Type and typeface design in the twenty-first Century

This essay was first published in the catalogue for the exhibition ‘Types for the New Century’ which I curated in 2012 under the auspices of the Worshipful Company of Stationers, London.

The past thirty years have seen the greatest period of accelerated change in some 550 years of type history. Patterns of type use have altered, and the culture of type design has expanded in a manner that few could have anticipated.
The use of type has been transformed from a specialist domain to a public one. Decisions over the choice of a typeface and the arrangement of type on a page, previously the concern of graphic designers and the printing trade, are now an everyday activity across both the workplace and the personal lives of a wide spectrum of the general public.
The design of typefaces, previously a specialist adjunct to the specific technologies of printing and typesetting, has become a ‘device-independent’ practice, liberated first by the development of professional-level desktop programmes for typeface design and then by the font distribution opportunities unlocked by the internet.
As a consequence, the last twenty years have seen the design of vast numbers of types and the emergence of innumerable independent type foundries, serving a newly redefined market as designers from across the whole spectrum of graphic communication now download typefaces for their own use.
The scale of a type producer is no longer the dominant index of quality. Internationally-acclaimed typefaces now originate as often from within small studios and foundries as from established corporate type producers.
The landscape of type distribution has altered dramatically, and offers a range of different models for the dissemination of new type designs. Designers may license their fonts through major distributors, or distribute direct through their own web-based businesses. Some focus largely upon specific partnerships with a limited range of specialist clients, while others actively promote their types to the wider design community and the general public.
Though no longer defined by the technology of production for hot-metal of photosetting, the development of a new typeface still represents a major investment of time for an unpredictable reward. For some designers this is offset by the design of custom fonts commissioned for the exclusive use of a particular client or publication. These are frequently subject to time-based agreements, under which they revert to the designer after an agreed period and are then released to the wider market.
Many type designers operate at several of these levels simultaneously.
As the design of type has developed as an individually-determined activity, rather than a component in an industrial hierarchy, it has taken on the scope to reflect a wide range of personal perspectives. The emergence of digital type design in the 1980s and 1990s coincided with the assimilation of post-modernist thinking into the culture of graphic design, and many new designs deliberately embodied qualities of argument and contradiction characteristic of this period. Type became a medium for challenging orthodoxies, celebrating particularity and difference, and re-examinining cultural histories.
This was a specifically digital phenomenon. The conditions of mechanised metal typesetting, and later the more flexible but still cost-intensive and specialised technology of photosetting, had militated against designs which might alienate or polarise opinion at the expense of return upon capital investment. The introduction of new design ideas into the culture of metal type production was necessarily slow and cautious, and the type production industry tended to respond to wider trends as they entered the mainstream, rather than driving them. It was within this context that Stanley Morison was to describe type design as ’the most conservative of the arts’ Under these practical and economic constraints the idea of a ‘radical’ typeface was seldom a viable concept, and the idea of ‘experimental’ type almost a contradiction in terms.
Thus, from the advent of mechanical composition to the end of the photosetting era, typefaces were exclusively linked to particular machine systems. The change to a common digital language has been crucial to the redefinition of the professional practice of typeface design.
The idea that type design might develop as a medium of individual experiment was only conceivable as the first desktop systems such as Font Studio and Fontographer came to supersede the more specialised conditions of the first generation of digital type programmes. For the first time, the design of type occurred independent of the mechanical systems of type production, and the process of type design emerged as an individual endeavor. The ‘top-down’ process, in which type design had been driven by the perceived requirements of the market, was to some extent replaced by a ‘bottom-up’ model, as it became feasible for designers to take the initiative and design new faces in the hope of their successful adoption by the design community. At this time the idea of designing type for purchase by the designer, rather than for the manufacturer of typesetting machinery, was a innovative and radical departure from industry norms.
Some innovative designs from that period are still with us. Others were by their nature temporary and time-bound experiments and have been largely forgotten.
Since that time the design of type has been carried out under a wide variety of working conditions, in the fulfillment of diverse design philosophies and personal preoccupations.
Revival, interpretation and reconstruction
The technologies of typography have, over the course of the twentieth century, developed to a stage whereby all the major stylistic modes and tendencies of the past 500 years are now simultaneously available and in widespread use. Each successive development in print and type production technology had involved the adaptation of pre-existing designs to meet the requirements of new production systems. The technical constraints of mechanical composition through Monotype and Linotype, prompted revisions to the proportions and dimensions of letters to fit to the standardised range of matrix widths. Further complex adjustments arose from the adaption of letterpress types to the conditions of photosetting for offset lithography. At worst, these marked a loss of technical quality or a compromise of stylistic integrity. At best, they provided an opportunity to review – and indeed improve upon – existing faces, and to revisit designs which had fallen into disuse.
The initiative to review and reform typographic standards seldom occurs during periods of technological stability. With each successive phase of type production technology, quality of type design has been a key element in the promotion of a new production system, persuading the printer to adopt Monotype or Ludlow, Scantext or Compugraphic. At points in history where the printing industry was deliberating between competing machines, the massive investment of time involved in the development of a new typeface was rewarded not simply by purchase of the fonts, but by the extent to which the quality of type design persuades the printer to invest in new plant.
Both the programme of reform instituted by Stanley Morison at Monotype, and the Linotype Legibility Series in the 1920 and 30s, were underwritten by these commercial arguments. Subsequent photosetting systems were also promoted on the quality of their typeface catalogues. These incentives were provided both by the offering of new typeface designs and by the quality with which classic faces were adapted to the new technologies.
The history of English Monotype provides a useful insight into the relative and interpretative nature of revival, in their use of the in-house terms ‘rough‘ and ‘smooth‘ revivals. A ‘rough’ revival was so far as possible a literal reconstruction of an older printed letter for the new technology, designed to replicate as closely as possible the appearance of the original, to the extent of incorporating anomalies and irregularities, as in Monotype Poliphilus. A smooth revival on the other hand is more of a synthesis, reviving the essential characteristics of a genre or the work of a particular punchcutter, as seen in their interpretation of the Aldine form, Monotype Bembo.
With the advent of digital typeface design, the spectrum of revival widened dramatically, as new media enabled on the one hand a more literal transcription of historical examples – most evident in the painstaking reconstruction of separate sizes of Caslon for Justin Howes’ Founder’s Caslon – while also enabling the development of new types which referenced their historical origins in ironic, fanciful or irreverent ways. Like new performances of familiar music or drama, canonical letterforms continue to reveal new dimensions of interpretation and nuance.
The revival of ‘classic’ typefaces for new technologies is necessarily an interpretative process, subject to changes in user expectation as well as the mediation of the design process, incorporating new glyphs, weights and cases in accordance with current patterns of use.
All typefaces have an element of revival, and even the most faithful and literal revivals have unique and original characteristics. As Alan Powers said in his St Bride’s keynote talk on this subject, it is impossible to step into ‘the same river twice’.
The politics of language: non-Latin types and language support
A significant aspect of the digital revolution in type design has been the manner in which it has begun to open up a field previously dominated by the western Latin alphabet, and given long overdue recognition and support to minority languages, as well as considering issues of stylistic compatibility across multiple writing systems.
Where in the past a particularly successful and enduring Latin typeface design might eventually prompt the design of an ‘extension’ for another alphabet, it is now a widespread practice for a type design project to be conceived across Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, while innovative design work continues to address the particular challenges of Arabic, Hebrew and a wide range of Indic scripts, and to give typographic voice to minority languages. Several examples in the current exhibition are devoted to these objectives.
Decoration and Novelty: a defence of the display typeface
With some notable exceptions, critical writing on type design has tended to focus upon the evolution of the text typeface, often at the expense of serious consideration of display types as a genre. One might suppose from this that the design of a text face is viewed as a more serious and mature undertaking for the designer. Display types, by comparison, have often been regarded as a frivolous or superficial area of practice.
Display type is the field in which type design engages most directly with other disciplines, notably the related arts of calligraphy, signwriting and lettercutting, and it is also the field in which typefaces are most commonly designed by graphic designers, for whom type design as an adjunct to their practice rather than their whole livelihood.
Beatrice Warde’s dismissal of designers as ‘flashy little stylists’ reflects some wider assumptions about the gravitas of the (predominantly Roman) text face as the path of true knowledge.
The current market of course gives a different picture. Sales figures from major font licensing sites show a strong bias toward the display face among the monthly ‘best sellers’
(I recognise of course that a display face comprising a single font and a limited glyph set does not represent the same level of investment as a fully-featured Open Type text family, and may not require the same level of critical deliberation on the part of the user; it may indeed be more of an ‘impulse buy‘. Nevertheless, the display face merits equal critical consideration).
‘Novelty’ is a term commonly used to denigrate designs, but ever since the nineteenth century, novelty has been a significant factor in the type design market, and in visual culture itself, and the digital era has further developed the role of type as a medium reflecting the contemporary zeitgeist. Rather than frivolousness, this is a real and significant aspect of the ‘fitness for purpose’ of many new typefaces, and a genuine and legitimate factor in both their design and their subsequent use.
Type in the digital era is no longer defined by the mechanical conditions which informed the production of metal type. While this can be read as a loss in terms of material ‘warmth’, it also serves to override the material distinctions which have previously separated type from writing and other autographic processes. As an increasingly wide range of graphic practices are now mediated through the common public medium of digital code, the distinctions which have divided type design from calligraphy, lettercutting or signwriting are progressively dissolved, and many innovative developments in contemporary type design have been informed by skills based in these disciplines.
Fluidity and mutability
For 450 years a defining characteristic of type has been the standardisation of letters; the creation of a single definitive form for each letter shape. In recent years this definition has begun to blur, as Open Type encryption and the concept of the ‘contextual alternate’ have begun to call these fundamental assumptions into question. From the early 1980s we have seen the design of typefaces in which a wide range of versions of the same letter may be activated by a programmed response to context or selected by the user. These developments have served to further question previously accepted distinctions between type, lettering and writing
Designer: artisan or artist?
The description of a design practice attaining the status of an ‘art form’ is often a lazy superlative, designed simply to applaud a practice carried out to an unusually high standard, while failing to recognise the significant difference of cultural value which the term implies.
The major shifts we have seen around the culture of type design however make this one area where such a definition is sometimes appropriate. As type design has emerged as a field of individual endeavor, its social meaning has changed, along with the range of motivation and purpose that may prompt the design of a typeface.
This is not to say that every well-designed typeface should share the common status of ‘art’, or to assume that type designers would necessarily welcome such a description. However, as we have seen, digital production has seen the emergence of type design as a ‘medium’, expressing a position overtly rather than implicitly, extending the scope of type design from a functional artisan practice to a self-conscious and potentially argumentative form, a platform for the expression of ideas, or (in the favoured term of the post-modern era), a discourse. In direct opposition to Beatrice Warde’s ideal of the typographic ‘crystal goblet’, as a transparent medium providing no obstruction to the content, much typeface design interposes itself deliberately between the text and the viewer.
This is another area in which technological development has not only brought huge quantitative change, in the proliferation of new typefaces, but qualitative change in the sheer variety of reasons for making them. The use of of typeface design as a medium of commentary crosses at times into the self-initiated values we associate with the term ‘art’.
The methodological challenges which confront the type designer will often however have more in common with engineering than with artistic endeavor, and different projects will reflect different balances between these opposing priorities. One might regard a display typeface as an aesthetic project with a dimension of engineering, where a text typeface may be an engineering project with a secondary dimension of aesthetics.
Some types are designed for conscious aesthetic enjoyment, others for neutral functionality, and to try to apply a common set of criteria to them would be both unworkable and inappropriate. The selection of work for this exhibition has been informed by a governing principle of inclusiveness and eclecticism; intended to demonstrate in as rich and vivid a manner as possible that the activity of designing type has different meanings for different designers. For some, as with Rich Kegler’s P22 foundry, it is the development of an artistic project, while for others from backgrounds in print or computing it is a pragmatic process of informational engineering. As the reach and extent of the medium has widened, it has come to encompass a wider range of purpose and motivation. Included in this exhibition are typefaces designed to reflect the conditions of particular cultures, as in Pilar Cano’s Tekari, faces designed for specific contexts, such as Fred Smeijers’s Arnhem, designed as a newspaper face for the Nederlandse Staatscourant, and typefaces designed to support minority languages, such as Ross Mills’s Huronia.
Conclusions
It would of course be easy to exaggerate the ‘democratisation‘ of type use and typeface design. The wider public do not buy fonts in significant quantities. Though the personal computer has brought professional quality type designs into the hands of millions of non-specialist users, most will tend to view them as a component part of their computer and may be surprised to learn that people actually design them, or that anyone might expect you to pay for them.
The world of online font distribution has brought immeasurable benefits to the type designer, but has also created a new world of problematic issues. The capacity to distribute and sell fonts via the internet has been instrumental in the development of the independent foundry, no longer dependent upon the infrastructure of larger organisations to ship the product or collect the revenue. The internet has however also been a fertile ground for piracy and misappropriation, in a field where the protection of intellectual property is the subject of continued debate.
This exhibition takes place under the auspices of a long-established printers’ guild, and it reflects a significant shift in the historic relationship between type design and the printing trade.
For over 500 years the printed word has been the dominant medium for the communication of knowledge. The work in this exhibition marks a period in which this supremacy has given way to a mix of complementary technologies. Type design in the twenty-first century is no longer directed toward the printed page alone, but increasingly concerned with the production of faces that will function effectively on screen. The development of the digital reader, ipad and smartphone have already had a major impact on the way we receive information, and in turn upon the way in which we regard typographic form.
Rhetorical predictions of ‘the end of print’ are however already sounding oddly dated. Print is at no greater risk of being replaced by the screen than painting was at risk of being made redundant by photography; technological advances simply serve to redefine our understanding of what each medium does best. A characteristic of many typefaces designed in the 21st century has been the concern to function equally well across both print and screen, and it may be that typeface design continues to provide a bridge between the two. Habits and patterns of immersive reading continue to rely upon our experience of the printed page, and the features which constitute both legibility and readbility on the page still inform the standards to which new reading devices aspire.
Typographic information permeates our lives more continuously, across a greater range of contexts, than at any time in history. It provides functional information, but also carries a wealth of connotative value and subtext.
The breadth and scope of this exhibition has been deliberate; encompassing a diverse and colourful range of typefaces designed to function to the highest technical standards but also, no less important, to provoke, amuse, and delight.