarded functionalist engineering as a model, a symbol of the superiority of the rationality of industrial production. During his time as an employee of Peter Behrens, Walter Gropius had learned from him about the logical and systematic coordination of design projects.* These two elements, logic and systematics, were and are central elements of the modernist promise of salvation. While in the prevailing historicism and eclecticism typography – particularly advertising typography – went haywire, the fields of mechanical and structural engineering, which were to become the bright guiding star of the modernists, had eluded this arbitrariness.*
For modernists the choice of type again became a manifesto of their Weltanschauung: documents had to be set in the “progressive” Grotesque, which shows the letters in their “pure” form, freed from everything supposedly superfluous. Historical letterforms and typography were rejected.** Many efforts were made to make both the typeface and the alphabet and language themselves more efficient and to optimize them according to modernist principles. The general simplification, rationalization, internationalization and universalization were elevated to an ideal, entirely in the sense of a transnational socialist-democratic solidarity. This was also linked to the traumatizing experience of war and to the alarming nationalist trend in Europe at that time, and demonstrated how the Bauhaus concluded artistic consequences from political visions. Modernist type designs were accordingly preferably constructed, avoiding historical or national characteristics and often making use of a modular system and grid, such as Josef Albers’ combination typeface.* There were ideological reasons for distancing oneself from ornamental “Wilhelmine” typefaces, such as those by Rudolf Koch. Clarity and simplicity were the highest good and so one returned again to the Archimedean basic forms, which already served as a model in antiquity: Square, triangle and circle.* In order to increase efficiency, the Bauhaus also supported the demand for the conversion of the German written language to solely lower case, which at the time probably actually led to great savings in lead typesetting and made work easier.
The modernist “design-as-system” concept also led to fonts becoming larger and larger projects from the 1920s onwards: Typeface families that would work in any application, in any size, any width and any weight. The idea of the all-purpose typeface was born. Sans serif typefaces such as Akzidenz Grotesk, News Gothic, Franklin Gothic, Futura and later Univers and Helvetica proved to be the most suitable for this flexible treatment and grew into ever more extensive families.* Creating a type family was a long and costly process. The idea of an all-purpose typeface spread, with additional weights and alternates. Type foundries were under the pressure of being able to serve at least as wide a range as the competition, which led to vendors with huge font libraries.*
In the 1920s and 1930s, typography was to be neutral: Bauhaus typography and New Typography. Modern times supposedly demanded the fight against decoration, illustration and all that embodied too much the traditional and established values. The “New Typography” propagated by Jan Tschichold was the creative consequence of a mindset that strived for a rational, democratic, egalitarian utopia in which serial, standardized production would satisfy the “similar basic needs of the individual”.* For this reason, even the written form had to be elementary and universal. No superfluous expressions, no calligraphic trace of the artistic hand – only printing types produced by the machine.*
Until Didot, Unger and Bodoni every time had its style. But now Paul Renner attested “his poor time” a lack of an own characteristic style. This novel shortcoming was caused by the dominant historicism and eclecticism, in connection with the mechanization and division of labor in the production of typefaces. According to Renner a new typeface that corresponded to the feeling of his time had to be “exact, precise and impersonal”:
“It had to present itself meaningfully and without digression as what it is. If it is a printed type, it must not be allowed to imitate a handwriting. Our typeface is the machine printing of machine-made metal letters that are more bookmarks than type. Our printing type is not a movement of expression, as it is the handwriting; all dynamics pushing from left to right, all width and narrowing, which only came into the writing through the reed pen and the quill, has no sense in printing type. We must finally draw the consequences from the invention of letter casting. The image of the grotesque typeface corresponds most closely to these demands of our contemporary sense of form, that is to the most recent typeface of the organic, artistically undisturbed development of type. These grotesque typefaces are the ‘nature’ to which we must return; they mean the same to us as engineering buildings to modern architects. If we succeed in mastering this material, this ‘nature’ as artists, then we will have found the typeface of our time.”*
This formulation for the concept of a typeface appropriate to the spirit of the time led Renner to development a typeface that is steeped in history and well known to us: “What can be more reasonable than Futura,” asks Erik Spiekermann in his book “ÜberSchrift”. The typeface published by Paul Renner in 1927 was a groundbreaking innovation. It achieved world fame with the VW advertisements of the 1950s and 1960s and is still one of the popular classics today, especially in advertising.** Futura, which had been used as VW’s corporate typeface since 1934, gained new popularity in advertising in the 1960s*. The “Think Small” campaign, which the advertising agency DDB developed for Volkswagen, not only made their car “as American as apple pie”, but was also celebrated by the industry magazine Advertising Age as the greatest advertising of all time and changed the advertising industry lastingly.*
“The engineer is the designer of our age” wrote the young Jan Tschichold, a pupil of Paul Renner, in 1928.* Tschichold shared the ideology of the Bauhaus and, like its typographers, searched for a “new, healthier orthography” based on the leitmotif of social and technical progress.*** In Noch eine Schrift he calls for the “complete elimination of all superfluous form components”. Whereby the term “superfluous” represents a typical example of the moralizing and efficiency-focused in modernist thinking.* With his extroverted spirit and his radical, uncompromising attitude, he quickly rose in the typography scene to become one of the leading experts of his time and among the best-known typographers of the 20th century.
His contemporary Max Bill also combined a political attitude with a creative practice. In Max Bill Kontra Jan Tschichold, Hans Rudolf Bosshard notes that “without exaggerating [...] Bill, who was interested in and committed to many things, could be found everywhere, so to speak, where progressive cultural work combined with leftist and anti-fascist thinking”. But Bill also paid tribute to the typically modernist enthusiasm for progress and efficiency when he insisted that “every design, in the sense of today’s living conditions, [...] requires the greatest possible economic efficiency”. The characteristic obsession of the modernists with technically constructed engineering structures is exemplified by Bill’s following statement: “The beauty of function [...] can probably best be observed where functions come to light most purely, without sentimental accessories, that is in mechanical and apparatus engineering, in the work of the engineer.”*
In her 1930 essay The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible, the young Beatrice Warde summarized the beliefs of a movement that opposed the “graphic monkey theatre” of the dominant decorative and complacent design style developed in the 19th century by the historicist avant-garde. The Crystal Goblet was her metaphor for arguing for a return to the classical values of a humanist typographic tradition in which writing, as a pure container, has as little place as possible between the reader and the message and must have no distorting or coloring effect. Good typography would therefore be transparent, clear and invisible. Warde was an advocate of the revival of historical writings and, with The Crystal Goblet, created a frequently referenced manifesto, the effect of which is still felt today.**
At a time when “in every western country countless different indigenous typefaces with ‘clear colours’ were still in use”, the modernist avant-garde had the politically motivated intention of banning these locally specific forms of design and replacing them with international-universal forms.*
However, even the first new geometric typefaces did not escape the national connotation: Erbar, Futura, and Kabel were considered German typefaces. In order to compete with these innovations, Stanley Morison, a Monotype executive, hired his former student Eric Gill to design the sans serif Linear Antiqua Gill Sans, based on Edward Johnston’s Underground typeface and created between 1928 and 1930.* As Monotype’s Advertising Director, Beatrice Warde put a lot of marketing effort into helping Gill Sans establish itself as the mid-century English national style.*
However, due to the declining importance of national borders for the distribution of media through technical progress, Adrian Frutiger in the 1970s was able to declare the uniformity of form sought by the modernists, “the crystallization of the Latin typeface into an international text type”.* Nowadays though, a strong local imprint, like when we talk about Swiss or Dutch graphic design, bares witness of a graphic heritage lastingly cultivated, appreciated and fostered by the respective society. Jean Ulysses Voelker describes that one can still “look at each country’s artistic socialisation [and its typical design]”. Today, Switzerland and the Netherlands would be particularly good examples of countries that have successfully turned “their design goals into [an] export hit.*
The reign of National Socialism in Germany ended the work of the local early Modernists. The Bauhaus was closed and the New Typography banned as non-German.* Many of the most important German designers were defamed by the regime, persecuted as “cultural Bolshevists,” and fled abroad, primarily to Switzerland and the United States. “Because [the Third Reich] was based on deception, it did not want to hear anything from the honest modernists [...]”, Jan Tschichold wrote a few years later.*
The Nazis’ own handling of type is an example of the potential of symbolic reappointment with new values and ideologies. Different styles of type played a special role in connection with National Socialism in Germany in the period from 1933 to 1945: the Grotesque, the Antiqua, the Fraktur and the Gebrochene Grotesk. The latter two have been commonly branded as Nazi typefaces in this context ever since.
While in most European countries blackletter typefaces like the Fraktur were displaced with the creation of the Antiqua typefaces in the 15th and 16th centuries, in Germany both fonts were used concurrently until the first half of the 20th century. Through the time of their coexistence both typefaces, Fraktur and Antiqua, gained ideological connotations, which – around the 1880s until the 1940s – led to the heated so-called “Antiqua–Fraktur disputes” on what was the “correct” typeface to use.
Whereas in the 16th century broken type stood for Protestantism and nationalism in Germany, in the 1920s it was attacked as outdated and replaced by the sans serifs of the “New Typography”. The Nazi party NSDAP took it up again to advertise for the people’s favour.* With the conservative connotation of “Deutschstämmig” (“German-born”), the “German” fracture was declared a state typeface. Under the Nazis “Schriftregelung” (“convention of writing”) took place as a counterpart to the “Sprachregelung” (“convention of speech”).*
Commercial advertising followed the nationalist trend and made use of the broken grotesque, also known as the “Schaftstiefel-Grotesk” – the typeface that is today most strongly associated with the National Socialists. The combination of a homeland sentiment with a comparatively modern, reduced design language would have met the demands of advertising in particular, writes Max Bollwage about the Schaftstiefel-Grotesk.*
In power the Nazi government then also made use of the Antiqua, which seemed to it like its “pseudo-classicalist architecture [...] more suitable for imperial representation, primarily [the] antiqua capital letters set on the central axis.”* With the “Führer’s decree” in 1941 the Nazis then turned their backs on the blackletter “Volksschrift” completely in favor of the more worldly grotesque, which Adolf Hitler allegedly had always actually preferred. This had the advantage that it could also be read by the population of the occupied foreign territories. Blackletter fell out of favor and was declared a “Judenletter” and officially banned.** This decree, however, remained largely without consequences in the advanced turmoil of war.
Although the Nazis persecuted representatives of the New Typography, they appropriated their stylistic elements and the advertisingly effective sans serif in their visual communication. The ease with which the fascists misused modern design for propaganda purposes shocked Jan Tschichold, formerly a fervent advocate of New Typography. He questioned his previous ideals, suspected ideological parallels between New Typography and National Socialism, and compared his own “leadership role” within the New Typography movement with that of National Socialism, which “meant mentally patronizing a following, as characterized by [the] dictatorship state”.* From now on he turned to traditional typography. The French typography of the 16th century was the new model for Tschichold.* This kind of scepticism towards design modernism unfolded and further developed in the second half of the 20th century in the postmodernist movement.
To Tschichold – with spatial distance from Switzerland – the fact that the New Typography was “almost only practiced in Germany and hardly found its way into other countries” was no coincidence. The supposed German mentality with its intolerant attitude, its tendency towards military order and its claim to autocracy was also the “terrible component of the German being that triggered Hitler’s rule and the Second World War”.* “From the outside it seemed as if Tschichold had replaced one belief system with the other with his about-turn [...], but for Tschichold this moment was traumatic,” writes Paul Rand years later about Tschichold’s rethink.* That the New Typography, i.e. he himself, had “thoughtlessly and erroneously assigned symmetrical design to the forms of expression of political absolutism”, he now saw as a mistake.
Tschichold still granted the New Typography that the value of the “efforts towards a typographic revolution” had been “that it purified the type setting pattern of dead elements, affirmed photography, renewed the rules of type setting, and gave numerous other fruitful impulses”, but he rejected its dogmatic radicalism.* “We saw aesthetic models in industrial products, mistakenly thought, as we would see later, that the grotesque was the simplest typeface and declared it modern.”
In doubt about the “naïve overestimation of so-called technical progress,” which shaped his own work between 1924 and about 1935, an essential characteristic of postmodernism already emerged at that time. “Whoever works in this way sees something exceptionally pleasing in the machine production of consumer goods, which is certainly a feature of the present. We cannot avoid producing and using such things. But it is not a question of simply surrounding them with a gloriole, because they are created in a continuous process and by exploiting the last rationalized methods.”*
Tschicholds view of industrial production, which had been glorified until then, and its supposed progressiveness turned into the opposite: machine production was not good or valuable simply because it was “modern”, much more it was “evil”. This development was no longer represented by the image of the technically refined, functionalist steel construction, but by the atomic bomb and so-called “retaliatory weapons”, heavy new weapons of war from which the Nazi regime had hoped for the “final victory” and which were also used against the civilian population.* Tschichold stressed, however, that his return to traditional forms was not a “typographic homeland style”, which would amount to a reversal of the belief in progress, “namely a sentimental flight into the irretrievably past.”
This radical change in the history of typography is testified to by the documents that in their entirety constitute the so-called “typographic dispute of modernity”. These are various essays by Jan Tschichold and Max Bill, in which “each of the two opponents bombarded the other with accusations of embracing Nazi aesthetics”. “This conflict of opinions was, simply put, about old and new, traditional and modern, commonly understood as symmetrical and asymmetrical typography or as typography with or without decorative additions. Max Bill, personally disappointed by the change of mind of the former pioneer of New Typography, saw the return to traditional typography as an attack on modernity. Bill, still a convinced modernist and representative of a further developed New Typography, compared Tschichold with a painter who ”began to express himself in reactionary forms after an interesting beginning that logically resulted from the contemporary world view”. Jan Tschichold, on the other hand, accuses Bill of “dogmatic stubbornness”. The fact that his conversion is classified as treason reinforces his view that the “struggle” of the modernists has traits of a sectarian religious matter, writes Hans Rudolf Bosshard in “Max Bill Kontra Jan Tschichold”.*
Because a large part of the German avant-garde had found refuge in Switzerland, their initiatives mingled with local progressive movements. After the war, this situation provided the basis for the development of “Swiss typography” and the resulting “International Typographic Style”.*
The earliest representatives of Swiss typography saw it as their task to expose the communicated information by removing all superfluous and subjective elements. In this way, the rational observer should be enabled to make uninfluenced and unbiased decisions.* This “Swiss style” of the 50s and 60s was marked by politically progressive ideals and also found enthusiastic supporters in the rest of Europe. While the Swiss representatives primarily used the old Haas-Grotesk, the German representatives of the Swiss style chose the similar Akzidenz-Grotesk that was already present in many local printershops.* The choice of typeface for this movement served as a sign of recognition among like-minded people and represented modernity and technology. In “Homage to a Typeface”, Lars Müller describes the goal of the Swiss style: to help people make better decisions through objective design, honest and functional communication.* Just like the then new works of Concrete Art, Swiss graphic design also glorified grids, programs and mathematical systems.Their representatives advocated anonymity, simplicity, order and clarity in design and rejected subjective and emotional-artistic approaches in favor of promoting pure information.*
The sans serif font embodied the “form follows function” principle that characterized modernism. In its smooth, sharp-edged form, reduced to the essentials, it presumably let information do all the talking.* The persistent search for a universal alphabet, a kind of holy grail of type design, seems from today’s perspective to be a reflection of the idealistic zeal and rationalistic obsession of the middle of the century.*
Around 1957, typefaces came onto the market which pushed Akzidenz Grotesk from its throne: Neue Haas Grotesk (later known as Helvetica) and Univers. Their gracefulness was even more unbiased and anonymous than that of their predecessor.* They also gave a younger generation the opportunity to distinguish themselves discreetly from the older generation while maintaining the same artistic attitude. Lars Müller writes that he learnt from his mentors Richard Paul Lohse and Josef Müller-Brockmann the rules and principles of functional design, which was dedicated to content with reduction and restriction. His preference for Helvetica was not a free choice, but a logical consequence, he says. Since Müller-Brockmann and Lohse had strictly used Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica had been the only way to set himself apart from them.*
About Helvetica in the International Style: In 1960, the typeface Neue Haas Grotesk was renamed Helvetica (Latin for “Swiss”) by the distributing Haas’schen Schriftgiesserei, a clever advertising gimmick that led to it becoming synonymous with Swiss design. As the epitome of unobtrusive precision, it found appeal in the corporate design of companies that wanted to communicate a concise and serious identity. The rapid integration of non-Latin writing systems into the Helvetica family and the large number of language-specific umlauts and accents made Helvetica the ultimate corporate typeface of the 60s and 70s.*
As in the Bauhaus, a socialist vision of neutrality and unity was pursued in Swiss typography. Helvetica’s popularity and polarizing symbolic power grew to such an extent over the years that Jonathan Barnbrook described it in 2013 as the best known representative of the neo-grotesque model, the “most ideologistic of all writing forms”.*
Lars Müller, too, associates Helvetica with ideology and writes that – if one wants to view it ideologically – it should be classified as socialist, since it is accessible to everyone.* Helvetica seems to polarize: To some it represents socialist-democratic values, objectivity and equality. To the others it is seen – above all because of its association with the International Style – as an evil symbol of a globalized neoliberalism with an intangible soulless ambivalence. There are two opposing perspectives on its creative universality and uniformity, which are understood either as utopian or dystopian.
“When it comes to typefaces I don’t need variety,” says Lars Müller about his favourite typeface Helvetica, “I remember as a child thinking that all cars were Volkswagens, that everybody smoked Gauloise, and that Sunday and chicken with french fries were inseparable. There was one television channel and vacations were always in the same place. I didn’t object to that either.”*
In Italy in 1966, under the direction of Aldo Novarese, the Societa Nebiolo type foundry designed its own zeitgeisty “universal” typeface. And as its name implied, Forma aimed to represent “the ideal letterforms of its time”, “as neutral and reserved as possible”, suitable for both continuous text and titles, and “attractive to graphic designers, art directors and printers alike”.* Franco Grignani, then a prominent figure in Milan’s graphic design scene and involved in the extensive production of Forma, formulated the mindset underlying the typeface: “We are typographers who use few typefaces, only those which represent the spirit, the architecture of modern graphics.”*
Nebiolo’s decision to develop its own “objective” sans-serif typeface as competition to Helvetica and Univers was based on a market analysis. The analysis revealed that there was still an unmet demand for a typeface “without any trace of calligraphy and with the potential to become a workhorse of contemporary graphic design”. “A consensus was reached to comply with the current trends and market expectations” and so the new Forma came into being. *
Otl Aicher was a representative of an advanced, humanistic modernism of the second half of the 20th century and one of the most influential German designers to this day. His attitude reflects a contradictory mixture of social commitment, anti-fascist social criticism and apodeictic design dogmas. Aicher considered typefaces to be highly political and a “treasure trove of cultural knowledge”. He saw the typographer’s creative decisions as a direct expression of moral and social attitudes: “the typographer is a homo politicus. even the question of ragged or block type setting will be an essential statement, in the small cosmos, as to whether the typographer is a follower of principles of order or principles of freedom. only those who advocate law and order prefer the central axis. and those who choose the central axis are, whether consciously or unconsciously, a person of ‘regulation’, of symmetrical unification.”*
In 1953 Otl Aicher, Inge Aicher-Scholl (sister of Hans and Sophie Scholl) and Max Bill together founded the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG), which saw itself as an indirect successor to the Bauhaus. Although Otl Aicher attributed great cultural importance to typefaces, the school he co-founded did not give any impetus to type design. There they were content with Akzidenz-Grotesk, Helvetica and Univers. One possible explanation for this could be that the Ulm school no longer saw itself as artistic-artisanal like the Bauhaus, but instead defined design through scientific theories. This attitude obstructed access to the teaching of the writing and drawing of letters. In addition, there was a conviction that the general demand for typefaces was saturated, as the supply was now sufficiently large.* Another theory on why the development of type design in West Germany came to a standstill, whereas it continued in Leipzig, was expressed at the 72nd Berlin Typostammtisch and goes, that it was the strong reluctance of the nationalistically connotated blackletter type that hindered a calligraphic culture and teaching in West Germany – and thus also a type design education based on it.
The Swiss style increasingly consolidated itself as an ideal, which began its triumphal march worldwide in the form of the International Style.* In 1960 the Neue Haas Grotesk was renamed Helvetica, a clever marketing strategy that led to the typeface becoming the general symbol of Swiss design. Embodying unobtrusive precision, its attributes were well received by companies looking to convey a concise and serious identity.* An additional advantage of Helvetica was its wide range of language-specific characters and the rapid adaptation of non-Latin characters into the typeface family. This made it the perfect font for companies worldwide. Another aspect of the international success of the rational Swiss design was its apparent objectivity, which made it attractive and easy to copy. Thus, the “International Swiss Style” shaped visual communication until the 1970s through continuous adaptation to social changes, to which technical innovations such as the introduction of phototypesetting contributed.* Helvetica embodied the modern mission of democratizing visual communication. After its introduction, first in Europe, then in the USA, it became the readable, versatile and discreet typeface of choice for companies worldwide. But according to Steven Heller and A. M. Cassandre in their essay The Meanings of Type, Helvetica’s neutrality proved to be a double-edged sword, and the democratic and pleasing character of this typeface was often abused to gloss over dishonest corporate communications and give advertising promises a rational touch.*
Because advocates of advanced modernism idealized Helvetica as ultimately close to the perfection of type design, they largely rejected new type designs as superfluous and unnecessary.
One famous proclaimed modernist, Paul Rand, admitted that “there are as many letter variants as there are different tools”, quoting Eric Gill. But although Rand accepted the basically infinite possibilities of form in theory, he was nevertheless critical of the addition of new typefaces to an already exuberant range, as long as they were not “really new”. In his opinion, however, this would only apply to one in a hundred new designs. At the same time, however, he also saw a fundamental need for improvement in some fonts and criticized Berthold Bodoni’s “low x-height, protruding ascenders and descenders, exaggerated line width contrast and uninteresting mechanical serifs”.*
Massimo Vignelli was a staunch advocate of modernist design principles and an opponent of a new style of design that emerged with the home computer and quickly gained popularity. In the contemporary debate, he was a polemic custodian of classical modernist values, describing typography set with a Macintosh as the worst form of visual mess humanity had ever experienced. He opposed the new trend with a design that felt “pure and noble”.* A famous quote from Vignelli expresses his views: “In the new computer age, the proliferation of typefaces and type manipulations represents a new level of visual pollution threatening our culture. Out of thousands of typefaces, all we need are a few basic ones, and trash the rest.”*
Michael Bierut, who was an employee of Vignellis for the first ten years of his career, recapitulates that time: “Between 1980 and 1990, most of my projects were set in five fonts: Helvetica (naturally), Futura, Garamond#3, Century Expanded, and, of course, Bodoni.” For Vignelli this was an ideological choice, even an “ethical imperative”. It was also very time-saving: “Why spend hours choosing among Bembo, Sabon, and Garamond#3 every time you needed a Venetian Roman? For most people [...] these were distinctions without differences. Why not just commit to Garamond#3 and never think about it again?” Interestingly, Bierut connects his attitude towards this typography, which he associates with “monogamy” and “sobriety”, with his upbringing: “My Catholic school education must have well prepared me for this kind of moral clarity. I accepted it gratefully.” In contrast, Bierut describes his creative phase, which followed the time of his activity for Vignelli and which was marked by the use of particularly many typefaces, as “slutty” and “promiscuous”.* Vignelli and Bierut thus provide a vivid example of the relationship between formal aesthetics and moral concepts.
The cultural and social atmosphere changed in the mid-1960s. “Pop and drugs, graffiti and flower power took the stage by storm, while protesting youth in Europe and the United States occupied streets and squares. The revolutionary posters and pamphlets that appeared in Paris in May 1968 reflected a new imaginative style. In the seventh decade of the last century, after 500 years, the end of lead typesetting and a new typographic era were heralded.”*
Between the conservative-dogmatic modernists and the anti-modernists, another typographic movement was also formed in the 1960s that represented a further developed understanding of modernism. Her representatives felt more oppressed than liberated by the established modernist ideology and left more room for the designer’s personal expression in their designs. Although this was not a revolution — they still saw themselves as professional representatives of Modernism — it was a clear reaction against the hard rules of their predecessors.
The Dutch designer Wim Crouwel was at the forefront of this movement in 1969 with his poster “Visuele Communicatie Nederland” for the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Crouwel owes his nickname “Gridnik” to his preference for design with screens. The more expressive use of technical-looking fonts marked the sensational shift away from the modernist code and created an example of a new typography.*
Although Crouwel himself broke with conservative rules, he also feared the erosion of the graphic design discipline by superficial fashions and dilettantism. For Crouwel, “dilettantism” meant the use of the visual language of the “common man,” such as the “non-design” of action groups and citizens’ initiatives — a visuality declared as a new ideal form by some postmodernist designers. Crouwel’s ideal though was to enable precise, timeless and consistent communication through graphic design, which is why he saw his work outside the trend-oriented, dominant advertising and pop culture. Crouwel condemned instinctive design and the lack of distance of the designer through any kind of over-identification with the content. Both allegedly interfere with perfect communication and are therefore undesirable.*
In 1972, in an influential debate, two “giants of Dutch graphic design” and each convinced representative of the two prominent, contrary design philosophies encountered each other. In this debate, the modernist Wim Crouwel was accused by his postmodernist counterpart Jan van Toorn of his rationalized design approach always leading to uniform results under the sacrifice of all individual expression: “By giving the same design response in all situations, you produce work of great uniformity, in which any sense of identity is lost. In my opinion, however, identity is a most essential feature of all human contact, including the communication of any kind of message.” *
Wolfgang Weingart was another pioneer of the new era and a forerunner of a style called Swiss Punk or New Wave, depending on the context. Himself a student of the Swiss School and later a teacher in Basel, he was “determined not to be intimidated by the restrictive conventions of a typography of Swiss Modernism, which, in his opinion, was bound to orthodox thinking and formulaic approaches.”* Even though Weingart worked as a typographer and not as a type designer, he is worthy of note here, as his work illustrates a change that took place between the rational concepts of the first half of the 20th century and the more expressive practices of the second half.
In Texte zur Typografie Petra Eisele and Isabel Naegele write that at the end of the 1960s scientific, social and technical changes led to innovations in typography. From a design-theoretical perspective, what had been achieved was questioned and discussed more and more vehemently from this point on. According to the authors, the spectrum of criticism ranged from the idea of an “extended functionalism” to anti-functionalist statements and manifestos that were characterized by a new sensuality and emotionality.*
Another trend around that time were gimmicky inflated and shadowed typefaces. The fat Gill Sans and Cooper Black exploded in popularity among advertising agencies. Designers trumped each other in using fatter and fatter fonts, downright inflating them. These types had been absent since the Second World War, but now diffused from the pop scene into advertising.*
In the period from 1950 to 1980 phototypesetting was the predominant typesetting technique. The advanced technology was significantly cheaper than lead typesetting methods and caused rapid changes in the industry. “This breakthrough to a variety of typeface variations is not least the result of the rapidly emerging phototypesetting technique, which allows, indeed almost demands, an ever-increasing range of typefaces, since the production costs of a film are in no way comparable to the costs once required to produce a new lead stencil set,” wrote Adrian Frutiger in 1978 in “Der Mensch und seine Zeichen”. * The new freedoms of phototypesetting seduced the designers to use excessively narrow typesetting. “Kissing Setting” (touching letters), “Sexy Setting” (overlapping letters) and the extreme reduction of line spacing, in which ascenders and descenders interlocked, were considered chic.* The new technical opportunities inspired the design of many new display typefaces in the 1960s and 70s.*
But technological advancement did not only bring new opportunities, but also new challenges and limitations. Another technical novelty in the 1960s were new, faster typesetting machines introduced by the companies Monotype and Linotype. Together with the Stempel company, they approached Jan Tschichold with the task of designing a typeface that would work on the three different typesetting systems of the companies. While Stempel still needed stencils for manual typesetting, the limitations of the typesetting machines at Monotype and Linotype meant that the typeface had to meet different requirements. Taking these systems into account when creating the typeface was a major design challenge, and many of the typeface’s characteristics were the result of compromises. “The width of the letters was determined by the 18 units available from Monotype [...] the Linotype system could not undercut [...] Linotype’s double matrices [required] that the upright and italic forms of a letter be the same width.” Furthermore, the deutsche Normallinie, which served to establish a uniform alignment for the use of fonts from different type houses, but “primarily took into account the blackletter fonts with their small descenders”, meant that there was little room for the descenders of Antiqua typefaces also. The elaborate production of the lead typefaces required that Tschichold only produced the templates, which were then drawn and reworked by a whole team for typesetting in practically every size. Within this tedious process, deviations from the original design template were likely to occur.*
In the 70s and 80s, commercial typography experienced a pronounced wave of nostalgia, with which “all forms of typography that had been frowned upon in our country for years resurfaced: central axis, small capitals, frames, lines, font mixes and initials”. The Antiqua celebrated its return in the form of the Times New Roman, which began a “triumphal march almost comparable to that of Helvetica”. With this typographic neoclassicism, “nobility, dignity, pathos” returned – “terms for which the design world for decades had nothing but mockery and ridicule”.*
In Anarchie der Zeichen: Grafik-Design von den Achtzigern bis heute Rick Poynor writes that it was primarily the loss of belief in the ideal of progress that distinguished postmodernism from modernism. The firm belief in continuous human progress through intellect and science is rooted in the Enlightenment of the 18th century. The advocates of the Enlightenment saw it as an irrefutable fact that there was only one true answer to every question. Their conclusion “that a rationally structured world order was possible if it could be represented correctly” presupposed “that there was only one form of representation which, if we could discover it [...] would provide us with the means for the purposes of enlightenment”. The postmodern thought, in turn, excluded such claims to absoluteness. The belief in totalizing systems, in universal values or solutions was rejected.
“The representatives of postmodernism look with disbelief at the [...] claims to the great or meta-narratives that try to explain the world and steer man through religion, science, or politics. Postmodern design challenged previous authorities and rules and turned to the aesthetics of countercultures, the informal, the flawed, and the aesthetics of everyday life. A creative current — the so-called grunge — visually recalled the aesthetics of the previous punk movement. ”Grunge, like punk, was energetic, disrespectful, angry (or perhaps it just seemed angry), and sprang from the subcultural milieu, even if it did not last. The clean grid of modernity was rejected by the nihilism of industrial youth culture“, writes Rick Poynor.*
In the 1980s and 1990s, all the rules of classical type design and typography that had previously been considered sacred and inviolable were under attack. Type design and typography were democratized and desacralized, comparable to the developments of the 19th century. These provocations occurred in their most extreme and visible forms in the USA, the home of the most resolute advocates of the new digital typographic freedoms.
This iconoclastic design generated an enormous controversy among designers and polarized – often along the generational divide – supporters and opponents. The new ideas and styles spread rapidly and in the mid-1990s they were a firmly established trend. This trend was not only present in countless student works, but also in magazine design, the music industry, fashion and other areas of youth culture. The most intensive experimental phase took place at the end of the 80s and in the early 90s. Everywhere, designers adapted to the changing working methods through the new design possibilities of the home computer. Since this new way of working could not be summarized under a single label, various terms such as New Wave, Postmodernism, Deconstructivism and Grunge were used to characterize forms of design that questioned and rejected established forms of typographical practice.*
Behind these developments was the conviction that conventional typography was inadequate to express the complexities of life and cultures of the late 20th century. The typographers of this New Wave were particularly disturbed by the idea, embodied in post-war modernist Swiss typography, that design had to be neutral, flawless and objective, and that a consistently functionalist treatment of type was best suited to fulfilling social needs. The “International Style”, which emerged from Swiss Modernism, was so popular in the USA of the 60s and 70s that it developed into the predominant aesthetic of North American companies. In the late 70s some American designers got tired of it. This ubiquitous style was perceived as a stranglehold that forcefully brought visual language into line and suppressed expressive creativity.*
While the first New Wave works by Californian April Greiman, who had been a student of Wolfgang Weingart in Basel in the early 1970s, were still based on an understanding of Swiss typography, her subsequent floating typographic islands defined a space that was subjective, elastic, changeable, symbolic, and emotionally charged. During this period, subcultural design, mainly from the magazine and music fields, also represented an alternative typography to the mainstream.*
The anarchic, sometimes narcissistic work of many designers was not only a revolting gesture against the dominant creative style, but was often directed against the establishment as such. Punk typography of the 70s and 80s had been the forerunner for this, in which methods of inexpensive reproduction were part of a rebellion against social norms and produced an inimitable style. However some experts doubt the existence of social visions and concepts in punk and the subsequent styles, such as the New Wave, which in the first half of the 20th century had formed the basis of most creative efforts. For design as such, these currents, in which creative self-love had taken precedence over the social responsibility of the typographer, had earned the reputation of the apolitical. Nevertheless, new formal approaches in which the style would already represent a manifesto were able question previous design perspectives and initiate discussions, as punk typography has proven. Nevertheless, the self-proclaimed “creative rebellion” usually lacked content-related and thus political reflection. Therefore the novel movements did not cause more than a scratching on the visual surface of the status quo. In a nutshell, the claim to artistic-formal freedom and the self-referential gesture could be described as essential features of postmodern typography.*
The trait shared by the many visual strategies of this new postmodern typography was its common storm on the highest and most sacred of all typographic commandments, on readability. The modernism of the Swiss school composed orderly, linear, well-tempered messages using supposedly objective and expressionless sans serif fonts. But the new style rebelled against this “bloodless neutrality” and justified its own experiments with the argument that no typeface was readable by nature. Instead, in the words of Zuzana Ličko, it is “the reader’s familiarity with a font that makes it readable.”*
In Schriften zur Typografie, Petra Eisele and Isabel Naegele summarize the new concepts underlying the emergence of postmodern positions: “Especially after insights from linguistics had been transferred to the field of design, new ‘postmodern’ positions could be developed on the design theoretical level. The realization that all forms – including those of a reduced design – are charged with very different contents of meaning, as it were, led ad absurdum the idea of an objective design derived purely from its purpose and a ‘neutral’ design. The influence of linguistic knowledge can already be clearly felt in the seventies [...]. Accordingly, the conviction prevailed that typographic elements are also involved in the formation of meaning content – they serve as a ‘semiotic resource’: even without knowledge of the content of a text, the character of a script, its arrangement, technical execution and material presence ‘speaks’ volumes in the truest sense of the word. [...] Ultimately, every detail of design, such as line length, line spacing, as well as the choice of format and paper, is involved in the construction of meaning. [...] The interplay between socio-political and new (media) technological developments finally led to new ‘postmodern’ positions. They not only questioned typographical conventions, which were now perceived as too rigid a set of rules, but ultimately led them ad absurdum.[…]«*
The rejection of modernism in the 1980s also led to a rebellion against Helvetica, a typeface that had embodied commercial modernist typography for over two decades. One solution to Helvetica’s global ubiquity was a typeface as far removed from objectivity as possible: Remedy, designed by Frank Heine and published by the independent Foundry Emigre. With its sweeping baseline, arbitrary ornamentation, and consistent plumpness, Remedy seemed nothing more than a scribble. It was as personal as a handwriting, without actually formally imitating a handwriting. In an act of rebellion against the prevailing sans serif aesthetic, designers longed to celebrate free creativity in their digital typefaces. The design ideal of universality admired by the modernists lay diametrically opposed to a more contemporary quest for an aesthetic of cultural individuality and diversity in the more recent understanding of design.*
One famous and influtential US-American type foundry was founded in 1984 by Zuzana Ličko and Rudy VanderLans. Emigre was one of the first independent and digital font publishers, paving the way for new ways in font distribution – independent of large corporations such as Monotype – for all the indiependent small type foundries that are around today. Zuzana and Rudy also published the influential eponymous magazine to showcase their typefaces and to give a platform for postmodern design voices, pioneering progressive desktop publishing and digital typography alongside Neville Brody and David Carson. The Emigre magazine was published with a total of 69 issues between 1984 and 2005.*
At the time, young postmodernist designers questioned the existence of a natural ideal form and felt the need to break with the developments of the recent past.* Historical retrospect revealed that legibility was above all a matter of habit: For instance, while in pre-war Germany blackletter type was the common, dominant choice, it was now perceived as very difficult to read. Or the typeface Baskerville from 1757, at the time considered unspeakable and unreadable, was now considered one of the most suitable typefaces for typesetting long texts. The observation of these shifts contradicted the modernist idea of the one perfect typeface. For this reason the postmodernists dropped this notion and designed extreme counterpositions with stubborn and unconditionally subjective typefaces.*
With the establishment of digital design processes in the early 1990s, many graphic designers became weary of the perfect, immaculate surfaces so easily produced by the computer and grew fond of the more challenging idea of returning the appearance of the typography and the letterforms to the rough world of physical processes through digital manipulation. “Letters for which perfect forms and exact technology had been sought for centuries were scratched, bent, struck and contaminated.”* Type designers strove for the formal equivalent of a “colloquial gutter language”*. Postmodern typography found formal inspiration in the field of the “vernacular”, the amateuristic ordinary everyday design. According to Rick Poynor, the attractiveness of this design form lay “in its authentic effect, the impression that it expressed the natural, unalienated expression of local feelings and concerns – without being branded by the strategies, marketing pressures, [artificial] smoothness, and calculatedness associated with the professional design elite”. Like the contemporary designer Tibor Kalman said: “We are interested in everyday graphics because they are the purest, the most honest, the most immediate form of communication.”*
California and in particular the California Institute of the Arts, “CalArts”, played a special role in the contemporary development of graphic design in the 1980s and 1990s. Jeff Keedy, then professor at CalArts, defended the “technological ecstasy” that prevailed in design in the 80s and 90s: “It’s not possible to create new typography with old typefaces. Why do so many typographers try to achieve the impossible – a new typography with old fonts.”* About his typeface Keedy Sans, which Emigre Fonts has been promoting since 1990 by “deliberately breaking with expectations”, Keedy says it was “a typically postmodern working strategy to draw attention to errors and artificial measures in one’s own structure”.* The aim was to encourage many different readings, rather than just one, to challenge the reader to become an active participant in the construction of the message. Late modernist typography called for a reduction in complexity and clarification of content. The new typographers, on the other hand, enjoyed the ambiguity and preferred provisional formulations and alternative attitudes to a well-formulated phrase. “If someone interprets my work in a way that is totally new to me, I say fine,” said Jeff Keedy at the time. “That way your work has a life of its own. You create a situation for people to do with it what they will, and you don’t create an enclosed or encapsulated moment.”*
Also in 1990, CalArts graduate Barry Deck published the soon-to-be authoritative typeface of the new decade Template Gothic. It was based on a similar idea to Keedy Sans and was deliberately imperfect to “depict the imperfect language of an imperfect world,” as Deck put it.* For Template Gothic, an extremely popular, even “epochal” typeface, Barry Deck was inspired by a sign in a laundromat. Deck intended the writing to look as if it had been distorted by photomechanical reproduction.* He referred to Beatrice Warde’s metaphor of the crystal goblet when he declared it his goal to replace the “myth of the transparency of typographic form” with a more realistic attitude that recognizes that form carries an inherent meaning.*
In 1991, Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft founded the experimental and influential typography magazine Fuse.* Propelling the ideals of the avant-garde, Brody and Wozencroft wrote with passionate rhetoric. By designing typefaces that did not aim at functionality, Brody and Wozencroft saw themselves as fighters against the repressive typographic establishment. The typefaces ranged from purely formal exercises to completely abstract forms, independent of the construction of the Latin alphabet, which were announced as “new forms of writing”. The fonts in Fuse Magazine were strangely diverse, making any recognition of selection criteria difficult.*
In Fuse magazine, defiant typefaces such as Tobias Frere-Jones Reactor (Fuse 7) were found, uninhibitedly, in which each additional character written increasingly soiled the preceding lines with a disturbing noise ( “the more you type, the worse it gets ...”). According to graphic designer Michael Rock, these type experiments are particularly interesting because of their strong connection between form and idea. Another example is Paul Elliman’s performative font F Alphabet (Fuse 5). This was produced, together with 26 participants who represented the letters, in a photo booth. This type of experimental type called into question both the concept of mechanical repetition and the weighting of formal decisions and the linguistic imponderables of the medium.*
Postmodernism produced a new type of designer in both architecture and graphic design, who achieved a new degree of fame through strong self-marketing. “An architect like Rem Koolhaas does not simply build buildings; he works at least as intensively on staging himself as a socio-critical thinker. Building only functional, aesthetically pleasing buildings is not enough. Peter Eisenman was able to integrate star philosophers like Jacques Derrida in order to ennoble his designs with a deconstruction of ‘architectural metaphysics’, as he called it.”* The concept of self-portrayal as an intellectual critic of society was already present in Edward Johnston and the modernists of the Bauhaus, but has now become an essential aspect in the works and appearances of some designers.
With the chaotic layouts of the magazines Beach Culture (1989 – 1991), Surfer (1991 – 1992), and Ray Gun (1992 – 1995), David Carson developed new Bibles for an entire generation of designers. His rise to become the “rebel and rock star” of the design world can be described as characteristically postmodern.* Carson shared the convictions of the designers of Cranbrook and CalArts and also explained that the rationalism of grid systems and other forms of typographic formatting was terribly irrational given the complexity of the contemporary world. “Perhaps you unconsciously do certain things to annoy someone – some of me see no plausible reason for accepting so many design rules. Maybe that’s why I haven’t dedicated myself to many of them either. [...] I’m not against schools of design, but when I began to take an interest in design, I didn’t know these rules, and I was simply fascinated by the manifestations and impressions it made on me.”* David Carson described the linear reception of texts as “conservative mainstream” and countered it with a design that made the reader struggle her way through to the content – and theorized this practice with the term “interactive reading behavior. Some experts doubt that the Californian surf subculture of the 90s, to which Carson belonged, had a pronounced political claim: ”I don’t think there was any surfer at the time who had a political self-image that went beyond a separation from bourgeois life. Carson’s magazines were weird and cool, but nothing more,“writes Jean Ulysses Voelker.*
The postmodern typeface design smashed Beatrice Warde’s typographic concept of the crystal goblet and drew attention to the typefaces themselves through a deliberate intrusiveness.* Like Carson and van Toorn, the Dutch studio Dumbar proclaimed the philosophy that neither the execution nor the reception of design should be simple. Instead, the reader of the message was to be forced to think about what they saw. The radical approach to communication sought to allow the viewer of a text to participate in it, to exert it, and to emphasize the construction of meaning. Radical typography aimed not to flow seamlessly legibly, but to interrupt and disrupt, to expose meanings and language as inherently problematic.* Undoubtedly, according to Rick Poynor, the “adventurous visual experience” of the new design approach “also represents a social resistance against any form of authority imposed from outside”.* The “rational approach” advocated by the modernists conditions and programs the public sphere, is neither neutral nor objective, and does not sufficiently cover the aspects of the meaning and identity of the message and the sender, according to the poststructuralist Jan van Toorn. The modernist method is technocratic and leads to great uniformity without being able to do justice to individual mentalities. Van Toorn was convinced that the use of chaos and everyday images improved communication with the public, leaving the viewer and reader room for their own opinions about the news. Design should empower the ability to criticize and to participate.*
The theorists of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, another influential school in the postmodern discussion of the mid-1970s*, derived their goals from French philosophy and literary theory. The reader should be provoked to become an active participant in the construction and deconstruction of the message. The manipulative visual language and the various levels of meaning embodied in a design were to be deconstructed, broken apart and revealed. Just as a literary critic can deconstruct and decode the verbal language of a novel.**
The visual style associated with these theoretical positions could be described as “postmodern deconstructed”.* The development of this visual style, from which the grunge emerged, was not dictated by the design theorists. Rather, through analytical processes, new ways had been sought to encourage the readership to participate and to reveal meanings, so that the readers could be involved in the construction and interpretation of the message. It was precisely this approach that was put into practice. The freedom of personal interpretation was often used to explain how the magazine Ray Gun and other related works attracted the attention of their audiences. Thus, Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller noted that the emphasis on openness of meaning by poststructuralism was integrated by many designers into a romantic theory of self-expression. Their logic was that designers and readers share the spontaneous creation of meaning, since meaning is not firmly inscribed in material forms. Interpretations are private and personal and are based on the unique sensitivity of the designer or reader. Such a view could, however, be used to justify just about anything, and in practice it was often the case that critical thinking in the observer would have been discouraged rather than encouraged.*
At the time when the computer was just beginning its triumphal march, Andrea Tinnes was first a student at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences in Germany, then at the aforementioned CalArts and later worked at Jeff Keedy’s studio. Looking back, she describes that at the time “the digital revolution and postmodernism [...] were on everyone’s lips in the field of graphic design”. Emigre, Eye Magazine, Ray Gun and Typography Now, “then the Bible for many students,” had a strong impact. Tinnes emphasizes that the CalArts’ graphic design program was often wrongly accused of pursuing a purely superficial exploration of form and visual language. Instead, in contrast to the education in Germany, “the teaching of design theory and history there took place at a high level”. “Both theoretically and practically, historically and contemporary, one exchanged views on all facets of typography and graphic design and reflected on the discipline.”*
Even in the more moderate and commercial realms, the zeitgeist demanded a change from the “too neutral” Helvetica design. New alternatives that gained popularity in the 1990s were the somewhat more characterful humanistic sans serifs, such as Rotis (1988) by Otl Aicher, Meta (1991) by Erik Spiekermann and TheSans (1994) by Luc de Groot. “The first time I heard the term ‘humanist’ in the context of typography was in the form of Erik Spiekermann’s Meta, a sans serif that was the perfect non-Helvetica typeface [...]”, font designer Stefán Kjartansson writes in the article What is a Humanist Typeface?. It had the discipline of the Akzidenz-Grotesk faces while being less sculpted, with a much softer, expressionist and crafted touch.”*
Among the representatives of classical typographic concepts, postmodern or poststructuralist design was met with scant affection. Otl Aicher explained that when “typographic signs are only used as a treasure trove of graphic material for symbols and textures, the font is reduced to a purely aesthetic object”, without any function beyond that.*
In 1995, design critic Kevin Fenton wrote in the essay “The New Typographer Muttering In Your Ear” about the jury of a contemporary design competition and their comments on the selection of winning works. Fenton doubted the meanings of the postmodern buzzwords that the jury lined up. They praised a design that “participates in the meaningful dialectic of deconstructivism,” “challenges our way of reading,” and refuses to “breathe the spent air of consumerism and technology,” thereby “infiltrating meanings and enabling alternative readings”. Fenton accuses that although the word “subversive” has been used several times, it remains unclear what was the object or goal of this subversion, except for the “traditional hierarchy of text and image” and the need for it. Fenton concludes with the impression that formal-aesthetic destruction has degenerated into an end in itself, which in his eyes, however, is nothing more than pure vandalism without any good reason.*
While deconstructive design in the 1980s was a semi-subcultural, seemingly largely subversive activity, mainly carried out in isolated university greenhouses and observed with deep mistrust by most professionals, in the early 1990s this style was ready for popular assimilation.* And the postmodern style seemed to be just perfectly made for arrangement. John Zerzan, a member of the capitalism-critical magazine Adbuster, describes postmodernism as “culture of no resistance”. According to him, it celebrates “the transient flow, states of the boundless and the violation of rules”. Postmodernism would share these values with the most passionate architects of consumerism and capitalist globalization.* Both the accused formal superficiality and the compatibility of postmodern design with the neoliberal consumerism system seem to be confirmed by the fact that many of its renowned “subversive” pioneers were now working for the usual suspects among the large capitalist corporations: For example, Barry Deck (designer of Template Gothic) for Coca Cola.* Or David Carson for Pepsi, Nike, and Microsoft.*
Rick Poynor regards Jonathan Barnbrook’s design as an example of his doubts about the socially critical position of postmodernism: “Does the critical significance of a Barnbrook design lie [...] in the presence of simple copy lines, as ‘Virus says, stops American cultural imperialism’ – even though the design itself embodies a seductively spectacular surplus that is characteristic of this colonization process? Any attempt to argue that his poster design ironically turns the things portrayed to make its case strong is countered by the fact that all Barnbrook works have the same recognizable look. So his complicit critique seems to be postmodern through and through: he means what he says and cannot escape the prevailing cultural conditions at the same time.”* Outside the scientific arena, one agrees, Poynor writes, that “postmodernism has followed the fate of so many other intellectual fashions. Many people have never understood the true meaning of postmodernism, and even benevolent initiates have their doubts”.*
The peaks of modernism and poststructuralism are now behind us and we are entering a new world in which we try to learn from our predecessors, to critically question them and reassemble their legacy, the components of their spiritual and creative heritage. Today the modernist quest for the timeless design — and with this the promise of the conclusion of style history — seems obsolete, as much as any totalitarian dogma and absolute solution. The postmodern surprise effect of the new digital tools as well has been exhausted and the general interest of the type design avant garde shifts back again towards the design of typefaces for longer reading texts. Today, type designers still share the concerns of some predecessors from the past decades, but the on average the current approach is less expressive and more concern is directed on the micrographic level of type design again. *.
In the following, the historical period in which we currently find ourselves, and the dominant creative currents connected with it, will be described with the term “metamodernist” — freely after the cultural theorists Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker. One characteristic of metamodernism is the unanimous preference for pluralism, which in our case means the assumption that there are many different but equally valid design practices and results.*
Another aspect of metamodernism is the realisation of the humanist misconception, that humankind would be just inches away from accumulating all possible wisdom, from solving the world formula. Looking back at the past — even looking around in the present — teaches us that it would be an error to believe that the peak of knowledge and cognition has now been — or will ever be — reached. Today’s branch of modernity is still “much less enlightened than it assumes”, writes cultural scientist Hartmut Böhme. In the belief of having finally become reasonable through the accumulation of knowledge, today it is overlooked that “in the interior of [our] world the fetishism is flourishing more bizarrely than ever before”. “Food and sex fetishism, the pop-modern star cult and the sacralization of the automobile, idol worship in sport and the pleasure economy of consumption are testimony to pre-modern energies that we believed we had overcome, float through all systematic levels of modern society.”*
The predominant, undogmatic pluralism in metamodernism also permits neoclassical tendencies again. This is for example connected to Robert Bringhurst’s demand in The Elements of Typographic Style for a new appreciation of the minuscule figures that have been rationalized away by the modernists. In a comparison of the uppercase and lowercase numerals, Bringhurst writes that the latter are a sign of sophistication. They stand for the fact that “dollars (numbers) are not really twice as important as ideas (words)” and that numbers should not be afraid of encountering words at eye level.*
In typographical literature the rhetorical personification of individual typographical characters, treating the glyph like a living being, can be found quite frequently. Good examples for this are texts by the above-mentioned Robert Bringhurst or Erik Spiekermann. To attribute human-like characteristics to a visual form may sound romanticizing, but it also suggests extending and derivating the author’s social ideals towards arguments for creative-formal solutions.
Bringhurst also elaborates the origins of the loss of reputation of the “old” minuscule figures: In the time when “modernism was preached as a sacred duty, numbers were deified”. The commandment was radical simplicity and many efforts were made to reduce the Latin alphabet. While this would not have left any lasting traces on the letters, the modernist campaign against numerical diversity was immediately more successful. Typewriters soon appeared only with the “modern” capitals. The typewriter developed into the computer keyboard and the minuscule digit became a rarity.*
The categorical rejection of new typefaces, as represented by the late modernists such as Massimo Vignelli or the Ulm School, seems to have been overcome today. Rather than rejecting new fonts in a generalizing way, today the questions of their respective added value and uniqueness are more in the foreground: “Does the font add something to what already exists or is it just a generic variation?”* Today we assume – and this is both disappointment and hope – that there will be no such thing as the perfect universal font that is appropriate in all situations and cultures, and that there will always be a need for coordinated communication, taking into account the local culture and the voice of the sender.*
The postmodernist quest for creative representation and identification may perhaps be the main driving force behind new type designs today. The wheel of re-innovation is kept running by the proverbial phenomenon “familiarity breeds contempt”. The overused typefaces, which we are tires of looking at, fall victim to this wheel, while it lets new typefaces (or the typefaces that we have not seen for some time) ascend. The demarcation from the supposedly worn and tired typefaces leads to the constant creation of new typefaces or the revival of old typefaces. Well-known examples of typefaces that at some point were getting outlawed by the general design-minded public majority include Papyrus, Comic Sans, Brush Script, Gotham, Helvetica, Arial and Times New Roman.*
It is interesting to note that personal aversion to typefaces is still often justified by poor legibility, which would have to be a relatively weak argument when considering the history of type and probably serves more to rationalize a subjective, personal dislike. The majority typefaces are not suitable for the typesetting of extensive texts, but are nevertheless frequently used succesfully in other sorroundings and therefore still have a right to exist.* The range of typefaces offered by current operating systems and text editing programs contributes its part to the overuse of certain fonts, but at the same time creates a broader awareness of precisely this effect.* A humorous example of nonspecialist type criticism is a sketch of the US-american comedy show Saturday Night Live on the use of papyrus on the poster for James Cameron’s popular feature film Avatar.* Not to mention the commonplace that Comic Sans is used in abundance and usually involuntarily comically.
Robert Bringhurst illustrates the appropriateness of different typefaces by comparing that some typefaces are more like bread, others more like cake.* That the proven architectural metaphor in this case has been replaced by a culinary one may be due to the acceptance of a new and greater diversity of typefaces. Kris Sowersby also finds himself in the kitchen in his essay Why we need new Typefaces. He longs for “variety – even novelty – in our diets”. He compares new interpretations of historical typefaces with “recipes handed down from generation to generation, adapted and updated according to available ingredients, technology and prevailing fashion”. And just as with food, there would be “different categories of typefaces for specific situations and occasions.” Sowersby rejects the idea that there is the one final form of writing and understands type design as a continuous discipline through which one expresses what priorities, aspirations and worldviews a culture has.*
In Peter Biľaks Essay We don’t need new fonts ... from 2011 he reflects on the legitimacy and motivation to create new typefaces. Biľak notes that not despite, but precisely because of the excellent conditions for designing and publishing fonts today – he even speaks of a “golden age of type design” – the vast majority of new fonts are at best mediocre, usually uninspired, unambitious, unoriginal, of inferior quality and simply superfluous. He uses the rule of thumb of his colleague Erik van Blokland “if an existing typeface does the job, there is no reason to make a new one” and denies this self-designation to many font designers: “Many people drawing type today have solid drawing skills, but no desire to advance the field (let alone rebel against it) by creating original solutions. Can we call them type designers? I think not [...]” Biľak explains that our concepts and ideas are at least as important as the form we choose to express them. Despite the flood of inferior typefaces, he formulates a clear current task for type designers: “Still, there are typefaces which haven’t been made yet and which we need. Type that reacts to our present reality rather than being constrained by past conventions; type for non-Latin scripts that gives its users more choices; type that brings readers from previous media to new ones. It is time to think about why we design type, not just how we design it.”*
It’s vital to emphasize Biľak’s notion of design’s duty to react to our current reality. A look at the history of origins of today’s widespread and generally known typefaces such as Bodoni, Times or Futura shows how much they are children of a certain time and a certain spirit. We must not unthinkingly regard these designs from the past as concluded, perfect, absolute or even as normal. We must not imitate these passed-down types without analyzing, questioning, challenging them. Instead, our own reality must be examined and appropriate creative consequences developed. Otherwise we blindly trust in the presumed decisions of our predecessors and run the risk of reproducing their wrong conclusions or applying outdated solutions to new problems.
In the foreword to the exhibition catalogue Frische Schriften from 2004, it is stated, with a look at the new typefaces on display, that especially “a younger generation [...] increasingly perceives flexibility and formability – once a hallmark of typefaces such as [...] Univers and Helvetica – as restraint and thus as deficiency”. In architecture, “less is more”, a model of minimalist modernism, would have been polemically reformulated by Robert Venturi into “less is a bore”. A similar turn seems to have taken place in the field of type design, the author notes with a view to the last decades.* However, it is to be assumed that the expressive will always represent only one possibility among others. There would indeed be a newly emerging interest in the principles of classicism around 1800, but without the “retour à l’ordre”, as had been the case in view of neoclassical tendencies around 1920.* These observations are underlined by Ludovic Balland’s statement in the same publication. He was disturbed by the concept of neutrality, invisibility and transparency of typefaces such as Univers or Frutiger. Instead, he prefers a statement and is more interested in the ruptures with “neutrality through perfection” that have existed since the 1960s.* At the same time, Francois Rappo observes a reappraisal of the “legacy of the outstanding achievements of the 50s to 70s, Univers, Helvetica, Syntax, Frutiger” among type designers. In the post-modern climate of the 1990s, the complexity in design and development was underestimated. However, this in turn would have been part of the “necessary renewal of a critical discussion on the massification of communication”.* The certain recognition that Rappo gives to the two opposing design attitudes is characteristic of the current, eclectic, metamodernist view.
In his book Counterpunch, Fred Smeijers looks with mixed feelings at the latest developments in type design. The design trade has evolved into a stage where young designers have dared to put on “fool’s masks” to play the role of the clown. At first their results would have been amusing, sometimes challenging, but this coin would have two sides: Meanwhile, this stage is full of mask-wearing people who think the masks are true faces.* According to Smeijers, today, there are no rules, no strong social movements or ideologies that produce clear attitudes or firm beliefs. So now everyone can do what he wants. Every attitude and every style would have its place. This makes evaluation more difficult and throws us back to the essential: the limitations of the human body, perception and usability.* But Smeijers also has hopes for the younger currents, which would have loosened up the typographic scene. Young and more radical designers today would have no obstacle to creating a climate in which prejudices, habits, rites and dogmas could be questioned and disregarded.*
In 1978, Adrian Frutiger thought about the typeface of the future and saw potential in sporadic opposition to the predominant mainstream. He wrote: “The fact that typeface is to be seen as the spiritual expression of a certain epoch is testified to by typefaces that we ‘experience’ today in graffiti, on walls, posters, but also in rubbing foils. These are signs that probably still carry the alphabetical in the background, but whose expression is at the border of the illegible. They are contemporary writings in which an obvious provocation to the conventional reading habit is latently contained. It is still difficult for us to accurately assess this anti-reading reaction and its significance. Perhaps something fundamentally new will emerge in the future from this movement, which is still considered decadent today.”*
Rather then speculating about a potential typeface of the future, we need to comprehend and define our current position in the greater history of design and society. We must be educated and skilled enough to work towards a common idea of quality in design, we must be able to distinguish that quality and recognize what effects social, technical and economic developments are having on this quality. We must resist the misbelief that we are at a qualitative climax in the history of typography and type design. The democratization of design discipline through industrialization and digitization led to a decline in production quality in many areas, such as type design, but also brought with it the potential to raise average quality and make it more available to the general public outside an exclusive circle. It should be every designer’s goal to develop an attitude to what quality means and to counter negative factors such as economic pressure from price erosion and to strengthen positive factors such as accessibility of education.
Every ideological and creative position is influenced by role models and cultural heritage and can therefore be located in a kind of “line of descent”. This connects people, styles and currents over generations, as the previous historical overview has hopefully made clear. Can this insight help to position oneself today? Can we deduce a new style of design from our current state of mind? How can we proclaim our social and political ideals through our methods and our designs today?
These questions can only be answered with knowledge of history and with knowledge of the origins and the historically grown meanings of the elements of our visual language. And an answer to these questions is necessary, especially since political discourses in the typography scene are fortunately not a thing of the past. Contemporary debates, such as those about the German right-wing politician and type designer Erhard Kaiser*, designer of the DTL Fleischmann and the Prokyon, or the discussion triggered by the open letter by Markus Dreßen, Markus Weisbeck and Ingo Offermanns to the Stiftung Schönste Deutsche Bücher*, show the necessity of a critical culture and will possibly serve future historians as testimonies to summarize the spirit of our time.