"NUMBERS"
Type on the Edge of History
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by Peter Fraterdeus or The Rumors of the Death of Typography have been Greatly Exaggerated...As has the Death of Humanism... [First Published in the Journal of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, Vol. 14, No. 3, 1996] Javan Tabibian, humanist scholar and restaurateur, dismissed me as "one of those computer addicts" when I tried to laud him on his "Death of Humanism" talk at last year's Aspen Design Conference (he saw designOnline on my name tag). "...but," I said, as he turned away, "I'm a card-carrying humanist, here, look, I've studied Petrarch's handwriting... I write with goose quills, and was a letterpress printer way before it was hip to deep-emboss logos from your Mac Laserwriter output...." I tried to tell him that I agreed with his analysis of the Internet. At least, it was one of the most colorful and provocative descriptions I had heard -- "The bastard child of the necrophiliac father War and the shameless whore Entertainment." That sure stopped the murmer in the big tent for a second. I think most people just figured he was some kind of academic with a socialist agenda, and probably never gave it another thought. I thought it was the high point of the conference, particularly after listening to Mr. "Four Million Dollar Video Studio" and Mr. "Think and Get Rich" and the general run of "Business is Good Business" corporate design apologists. There are still some of us who DO believe that "the purpose of design is to help make a better world." Perhaps those who take seriously the relationship between the culture and the cultural workers whose artifacts help to define the culture. (See http://www.worldstudio.org)
The Jet-Ski as cultural attack weapon.In Northwestern Washington state there is a quiet corner of the Puget Sound which has taken a giant step toward balancing the all-pervading mechaniphilia which seems to overwhelm our society, and all too often, our better judgement. This small community, which depends on its peace and quiet as a special quality to attract vacationers, has banned jet-skis in the entire portion of the Sound under its jurisdiction, saying that the constant buzz of these obnoxious water craft and their loud-mouthed and inconsiderate riders back and forth across the waterfront has destroyed the tranquility of the area, which is a natural treasure and a commonwealth of the community. Of course the jet-ski industry won't take this laying down! They're already in court claiming a constitutional right to "interstate travel", and so forth, and that "you can't fight progress..." It seems that the predominant culture is largely made up of terminally immature kids who are forever rebelling against their eternally authoritarian elders. Of course, things are no different in the culture of typography...
Degenerate Type -- Signifyin' Nuthin'
[degenerate type is...] a form of canned cynicism which will doom its perpetrators to a special room in hell where lovely little children of all races, creeds and religions are eternally bathed in gentle rosy and amber glows, singing "It's a Small World After All." There's no legitimate typographic reason to create an alphabet which looks like it leaked out of a diaper. Trash type is proud of being the worst student in the class. As if it's more "legitimate" to create ugly little malformed sploches in Fontographer than to attempt to draw the Platonic nature of the alphabet from its essential causal form into a well-reasoned and deliberated family of symbols. Please, I'm not getting personal here. Some of my favorite people are making trash type these days. It seems to be the only thing small foundries can even sell! But we don't have to accept that these are anything more than accidental expressions of a techno-sociological transition.
Letters are Things, not pictures of things. But perhaps the "fontography" buffs (sorry, Macromedia, it's a generic term now!) and "fontographists" are really just making pictures of things... The difference between a fontographist and a type designer is simple enough. Ask a fontographist to draw a three inch high Roman "S" with a pencil...without tracing.... Soon enough you'll know if there's any real knowledge of the shapes of letters there.... (although even many type designers don't know the true subtleties of these forms..) Mangling Caslon, or Helvetica, and calling it a typeface is not type design... Maybe it's font design, but then who cares what that means, since apparently anyone with a PC and a pirated copy of Fontographer can be a "font designer." It's time for someone to stand up and say "The Friggin' Emperor's Got No Friggin' Clothes!" None-the-less, graphic designers can't seem to get enough of these fonts. Why is this? It's apparently related to the fact that in our jet-ski society, no one can get enough novelty to satisfy that, unnngh, itch, that craving for the next one... And since our visual circuits are so heavily overloaded with snap, crackle and buzz, people don't even notice letters anymore, unless they jog our deepest reptile-brain fears of death and decay. A bicycle ad in the Chicago Reader is lettered in a decaying crumbling font, generating a deep sub-conscious response in me that says "These letters represent some kind of danger. I better pay attention..." As if they've just been run over by an 18-wheeler, and I'm still in the middle of the highway. And of course, with the hundreds of millions of dollars spent, since the earliest days of advertising, on detailed psychological research to determine exactly WHAT makes people BUY, we can be sure that these fonts have caught the attention of the marketing people who see their vast potential.
"Burner" has been accused of being unlegible, but this feature is built in intentionally. Graffitti as an artform is a way of expressing your message to those who will care to read it. Many of the pieces seen on subways and the like are over looked every day by people who do not care to take the time to read. Burner allows the reader to become part of the message by making him or her have to understand the type to get the message. The wave of trash type and grunge "typography" is just that -- a wave. The sound of it crashing on the beach of long-term typographic structure is not the sound of the whole beach being washed away. There is nothing more pretentious, to my view, than the designer (or worse, the purveyor) of trash type claiming that their wares are responsible for "changing the nature of legibility." For as in language, while the styles and vernacular shift with the seasons, the underlaying grammar and structure change very slowly indeed. The question, at this juncture, seems rather to be whether there's any lasting value to the "new typography." In fact, as graphic design is really a fashion industry, one can't really argue with the fact that the new tools have widely broadened the pallette for typographic designers. Unfortunately, there seems to be a striking paucity of brilliant, clear hues. Rather we are faced with an overabundance of murky industrial corruptions, mutilations and mutations rendered mechanically possible by Fontographer. I suppose it really comes down to simple Newtonian (Issac, that is...) physics -- the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I believe -- which states that it's much harder to create order, than to create chaos....chaos is the inevitable expression of the loss of order. In our typographic universe, sociological and personal chaos finds expression in letterforms often artlessly drawn and mechanically rendered. Of course, there are exceptions, and if you browse through the list of foundries at Chris MacGregor's online font foundries web page (http://users.aol.com/typeindex/), you will find amongst the chaff some pearls of remarkable and useful designs being produced by one and two person font offices around the world. The nature of typographic design will change more in the next 18 months than since the birth of printing, as design for online environments becomes more widespread and its strengths and limitations are tested and developed. The web browser is the new "codex" -- somewhere between a scroll and a folio, it challenges designers to think in a new dimension. The technological discussion about online fonts is starting to take shape, and unfortunately, it is again an afterthought, arriving after the camel has left the corral, much as type came to desktop publishing . However, the inclusion of some form of designer control over on-screen fonts in inevitable, and with it considerations of moving type, random type, hyperspacial type... Through it all, the underlaying issues of proportion, structure and legibility will remain. Good typography is in no danger of disappearing on the net. Clear visual signs are a highly developed and widely understood method of message transmission, and if a type face doesn't serve this purpose, it will quickly evaporate. Of course, there are always going to be market forces seeking to bypass the rational mind with the use of jumbled and degenerate typography -- reach right into 'em and get 'em to BUY -- but at this point, it seems to me that the argument is not with type design, but, indeed, with consumerism. But, if the folks in Puget Sound win their battle, there may still be hope, and with it, also the potential for a rebirth of quiet places in the world, and a return to clarity, elegance and skillful drawing in typography and type design by the turn of the millennium.
Peter Fraterdeus is the founder of Alphabets, Inc., in Evanston, Illinois, and of designOnline, Inc., where he assists corporations in developing internet strategies.
He can be found online at the dezineCafé and would love to read reasoned and rational responses to his ideas. His type designs, A*I Prospera and A*I Quanta, can be found at www.fontsOnline.com and on the ITF CD-ROM.
Copyright © 1996 Peter Fraterdeus |
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