Will Hill

This paper was delivered as part of the Letter Exchange lecture series at the Art Workers Guild, London in 2012

The relationships of letter craft and type seem to prompt horticultural and arborial metaphors, as we look at practices which reveal intertwining branches and deep hidden roots.
Robert Bringhurst has said:
‘Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy – the dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand – and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines’
I worry that that tree might be collapsing under the weight of Bringhurst’s metaphors, but the relationship between the industries of print and the crafts of lettercutting, calligraphy and signwriting, is a complex, organic one. Sharing a common vocabulary of letter shapes but often representing opposed philosophical positions, they are interdependent, but distinct in spirit, representing some very different cultures of practice.
Type exists at the intersection of the major letter arts; it shares common ground with both calligraphy and inscriptional lettercutting, and this has created a synthesis which transcends both, to become a distinct medium in its own right.
In the media environment of the 21st century, where every phase of type and letter history is appropriated towards the creation of new forms, the act of design takes place further and further from the direct engagement with physical tools and the defining constraints they bring to the design, prompting a renewed need to consider these material factors and the impact they have upon letter-shapes.
The behaviours associated with nib or brush, may now be completely absent from the designer’s desktop, where digital letter-shapes make only abstract theoretical reference to manual processes.
Type, the stroke, and the dinosaur’s toenail
When I was a student on the MA Typeface Design at Reading I started to think about the ways in which a typeface’s essential features could be better identified, particularly those underlying qualities which define it by remaining constant across a range of weights (and in some cases across both serif and sans versions).
I was thinking of an analogy with genetic code; the DNA of the typeface. Not only the conceptual skeleton which type designer Martin Majoor refers to as the ‘form principal’, but also those qualities which would enable one to reconstruct a typeface from the evidence of a small detail (the dinosaur’s toenail).
It is tempting – but questionable – to locate this essential quality in the letters’ manual origins.
Type originates of course in the imitation of writing; initially in the literal mimicry of the textura bookhand of 15th century German scribes. Like every period of type history, this continues to inform the design of new types, and this idiom has frequently been referenced and revisited in the digital age, as we can see in James Grieshaber’s Gothic Gothic and Jonathan Barnbrook’s Bastard (a title which references the blackletter classification Bastarda but typically carries a political subtext, described in the designer’s promotional specimen as ‘a typeface for use by corporate fascists’).
The textura letter, and blackletter type in general, have of course formed a continuing typographic tradition in the German-speaking countries, a topic too complex and autonomous to give full consideration in this talk. I intend to focus upon the roman letter which was to replace the textura, as the technology of type production travelled south in the late 15th century, seen first in the letters of Sweynheim and Pannartz at Subiaco. The stylistic basis of type design at this stage remains wholly imitative of the written letter, and the literal reproduction of writing remains a driving feature in the earliest of the Roman types. The idea of an autonomous form, the ‘Printer’s letter’ can be seen to emerge with Jenson, and is consolidated in the letters cut by Griffo for Aldus Manutius
Since this point, at which type and writing diverged, they have followed parallel histories, occasionally touching and exchanging information with each other.
The italic
One area where the two streams have often run closest is in the design of italic fonts, both for new typefaces and in response to the complex question of partnering appropriate italics to revivals of early types. Throughout type history the design of italics has been an area in which the discussion of calligraphic influence has been sustained; an aspect of the type family in which writing and printing remain reflective of each other. This has prompted type designers to both look back in history for appropriate contemporaneous examples, and to look across, to the work of current practitioners in the letter arts. The italic designed by Alfred Fairbank and initially intended by Stanley Morison to partner the Monotype Aldine Bembo, was to be abandoned in favour of a less assertive and colourful font based upon the letters of the renaissance writing-master Giovanni Tagliente, but the Fairbank Italic re-surfaced in its own right, sometimes described as ‘Bembo Condensed Italic’ .
These two approaches to the problem characterise opposing positions on a debate which recurs in any typographic ‘revival’ of designs predating the mid-16th century. The first italic types had of course been conceived not as companion elements within a typeface family but as self-sufficient, autonomous fonts; designed for the economical setting of long texts.
The question of the ‘italic capital’ introduced by Schöffer and De Colines in the 1530s has fueled stylistic debate, between the calligraphic basis of the idiom and the inscriptional origins of upper case type.
The Aldine italics were of course a lower case only, combined with upright roman capitals. This idea has occasionally been revived, and Georg Trump’s Delphin (1951) draws upon this early italic idiom in juxtaposing a calligraphic lower case with an explicitly inscriptional capital.
Since italics were first paired with Roman fonts, and their usage over the following centuries established their semantic function, we have moved toward the contemporary view of the italic as a secondary partner in the typeface as a whole. As such, it is a form which has maintained a closer relationship with the autographic script of pen or graver, than its dominant Roman partner.
Twentieth-century types show a wide range of perspectives upon this question, with the consequence that types which are (relatively) similar in their roman form, can show dramatic differences in the approach to the italic.
Type and the inscriptional letter
As the early italics help to confirm, while the lower case miniscule letter owes its stylistic origin primarily to a written hand, the upper case letter shows a closer affinity to the inscriptional capital, to the chisel rather than the nib. The interaction between these processes is however a complex dialogue. Orders of classical lettering vary in the extent to which their formal characteristics reflect the direct action of the chisel, or depend more specifically upon reference to the pre-drawing of pen or brush.
Donald Anderson writes of ‘the mysterious infusion of calligraphic content into the art of the stonecutters’ while Edward Catich provides a detailed and I think persuasive argument for the action of the brush as a defining preparatory drawing tool in the production of the classical roman inscriptional letter.
By the late eighteenth century we can see the ‘mysterious infusion’ flowing in a different direction, as the widely established forms of the printed letter start to inform the autographic traditions of pen and chisel.
We know that Baskerville was originally a writing master, later turned type founder and printer, and in his work we see developments in the written hand then applied to the development of type. The carved stone advertising his services marks the intersection of several letter disciplines; these are letters cut in slate reflecting several stylistic idioms, using the one medium – that of incised letter cutting – to integrate ideas from two others: printing and handwriting. The dramatically sloped italic capitals are clearly typographic forms rather than written ones. Though they are customised with calligraphic flourishes, they do not conform to those distinctions between the two practices which have become familiar since the revival of both calligraphy and lettercutting as autonomous forms with their own stylistic integrity.
Baskerville’s types are credited as a significant factor in the development of the rationalist letters of the late 18th century, alongside the influence of Fournier and the much-contested letters of the Romain du Roi.
The extent to which the letters of the Romain du Roi were actually a consequence of the complex mathematical grids upon which they were portrayed, or actually a product of Phillipe Grandjean’s writing hand, is a debate too complex and divisive to go into here; in particular it has been the subject of some typically irascible and argumentative comment by Gerrit Noordzij.
Baskerville’s stone serves to remind us that alongside the references to scribal traditions that run through early type design, from the 18th century, type was influencing the letter crafts. From the mid century in particular we see the influence of printed type upon lettercutting.
I’ve noticed that rural headstone lettering in Britain shows a huge diversity of local tradition and individual crafting, up to a tipping-point somewhere in the mid- to late- 18th century, after which a far greater level of conformity sets in, and the style becomes increasingly typographic. This can be assumed to reflect improved access to printed specimens, providing a more comprehensive range of printed models for the lettercutter to work from.
Type and the letter arts in the 20th century
I’d suggest that the 20th century is unique in both typography and the letter arts, as a period in which previous patterns of steady incremental change and the redundancy of past styles, give way to a climate of revival, reappraisal and reform, while a new self-consciousness enters both areas of practice.
A key legacy of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement was the redefined status given to both printing and lettering, imbued with new cultural value as emblematic ‘crafts’ embodying a philosophical position. This ethos was to inform the work of Edward Johnston – feeding into type design obliquely through his own Underground letters and more widely through his influence on the work of Eric Gill – and it is largely to letter craftsmen, uneasily adapting to the constraints of production type, that we owe the genre of the ‘Humanist Sans Serif’. The reference point of calligraphy remains implicit in the construction and proportions of the sans serifs of Johnston and Gill, while later examples of the humanist genre make more explicit use of modulations of stroke width, a notable characteristic of Ronald Arnholm’s Legacy Sans.
A key distinction in sans serif faces, is the extent to which they refer to a written origin; a distinguishing characteristic of the humanist sans serifs of Johnston or Gill, when compared to the grotesques (derived primarily from typographic shapes), or the geometrics, (entirely self-referential to their own geometry).
The distinction is reinforced by reference to their italics. The defining aesthetic of a geometric or neo-grotesque sans leads logically to a mechanical oblique or mathematically slanted version of the roman or upright form, while the humanist sans italic refers back to its calligraphic origins.
Graily Hewitt and the Treyford types
Peter Foden’s article in Matrix 13 from 1993 traces the history of a typeface which was buried by historical circumstance. The only face designed by calligrapher Graily Hewitt, then described as ‘the greatest scribe of our time’ , it is a largely unmediated transcription of his own calligraphic script, adapted for Monotype composition, and its story seems to me to embody some of the key debates and demarcations between type and writing. After enthusiastic development and promotion by John Johnson, printer to the University of Oxford in the late 1920s, it was effectively ‘buried’ by the disapproval of Stanley Morison. This ideological standoff centred upon Morison’s preference for the inscriptional letter over the pen letter as a basis for typographic design.
Contemporary type designers have drawn upon the full historical spectrum of calligraphic letters, from letters of renaissance writing masters including Arrighi, beautifully evoked in Jonathan Hoefler’s Requiem, through to the rational hand of the enlightenment in Matthew Carter’s Snell Roundhand. Designed before the digital revolution, Snell Roundhand references the period in which writing aspired most fully to the uniformity of type. The rigidly programmatic letters of the writing masters of the late 17th and early 18th centuries did not encourage variation, making them an unusually appropriate choice for translation into typographic form.
The rigid formality of Snell’s model circumvents one of the underlying problems of the ‘script type’ up to the late 20th century; the inability of type production technology to incorporate the variability and responsiveness of hand-rendered scripts.
Type and lettercutting
Along with faces inspired by the written hand, 20th century type design has also been inspired and informed by revived traditions of lettercutting:
The incised letter is another ‘underground river’ in the landscape of type history; absorbed into the mainstream through the primarily inscriptional basis of the roman capital letter, it surfaces in its own right as the flareserif form rather awkwardly categorised by Vox as ‘Glyphic’ that we recognise in Zapf’s Optima or Wolpe’s majestic Albertus, and most recently revisited and developed for the 21st century by Matthew Carter and Dan Reynolds in the form of Carter Sans. More explicit interaction between lettercutting and type design can be found in the collaboration between Will Carter and David Kindersley which produced Octavian, and in the more recent work of Paul Shaw and Garett Boge of Letter Perfect.
Type has derived shapes from hand-lettering, lettercutting and calligraphy, but as we’ve seen, the interaction can travel both ways. It is a reciprocity by which we can trace instances of unique hand-lettering that reflect the influence of type and recreate typographic lettershapes in autographic form.
This seems to indicate a significant and under-documented category or genre within contemporary hand lettering; the ‘handmade’ work which uses forms derived from printed type rather than writing. In this genre, forms which have evolved within type history – through the craft of the punchcutter and typefounder – are adopted into the practice of hand lettering and in turn inform the more defined field of calligraphy.
This capacity to interact, absorb and respond is I think a sign of health in an active and lively medium.
In the hand-lettering of William Addison Dwiggins, we see a hand-rendered letter clearly derived quite as much from the observation of types as from the consideration of the written ‘stroke’.
What we might term ‘type drawing’ or ‘typographic lettering’ also occurs in the work of Eric Ravilious, and Barnett Freedman. In these instances of lettering (clearly not calligraphy), we see the traditions and connotative values of type history feeding back into expressive, unique works of individual letter-crafting. In some cases the outcome has then been re-absorbed into the currency of type design through the making of new fonts, as in Freedman’s Bayard Claudia initials.
For some letter artists the design of a typeface is the synthesis or consolidation of a stylistic manner refined over years of hand lettering, for others the exploration of typographic production takes a more formal direction than their autographic work. This can be seen in the work of Imre Reiner, whose highly idiosyncratic letter drawings contrast dramatically with the colourful but highly structured script types he produced for Monotype in 1957.
Photosetting: from metal to light
In the period of type history immediately preceding the digital era, the development of photosetting enabled a huge shift in the relationship between type production and the letter arts. This more economical and portable medium allowed for more adventurous and diverse production of display faces, and provided new opportunities for lettering to inform the production of reproducible types. Situated between the long history of letterpress and the revolutionary impact of digital media, photosetting brought a generation of letter artists into the arena of type design. Particularly notable among these were Tom Carnase, Tony di Spigna, and Ed Benguiat.
Photosetting for display faces had embraced the vernacular lettering of the ‘commercial artist’, making a kind of bridge between lettering and type design, and rendering a wide range of display lettering idioms into film. Dry transfer lettering continued and developed this process. These more flexible and inexclusive technologies went some way to prepare the ground for the huge shift in typographic culture brought about by digital media
Digital type and the letter arts
Foden’s essay on Graily Hewitt’s Treyford types, closes with the observation that: ‘Stanley Morison’s condemnation of this typographic experiment had depended upon the insoluble link between metal technology – punchcutting – and typography, which has now been swept away’
I’d understand this to refer to the way the digital revolution has altered the designer’s relationship to particular tools and processes, from being a material fact to an abstraction – albeit a very significant one.
Current typeface design offers an unprecedented volume of new typefaces, reflecting – as one would expect – a huge range of approaches to the relationship between type and the letter arts . While on the one hand, current digital media allow for a more direct transcription of crafted letters into reproducible ‘fonts’, they also enable the designer to construct letters without any reference to manual traditions at all. The idea of a ‘writing tool’ may now be a secondary, subliminal reference in type design, and material processes are absent from the manufacture of digital type; a product with no definitive physical existence, stored, distributed and applied through the medium of code.
The influence of calligrapher and teacher Gerrit Noordjiz has informed the work of a whole generation of type designers from the Netherlands. In typically assertive style, he takes the view that:
‘The stroke is the fundamental artefact. Nothing goes further back from the stroke’
We can see his influence in Peter Verheul’s Narly and Versa, notable for the fact that the italic font prompted the design of the Roman, rather than the other way around.
Noodzij’s precepts provide a very solid basis for the design of a certain kind of typeface, but I don’t believe we should conclude that it need be the only valid approach. Reference to the ductus and modulation of the stroke provides a means of ensuring consistency across a set of letters, but we need not conclude that this is the only way, or always the best.This will be determined by the context and purpose of the type.
Talk of the primacy of the stroke is self-evident when applied to writing, but type is not writing, and typographic letters have, for over 500 years of their development, been created as shapes, not strokes; they have been sculptural not gestural.
Robert Slimbach notes that:
‘Venetian types… …show a marked engraved quality as a result of the type cutting process and the punchcutter’s personal design style.’
Shapes can after all be created in many ways. The punch is a subtractive medium, the forming of the letter being made by cutting away. This has analogies in the traditions of the raised letter more common to Germanic lettercutting traditions than to British ones, it is sculptural rather than an autographic process. One of its most explicit expressions can be found in Rudolf Koch’s Neuland, purportedly created direct in the cutting of the punches without any pre-drawing.
‘The punch is made as in olden times by the punchcutter being his own designer. the forms have been fashioned directly out of the metal by the tool without being previously drawn on paper’
The early development of digital type technologies coincided with tendencies in graphic design grouped together as ‘post-modern’. This reflected an increasingly pluralistic attitude to form and structure, embracing the eccentricities of vernacular lettering; a kind of ‘outsider art’ of the typographic world.
Like photosetting before it, the advent of digital type design opened up stylistic scope to include still greater cross-reference between type and the autographic traditions of lettering and signwriting. As both the design process and the medium of distribution moved from the ‘device-specific’ conditions of adherence to a particular system, into the ‘device-independent’ realm of a common digital language, there was an explosion of what one might call ‘inductive’ design; making types from non-typographic sources. In several cases it has provided opportunities for the synthesis of years of autographic practice into typographic form.
We see an explicit reference to contemporary inscriptional form in the work of letter cutters and letter artists including Michael Harvey’s Mezz, and Julian Waters’ Waters Titling.
In Jovica Veljovic’s Ex Ponto, digital processes have a actually been used to enhance the quality of physical presence. The vector points on one side of the stroke have been edited to create a smoother profile, as would be created by the greater pressure on the leading side of the nib as it impresses a stroke into a textured paper.
Many leading type designers draw upon a background of calligraphic practice which informs their type design either explicitly or implicitly.
Robert Slimbach’s Brioso pro is a telling example, derived from the designer’s personal hand lettering style – itself a highly personal synthesis of influences – it is described by him as ‘a roman book face with an overtly handwritten appearance’. It offers not only a range of weights but also four optical sizes and an additional poster font.
This reflects the manner in which type production technology has reinstated the scale variants characteristic of manual punch cutting:
‘Over the years I’ve designed many practice alphabets with the intent of merging the essence of my personal hand lettering style with the practical requirements of the modern composition family. These ongoing exercises have been a great learning experience, providing a means of reconciling the division between the purely organic form of written letters and the more methodically constructed form of a digital text type’.
Do we view this as a calligraphically-flavoured typeface, or the development of a written hand through digital type production? I’d suggest it’s a highly sophisticated synthesis, which shows the manner in which current media have enhanced the quality of dialogue between the two forms. We might also see it as an instance where calligraphy, traditionally associated with making finite, material objects on paper or vellum, is instead integrated as a defining factor in the creation of a digital typeface – quite a different thing from ‘making calligraphic letters into a font’.
Open Type: technologies of variability
As we’ve seen, a key distinction between the process of designing a typeface and the act of making letters with pen, graver or chisel, is the question of standardisation and variability. Many of the features which we have come to appreciate the most in calligraphy, lettering and lettercutting derive from subtle variations introduced in response to particular letter groups and pairs. By contrast, for over 500 years a defining characteristic of type has been the standardisation and mechanical reproduction of a definitive font of letter-shapes which remain identical.
Among the first indications that digital type media might alter these conditions was with Blokland and van Rossum’s 1989 Beowolf, a postscript font built with randomised variation of form, and promoted under the provocative title ‘type you can’t trust’.
“All points on the contour of a (fairly) normal typeface are given a space in which they can freely move. So instead of each letter having one fixed form, the shapes move and wobble. Every single letter this typeface will print will be unique. If characters are repeated in a text they will have different shapes”.
Since then, the development of the Unicode system for the encryption of font data has enabled the storage of vastly increased numbers of glyphs within a single Open Type font. This opens up the scope for of variant letters-shapes, special ligatures and other forms of ‘contextual alternate’.
Hermann Zapf’s Zapfino was offered as a bundled font with the release of Mac OSX.
An idea which had appeared impractical at the time of the first drawing in 1944, was revived by the new possibilities offered by digital font media. Zapfino is characterised by the range of variant letters, ligatures and other alternates. In the earlier version, these options exist only as user-activated feature; we go into the glyph window (often unvisited by the casual user) to make substiutions. In the later 2003 Zapfino Extra however, the substitution of glyphs can be automated through the extended use of contextual alternates, the programmed response to a sequence of letters (or letters and spaces) to which the software inserts an appropriate alternate form. (At its simplest, this is the technology which ensures that our quote marks point in the correct direction or that the keystrokes f, i produce an f-i ligature).
Taken beyond these traditional tasks, the principle of the contextual alternate has the potential to fundamentally change the way we look at type design, and in particular to reconfigure the traditional boundaries between the fixed shapes of type, and the variability of calligraphy and other hand-forms.
One of the first people I encountered who grasped the full implications of this development was the designer Nick Shinn, who had started to extend the use of contextual alternates in his monoline script typeface Handsome, as he updated this for the release of Handsome pro in 2005
After we had discussed this, I realised that, far beyond being a ‘smart tool’ for automating current conventions such as standard ligatures, contextual alternates could alter the way we think about type and in particular the qualities which distinguish it from ‘writing’ and ‘lettering’.
Returning to Brioso, we see in Slimbach’s type family just how far the traditionally established definitions which distinguish ‘type design’ from ‘calligraphy’ are beginning to blur and reconfigure. The letter-shapes are explicitly calligraphic, but the conformity to user expectation is characteristic of type. But most important, the extent of the variables in the design calls into question a characteristic which has defined type for over five hundred years; the idea that each letter of the font has a single definitive form. This has been replaced by a responsive variability – a quality which we associate with calligraphy and other autographic forms – in which the letter-shape varies with context and the writer’s individual preference.
The multiple variants of a single letter are, of course, still fixed and defined, but I would suggest that they indicate in turn a possible future development in which letter-shapes are generated from a range of option permutations and the behaviour of the digital font becomes properly ‘fluid’.
As the typographic expression of a personal hand, Brioso can be seen as a similar project to Hewitt’s Treyford types. But the changes in type production technology which Foden has noted, make this a far more viable proposition for Slimbach in the early 21st century than it was for Hewitt in 1928.
There comes a point however where we might wonder whether the traditional defining characteristics of a typeface are becoming compromised. Throughout its previous history, type has been defined by the standardisation of its letters; as we introduce this level of optionality, do we lose the qualities derived from the idea of refining a design to a single definitive form?
Some differences
Though they share a common vocabulary of forms, the design of types and the making of crafted letterwork are clearly very different projects, rooted in distinct philosophies and traditions.
Through the course of the 20th century we have seen the emergence of calligraphy as a self-conscious concept, and the idea of ‘expressive’ lettering implies a level of specific response and creative interpretation, in which the letterforms are informed by the text, a quality which cannot occur within the standardised letter-shapes of type. The lettercutter or calligrapher is typically concerned with designing for a specific text; developing the most apposite form for a specific, finite sequence of letters and words. The lettercutter Eric Marland recently told me he had never had a job which required him to cut a whole alphabet. The type designer on the other hand is concerned with designing letters that will work together in as many permutations as language demands.
This in turn leads me to the view that type design and lettercraft may involve entirely different perceptions of space. Space in lettercutting or calligraphy is particular and consecutive, space in type design is modular and standardised.
Conclusions
At times, in looking at the relationships between type and the letter arts, I’ve tried to apply the analogy of marriage. But if it is any kind of marriage, it has a been a pretty open one, marked by some periods of separation and estrangement in the modernist era and a promiscuous period of adulteries under the license of post-modernism, as type design went through its mid-life crisis in the 1990s.
In my view, the extent to which type design is answerable to letter arts traditions is a matter of the designer’s personal taste, but their position on the matter is a defining characteristic of their design philosophy.
Types of great integrity have been designed with minimal reference to autographic traditions, and some very poor ones have attempted to mimic or conform to calligraphic or inscriptional models. It would be unwise to see adherence to the manual stroke as a guarantee of quality.
I’ve found nothing to convince me of the argument that since all type originates from writing, all type design should therefore maintain calligraphy at its core. The marriage of calligraphic and inscriptional form, itself an uneasy one, has been mediated through the punchcutter’s sensibility for 500 years, and from a very early stage we have seen the distinct and autonomous tradition of the ‘printer’s letter’.
During that time, I’d suggest that typographic form has been invigorated by influences from lettercutting, engraving and calligraphy, an intermittent dialogue which continues to this day. This is not about the primacy of calligraphy and writing but their capacity to energise the static forms of type.
So: where is that conversation going in the current digital era?
At first, many within the world of the letter arts regarded digital communication with doubt tan suspicion. This is the same scepticism that led Edward Johnston to keep the type industry at arm’s length, and Eric Gill to only accept it with some reluctance as ‘not my line of country’
In his essay Slouching toward Cyberspace: the place of the lettering arts in the digital era, David Levy questioned whether the lettering arts should
‘settle for an uneasy co-existence with these technologies, like partners in an unhappy marriage’
In the twelve years since those words were written, I believe our view of these matters has changed.
Not only have we assimilated digital media into so many aspects of our lives that its language no longer seems so alien and counterintuitive, but the first decade of the century has seen a profound and enthusiastic reappraisal of the concept of craft.
The argument has shifted away from an oppositional relationship between digital media and craft, toward a growing realisation that the idea of ‘digital craft’ is no longer a bizarre contradiction but a significant reality. Type and calligraphic lettering are no longer divided by adherence to distinct and unrelated technologies, but swimming in the same digital stream.
Looking back at some of the examples and questions we’ve considered, it is clear that type and the letter arts have developed along separate routes, but have periodically informed and enlivened each phase in the other’s history, bringing fresh colour and the vitality of stylistic argument, into media otherwise often constrained by their own orthodoxies.
To return to the horticultural metaphor we began with, I’d see the root-stock of type design periodically invigorated by graftings from the letter arts, ensuring the genetic health of traditions otherwise at risk of stylistic inbreeding.
Both are at their most vital when most responsive to external influences and stimuli, and at greatest risk of atrophy when they become inward-looking and self-referential.
As digital media redefine or dissolve the material boundaries between different ways of making and reproducing letters, we can see particularly fertile ground for new forms of hybrid activity across these interrelated disciplines. And it is this kind of cross-disciplinary dialogue which maintains dynamism and vibrancy at the leading edge of visible language.