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Jun 27, 2013 - advanced computer systems allow for more unique characters, and ... Smeijer's Arnhem-based OurType.com uses English online, is it.
Nate Schulman

Face Forward Digital Dutch Type Design, 1965–1995

27 June 2013 Spring Term Essay 2.0 7,035 Words RCA / V&A History of Design programme

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations    2 Acknowledgements    3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Ever present, by way of introduction    4 Gone cold    5 The highest density    11 Out of this world    15 The 'digital' disintegrates    18 Ships to screens – software’s scope    27 Obstacle course – tradition and revival    29 Appendix A: Wim Crouwel, New Alphabet    33 Appendix B: First digital typefaces to be acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art    35    Illustration Credits    37 Glossary   38 Bibliography    39 Colophon    42

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List of Illustrations

1 2 3 4 5 6 7

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Typesetting Over Time, 1400–2000 Type Terminology Over Time, 1965–1995 A-Z of Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet, 1967 Announcing Digiset, 1965 Digi-Grotesk Series S, 1968  Gerard Unger’s Demos, 1976 and Hollander, 1983   Announcing Ikarus, 1975

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful to Bob Richardson and the staff at the St Bride Library, and the helpful criticism and encouragement of my colleagues and tutors on the course. Cheers to Vicky Wilson who helpfully suggested this topic to me. Thanks as well to Katrina Royall for her dilligent assistance to the students on the course. May I also take a brief moment to acknowledge the support of the American Friends of the V&A, without whose support I could never have become a Londoner-umbrella, down jacket, and all.

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1 Ever present, by way of introduction

For something ever present, even in this very moment, laying claim to any singular definition or history of typography is a nebulous pursuit.Though nearly always in view, this utilitarian subject easily recedes out of focus. Just as there is no type history without typesetting, and no typesetting without words, there are no words without letters, and no letters without ideas. Presented here are some ideas on letters made during the emerging networked age of 1965–1995.     As a now-familiar tale has it, the personal computer made type a digital and broadly accessible art form. New typesetting developments not only altered how printed pieces could be made, they vanquished former norms in type design and layout. The turbulence was not always soft, and our tale is one of disappearances as much as flashy arrivals. So as to restrain the horizon of this twilight, we’ll focus on The Netherlands, a land with a long-held tradition in the craft of designing letters. Drawing on a mixture of printing and graphic design historians, typesetting manufacturers, and the type designers themselves, four case-studies will elaborate Holland’s role in this zoned-in snapshot of historiography.        As with the quill pen, letterforms made via the computer visually acknowledge an aspect of their own creation. New digital outputs dictated new possibilities for form. The first machine capable of such ‘digital’ fonts for output and exposure came in 1965, with the unveiling of Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell’s Digiset 50T1. In a tumultuous left-turn, only two years later, famed Dutch designer Wim Crouwel proposed a preposterously ‘New Alphabet’, which relied on Digiset’s underlying technology. As a so-called ‘Programmed Typography’, new letters were systematized via the constraints technology–in this case, how they would be seen, which was via the Cathode Ray Tube.  With its peculiar approach and form, the New Alphabet was to become more a vessel of demarcation in global type design history than it was a success in those practical successes of profit, readability, or breadth of use.

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     In the third case-study, software’s scope will be assessed via a mythically named tool of translation: Ikarus, a early ‘font digitizing tool’ from 1973/74, and Beowolf, a randomized typeface of peculiar form and process. Made by Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum, Beowolf proved the intrinsic nature of digital type as code, but has been overshadowed by equally Generative, Algorithmic ComputerAided-Design of many quarters of Contemporary Architecture. It escaped without enough appraisal.      The fourth and last case study evaluates Gerrit Noordzij’s pre-eminence as a teacher of young digital Dutch type designers, through an ironic focus on Tradition & Revival. Through their attempts to renew unique craft heritage through mysterious calligraphic approaches, the faces and foundries of his students and sons returned to the past through new technologies.    Gone cold Into the 1950’s, there had been only three major technological methods developed for the advancement of typesetting: Hand-Set Type, Mechanically-Composed Type, and Photo-Type. As such that physical metal type ‘for five centuries dominated alphabetic printing’, any sort of ‘new freedom from the constraints of metal type,’ was no minor move.1 Thus, the initial showcase of digital typesetting in 1965 marked the ‘beginning of the decline of hot-metal mechanical composition’, or Hot Type. Through an era of intense speculation, the last lights of one trade faded out for another. Hot Type was going Cold. Indeed, all the variants of typesetting without metal took on this term, including: • phototypesetting • digital phototype-setting • digital typesetting • ‘desktop publishing’      

1. Herbert Spencer and Colin Forbes, New Alphabets A to Z (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1974), front flap.

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       Guidelines for typesetting have historically positioned it best that long settings of texts be designed so as to bring no unnecessary attention to themselves. In an important 1930 lecture, Monotype Corporation publicist Beatrice Warde went so far as to proclaim, ‘Printing Should Be Invisible’.2 Yet this meek approach was to blossom in places far and wide beyond her native England, indeed becoming self-evident in the Netherlands. Most recently, the Dutch typeface designer Petr van Blokland walked the well-trodden path, stating, ‘the same bottom line that applies to typography also applies to typefaces: when no one notices, the aim has been accomplished’.3 There remained all sorts of unresolved questions, all throughout the coming of the personal computer. Tensions took hold between the warring camps of obedience to craft (even invisibility), versus the pronouncedly formal openness that faster hardware and software opened up. Both socially and economically, new composition machines afforded both the design of completely new typefaces, and new adaptions of older ones.          Every literate person is implicated inside typographic culture. Factoring that presence in all acts of reading, how does a mystique remain around the applied art of designing letters? The high level of technical precision is one mettlesome answer. That tricky melding of aesthetics and engineering prevents too much fashionability, as much as it does for bridge builders. We cannot be shocked by the contention of social historians Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin when they worried ‘books, and the printed word more generally, are aspects of modern life that are all too often taken for granted’.3 A vested and underlying interest in the everyday is most productive here, originating from the history-from-below approach that Febvre co-developed in the Annales journal and school of thought.

2. Beatrice Warde, ‘The Crystal Goblet, Or Why Printing Should Be Invisible’, Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, ed. by Helen Armstrong (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), pp. 39-43. 3. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450-1800 (London: Verso, 1984), back cover.

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       That being said, in today’s Mass Media Society, an air of typographic literacy has surely been growing of late. Even decades ago, in a more optimistic vein, the editor and Publisher of one of the first scholastic journals on Typographic Research, Dr. Merald Wrolstad wrote in 1967’s first issue that since typography ‘deals with visible language to communicate information’ all those with an interest in ‘the visual form of language’ can take an interest in it.4        In taking the long view, surely we notice the extremely small scale of today’s typesetting technologies as a proportion to developments from centuries before. To help periodize, two chart illustrations of typesetting over time are now included to help visually make that point. A timeline created by typeface designer Malou Verlomme [1], for his dissertation, is one of the many recurrences in graphic design history where the scholars producing the scholarship are the producers themselves.       

[ 1 ]

Typesetting Over Time, 1400–2000

4. Dr. Merald Wrolstad, Journal of Typographical Research 1, no. 1, (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1967), Introduction.

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In our second chart, the linguistic corpus of Google’s complete ‘Google Books’ database is visualized to chart the use of the term ‘digital typography’ over the last thirty years of the 20th century [2]. We can see the seismic shift from 1983-1990. Just a year earlier, in Terminology over Time: 1982, print historian Lawrence Wallis summarized the epoch well by “Digital Typography” saying: ‘more has happened and altered in type composition over the last quarter century than the previous 500 years’.5

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Type Terminology Over Time, 1965–1995

      Which leads to another area of scholarship: the technical history. However arcane to the non-initiated, these should be valued for being less celebratory and more explicatory. Both technology vendors and typeface creators peppered the emerging computer age with terms like ‘revolution’ so as to assuage obstructions along the obstacle course of change. In so doing, they put difficult aesthetic and economic movements on a treadmill of predestination. Yet instilling revolution presupposes all became clarified, neat and sound. To cite but a few examples of this, here is a list of excerpts from serious offenders, in order of their chronological stage in the technical development of typesetting: a)       “After four centuries of virtually unchanged craftsmanship, the second technological revolution… occurred towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the invention of mechanical punchcutting and typecasting machines”.6 5. Lawrence Wallis, Electronic Typesetting: A Quarter Century of Technological Upheaval (Gateshead, England: The Paradigm Press, 1984), preface.

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b)       “Triggering the revolution was the introduction of filmsetting machines, with letters existing solely as visible images on negative film”.7 c)       ‘The early seventies market the onset of a revolution having had a direct and far-reaching effect on typography’.8        Inevitable changes are not less painful for their inevitability; as the line from a 17th century madrigal had it, so it still stands: ‘All things change, except the love of change’.9 A seemingly insurmountable chasm faced the classical, and primarily book typographers of yore - a digital world whereby text became impermanent, and the screen ruled over the page. The remedy was also the scourge, and it went by the name: ‘Desktop Publishing’.        Through reactionary fear, if nothing else, it can seem today that the old lessons of print typography no longer hold court, not in a contemporary environment where the vast majority of what we see printed commences from computer typesetting, someone starring at a screen. Funny how the artist at the easel has always held a kind of mystic metaphorical power the designer and their screen-space hasn’t quite mustered. In the sense of public education, the more the craftsperson does their work privately, the more mystique they may gather. The locksmith at the hardware shop, however, has that consumer always keeping an eye on the maker, focused in on their needs. The consumer of type, as a reader, can appreciate reading without needing to acknowledge the actual craft with such focused

6. Ladislas Mandel, ‘Developing an awareness of typographics letterforms’, Electronic Publishing 6, no. 1 (Nottingham, UK: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 1993), p. 8. 7. Peter Karow, Font Technology: Methods and Tools (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994), Introduction. 8. Gerard Unger, ‘Preface’, Font Technology: Methods and Tools (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994), Preface, v. 9. Richard Carlton, ‘Madrigals To Five voyces,’ in English Madrigal Verse 1588-1632: Edited from the Original Song Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1920).

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vigilance. The consumer of type, if either an interactive or book designer, has no such choice, needing to evaluate suitability for a hugely variable set of reading contexts. Graphic design historians have too often left out tools and economics, rather understandably battling with the depths of technical description.The first remedy in this regard has come in the form of the recent Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide, by Johanna Drucker and Emily McVarish. As the easel has gone so largely unchanged, one can looks upon the paintbrush and canvas instead, but the type designer’s tools are not generally put forward for such display. In that the digitization process requires use of computers that are accessible to anyone else who wanted to buy them, they’d form a blank canvas ‘only’ of the knowledge and workmanship of the hardware (let’s say a MacBook). These tools may seem commonplace to even the most casual coffee-shop observer, but they would not at all be predictable to even the earliest and most ardently tech-savvy typographers of but two decades ago. If we live in a culture instilled with values from the digital world we now inhabit, we’d do best to attempt to figure out how we got here, lest we become ourselves determinists.

10. Leslie Sherr, ‘A tradition of departure’, Eye 6 Spring 1992.

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The highest density Where the American graphic design press disagrees on much else, it blithely regards the Netherlands as a land rich with typographic heritage. Blinding optimism abounds in joyful shouts such as! - ‘American designers acknowledge the emergence of Dutch innovation as the leading edge in graphic design’!10  The tenor of joy makes it sound as if millions of typefaces pour out from the Dutch like those millions of paintings from their Golden Age. While of course this is not the case, both fact and fascination remain– especially for one of the smallest countries in Europe, Dutch type design is plentiful and renown, inside the nation and out. Attempts at canonization can be gleaned from both inward and outward sources. A proclamation such as ‘Holland today has more type designers per capita than any other country in the world’, comes from well-renown dutch typeface designer Gerard Unger, himself an important role player in the tale to follow.11 Likewise, German type world juggernaut Erik Spiekermann has more than once duly avowed that ‘the Netherlands is the country with the highest density of type designers per square kilometer’, compounding a collaborative effort between Germany and Holland which also burns deep.12        But what does the ‘Dutch-ness’ in ‘Dutch Type’ actually mean when design influences, the transmission of digital files, and product sales take place across borders? Is there something characteristically Dutch in Dutch characters? First and formally, we shan’t forget ‘there are no Dutch letters, only Roman or Latin ones’, as the historian and lettering artist Paul Shaw reminds us.13 Today’s more advanced computer systems allow for more unique characters, and thus more multilingual fonts with entirely more support for a wider array of languages. When first-generation digital type designer Fred

11. Peter Bil’ak, ‘Dutch type design’ (The Hague: Typotheque, 2004). 12. Jan Middendorp, Dutch Type (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004), p. 10. 13. Paul Shaw, Blue Pencil no. 6—Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles.

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Smeijer’s Arnhem-based OurType.com uses English online, is it a framing of internationalism, personal preference, or just smart global commerce? Does it matter? It certainly makes for easier PR in the more-widely spoken language. The story behind a broad global marketing campaign may have a more easily buzzed backstory, with its well-defined audience, broad team of makers, and a PR machine. But a digital typeface made in private has to fight to stand out in an extremely crowded market and internet sphere. With it’s inexhaustible potential for future use, type sold out does not offer the easy set-up of a story-line. In the ability to garner publicity, narratives are too easily lost in the search to zone in.       What unfortunately emanates through nation-based case studies of graphic design is cleanly tying nationalism into formal concerns only.14 This serves to promote certain attributes of design as more or less specific to one country over another. Fair enough, so stated, but these changes can be extremely subtle, especially when dealing with shared lineages of printing history of neighboring countries, as in the ‘Low Countries’ (the essentially unofficial collective of Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands). It would be tricky enough to scholastically locate hugely distinguishable differences in the formal approach between an Antwerp and an Amsterdam. To then share the new discovery verbally, without jargon, or visually, to a less demanding, less detail-oriented eye, would be an entirely different level of difficult. However well stated by the ‘royalty’ of the graphic design press or trade, the problem of mapping form to place too cleanly arises in the eventual dominance of the stereotype. When Gerard Unger’s Dutch type designs build upon his belief that ‘clarity, sturdiness, straightforwardness’ are all that ‘is characteristic of Dutch type design over some 400 years’, he is not so loosely attributing the same politico-ideological status to his homeland.15 How these underlying philosophical frameworks pin to subjective formal properties is the more challenging text to read.

14. Two nation-based studies are Alston W. Purvis, Dutch Graphic Design 1918-1945, and Kees Broos & Paul Hefting, Dutch Graphic Design. 15. Robin Kinross, ‘Technology, Aesthetics and Type’, Eye, no.3, 1991. pp. 36-41.

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      A rejoinder is in order, for transnationalism is nothing new in Dutch type design, only the thought that it might be. An early rebuke was provided by the Dutch punchcutter Pierre Simon Fournier, who said in his 1764 Manuel Typographique even ‘the best possible shape of letters is a matter of personal taste’, projecting the enormous scale of this most subjective concern.16 Yet eons pass, and even the talents of critical design historian Robin Kinross cannot neuter a position of a ‘grand arbiter’ of taste, not when he sings the tune of Holland’s ‘splendid national tradition of type design’.17       Before continuing into our four case-studies of digital dutch type design, we must foregrounded the primary work of our subject-inreview. The single most comprehensive tome on the subject is type historian Jan Middendorp’s Dutch Type, from 2004.18 The work is proof perfect international. Middendorp is Dutch-born, yet works in Berlin, where he edits a magazine created for a Dutch-Belgian subsidiary of FontShop, the very definition of a global type foundry. Middendorp’s work doesn’t so much reflect two countries visually, as it does verbally. With its text in English, for cross-border appeal, and written by a type world insider born in the Hague, Middendorp’s internationalist, connoisseurial bent is never disguised. The author plainly states his self-avowed intent: to ‘deepen my knowledge of methods, techniques and historical references’.18 By doing so, his process relied on his own privileged role, not just in the access to particular archives, but through new interviews for new knowledge. Despite its historical arc being much longer than the last three decades, Dutch Type makes plentiful reference to the ‘digital’, where it appears one hundred times.

16. The Manuel Typographique of Pierre-Simon Fournier le jeune, Vols. I-III. Edited by James Mosley, 1995. Darmstadt. 17. Kinross, Ibid. 18. Jan Middendorp, Dutch Type (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004). 19. Ibid., pg. 5

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      The utter breadth of this comprehensive title well surpasses any and all scattered sources. As easily discovered, these would have been limited to more exclusive trade journals, titles in Dutch only, or even the type specimen books themselves. Dutch Type’s gestation period was a long one, beginning in 1997, but followed by seven years of interviews and fact-finding. In all this, this encyclopedia of sorts is more than enough to grant Middendorp the title of ‘bearer of the mantle’.       Yet this ‘keep it in the family’ approach is easily problematic, leaving masses of room for collegial self-regard and self-censorship. Clubs write their own histories, but disciplines need more. One overriding question becomes– how can we discuss these histories as constituent of particularized publics? After all, typographers set type for public audiences, not historians.

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Out of this world       The precursor to designing reproducible letters was handwriting. Yet, in that earliest of early typographical transitions - from 15th century manuscripts to their counterparts, printed books imitations, ‘people soon came to prefer printed texts which were more readable’.21 So, too, with the move to digital settings, readers would generally not prefer a radical break in their texts’ visual appearance so much as an imitation of the past, only furthered. In the drive towards emulation, the prowess of the new mechanical process at hand is not necessarily used in groundbreaking fashion.       In bringing forth the printing press, it is easy to presume Gutenberg also brought forth design change, but this was not so immediate. The appearance of typography originally needed to imitate what readers of the time were already accustomed to. The arguments for sudden change were low, resistance high.       Wim Crouwel was an exception. The most internationally renown of post-war typo/graphic designers in Holland, he argued the advent of the digital should certainly make for sudden changes, the sooner the better. In a 1970 screed within The Journal of Typographic Research titled “Type Design for the Computer Age”, Crouwel demanded typeface design speed up the pace to keep abreast with the then-new space age. Adding a futurism not the least bit Alvin Toffler, he requested ‘a type that would not be anachronistic to the space craft in which the first men landed on the moon’.20 There’d be no easy landing.       The translation to phototypesetting was not causing any radical shifts in letter designs. Machines were developing so fast it seemed beyond what letter design could keep up with.

20. Wim Crouwel, ‘Type design for the computer age’, in Journal of Typographical Research 4, no. 1, (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1970), p. 51. 21. The Manuel Typographique of Pierre-Simon Fournier le jeune, Vols. I-III. Edited by James Mosley, 1995. Darmstadt.

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Released six years prior, Swiss designer Adrian Frutiger’s ‘Apollo’ was the first typeface designed specifically for phototypesetting, in 1964. While Apollo’s name may have predated NASA’s program of manned flight to the moon, it was anything but radical in design, indeed even staid. As a design suitable for the body of the text (long settings and long readings), Frutiger’s Apollo was categorically at the heart of business for Monotype. The classically-informed aesthetic hid the burgeoning newness of the technology behind the scenes. As shown via the embrace of Cathode Ray Tube (CRT), this point could not have been lost on Crouwel, who even dressed in a space-suit for promotional purposes. Wim’s take on matters? Embrace the Machine, warts and all. ‘New Alphabet’ was the result [3].

[3] A-Z of Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet, 1967

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To introduce his release, Crouwel described his process as follows: ‘the letter symbols will be introduced into the memorizing mechanism of a computer. Because circular and diagonal lines are least suitable for this technique of screen reproduction, the proposed basic alphabet consists entirely of vertical and horizontal lines’.22 Did Crouwel tread a path the type world was to follow? Whether or not, readers actually understood or could even read the advancement of letters was much less evident. The experiment marks a failure no less off for its bravura, judging by its establishment in a kind of cult design history canon. The abstract creations establish their own function, rather than being dominated by someone else’s. If the main goal of ‘New Alphabet’ was to directly and formally imply advanced technology visually, it was not without precedent - yet the topic was absolutely new. Speed was of the utmost- speed of modernity, speed of life rushing by, speed of reading when given so much to read. As Crouwel wrote, ‘Our ancestors had time to spare but we have not’.23 

22. Wim Crouwel, New Alphabet: An Introduction for a Programmed Typography (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Steendrukkerij de Jong & Company, 1967). See Appendix A for further excerpt. 23. Ibid.

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Unveiling of Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell’s Digiset 50T1 was at the TPG ‘International

The ‘digital’ disintegrates

was pixels Technologies Exhibition’ in Paris, July 1965 (Figuremonitors, 04).37 Dr. Hell What were these Cathode Ray Tube andhimself the chunky

e inventorsthey of the imageon scanner’ during the 1960s,How and his ‘a a path relied for rendering letters? didcompany Crouwelwas tread

38 Located in Kiel, on the Baltic urer of electronic components devices’.Let’s the type world wasand to follow? visit the first unveiling of Dr.-Ing.

Rudolf Hell’s Digiset 50T1, which were was at the TPG ‘International orthern Germany, the organization’s resources highly accessible to Graphics Technologies Exhibition’ in Paris, July 1965 [4].

[4] Figure Announcing Digiset, 1965 04, Announcing DIGISET

Dr. Hell was ‘one1965 of the image he TPG exhibition in Paris during thatinventors the mysteriesof ofthe digital fountsscanner’ for output during and 24 Sixties. Hisunfolded was company specializing inatthe manufacture of a cathode raythe tube were initially to a printing industry which the time had

25to hot-metal composition’ sted to a more conventionalcomponents phototypesetting as an alternative ‘electronic and devices’. Located in Kiel, on the Baltic Wallis, Electronic Typesetting: A Quarter Century of Technological Upheaval, p. 43. coast in Northern Germany, the organization’s resources were highly

story 23, no. 1,accessible p. 44 & John W. The World of Digital Typesetting, (Media, PA: Seybold to Seybold, Holland.

, 1984), p. 127.

24. Printing History 23, no. 1, p. 44 25. John W. Seybold, The World of Digital Typesetting, (Media, PA: Seybold Publications, 1984), p. 127.

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‘Frohe Ostern’, or ‘Happy Easter’ in German, was the phrase which first appeared across the CRT tube.26 A working Prototype was completed the year after, but the first commercial installation had to wait until the tail end of 1966, when it was used to set the Copenhagen telephone directory.27 Were it not for Crouwel’s first introduction to the machine, during a German trade show in 1965, The New Alphabet project would have had no sustenance.       The Digiset was the earliest to employ digitally encoded fonts in computer memory, with a method entitled CRT photo-composition. The purity of keeping to the typographer’s wishes was sacrificed for the sake of speed. Such imperfect distortions in the imperfect early capabilities of the machine were gracefully excised to frame a better tale of progress. Given it’s outrageously high price, it is hard to say rather it is truth or boosterism that this ‘digital elecronic photocomposing system . . . gained immediate recognition in the printing industry worldwide’.28 In terms of further internationalism than just the Low Countries, the Digiset was in no way restricted to use or sales on the continent, as it became known in the States as 1968’s RCA VideoComp. What we do know is that by the early 1970’s, speed beget more speed, Moore’s Law gone typo. In 1974, the earlier generation of photomechanical machines set type ‘at speeds of approx. 100 characters per second’ but when the cathode ray was put into the marketplace it increased ‘output performance by a factor of 10 or more’.29

26. John A. Lane, ‘Type designs: function and spirit’, Bram De Does: Letterontwerper & Typograaf (typographer & Type Designer), ed. by Mathieu Lommen (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij De Buitenkant, 2003). John A. Lane received this information from Lawrence Wallis, chronicler of Electronic Typesetting. 27. Ibid. 28. Siemens Review, p. 114. 29. Ibid.

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While now capable of operating at speeds of 1,000+ characters per second, the formal appearance of character forms were being altered and demeaned in the process. This was because when ‘the cathode ray tube (CRT) transferred the digitised typeface, which was broken down into pixels or vertical lines, onto film,’ it also destroyed the representation of typefaces at their most precise delineation.30       In the same year as Crouwel’s breakneck A-Z, Linotype’s Linotron 505 became the more popular alternative player on the CRT machine market. Not surprisingly, digitally storing characters in these new breeds of typesetters was much more expensive than photographically doing so, as the normal photosetting predecessors had done. In the second half of ‘60s, ‘digital’ didn’t just represent disintegration from tangible to intangible, it also meant a truly high financial cost. This was largely due to the cost of memory. To quantify, the Linotron 505 ‘cost about £39,000’ in 1970, and given it was ‘the first such device to have a major impact’ one can only imagine the Digiset’s presumably higher initial expense.31 Either way, all of these machines suffered from ‘prohibitively high costs of the equipment’ and all in all, ‘the very first CRT machines tended to have very little direct influence on the printing industry because of the high capital costs’.32 This disputes the inherent jubilant upshot to the term ‘revolution’ in favor of a slow and steady, uphill ‘upheaval’. In sheer terms of iterative releases, Videocomp & Digiset dominated the late 60s and mid 70s, and ‘from 1975 onwards, CRT Machines took over the market and virtually replaced hot metal composition’.33 When digital CRT machines began to excel in ‘more typographic flexibility in terms of modulating forms’, the machine operator began to become an inadvertent computer-aided collagist, modulating type designs without permission.33 Particularly in the machine’s new ability to alter scale and width to no end, a sense of anarchy reigned. Conversely, Crouwel

30. Heidrun Osterer, and Philipp Stamm, eds. Adrian Frutiger–Typefaces: The Complete Works (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2009), p. 432. 31. Phil Baines, and Andrew Haslam, Type and typography (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005), p. 103. 32. Ibid; Lawrence Wallis, Electronic Typesetting. 33. Wallis, Electronic Typesetting.

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accepted CRT at its own pace, so as to best it, rather than keep up with it retrospectively. Its hard not to agree that type designers are ‘entitled to make demands of a type manufacturing system (as) these are the designers whose work provides the input to the system, and, in a sense, the justification for its existence’.34 Calling the CRT a type of writing machine, prominent digitization software developer Peter Karrow, in particular, bemoaned the state of affairs where the quality of reproducing type was being given short thrift. In this regard, typeface designers must answer to the whims of developers as much as to readers. Particularly in the upcoming role software and hardware companies would have in shaping Desktop Publishing and the integration of word and text into new venues, Crouwel was prescient to desire a system that did not add extra confusion in user experience between a designer and how to create their idea.       If substantiveness of a type design comes through its fit for purpose, high sales would only depend on the particularity of that purpose. Nonetheless, even in this particularly special case, clearly commercial applications of The New Alphabet were non-existent. Visibility in terms of sales is all the same difficult to quantify for reasons of commercial sensitivity on the part of the type vendors. The pre-eminence ‘New Alphabet’ and its corresponding historicizing exists on a mythic ethos, beyond its actual audience. Commemorated widely in a variety of graphic design history textbooks, the New Alphabet was recently one of the first twenty-three digital fonts acquired by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art for their Department of Architecture and Design (see Appendix B). Removed from audience, however daring the attempt, an omen resounds from typographical evangelist Stanley Morison‘type design moves at the pace of the most conservative reader’.35

34. Richard Southall, ‘Character description techniques in type manufacture’, Computers and Typography 2, ed. by Rosemary Sasson (Bristol: Intellect, 2002), p. 93. 35. Stanley Morison, First Principles of Typography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), p. 7. Morison also said of Christopher van Dyck, a Dutch typographer, ‘the faces modelled on a letter of historical importance are often noticeably superior in design to their prototype’.

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Nay, the controversy lies with the Alphabet’s consistent set-up as a textbook example, which always overrides its ‘turn key’ ability to be widely published and understand.       Closer still, Dutch compatriot Gerard Unger wrote A Counterproposal which directly spoke to Crouwel’s adventurous project the same year it was released. ‘I see no reason in developing an alphabet which takes a totally new form,’ Unger sauntered, holding back no punches. ‘The introduction of such an alphabet requires an adaptation of men. It would be more logical to adapt the machine’.36       Seven years later, Unger would have his chance, as he was offered a freelance contract that same Rudolfworldwide Hell GmbH of Kiel. type design: the small groupwith - perhaps half aDr.-Ing. dozen people - who designed As Middendorp points out in his Dutch Type, it was then that ‘Unger 54 typefaces for the latest digital typesetting technology’. He was offered a freelance joined the ranks of what then could be seen as the jetset of type decontract with that same Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell GmbH of Kiel. Essentially anonymously, sign: the small group - perhaps half a dozen people worldwide - who the staff of Hell’s pioneering office had designed Digi-Grotesk S, the first truly designed typefaces for the latest digital typesetting technology’.37 digital typeface,       inE1968 (Figureanonymously, 05). ssentially the staff of Hell’s pioneering office had designed Digi-Grotesk S in 1968, the first truly digital typeface [5].   

[5] Digi-Grotesk Series S, 1968  Figure 05, Digi-Grotesk Series S, the first digital typeface

Appearing most similarUnger, in tone and texture to Wilhelm Pischner’s 1928 Neuzeit Grotesk, 36. Gerard A Counter-Proposal (Hilversum, The Netherlands:

Steendrukkerij de Jong & Company, 1967), cover. ‘digital’ in any kind o the clean compactness of Digi-Grotesk does not lookback particularly 37. Dutch Type, p.aesthetic. 167. ground-breaking computer Non-remarkable, it bathed in the harsh

anonymity of the corporate design office it was built from. In the classic modern factor

of the 19th and 20th centuries, the owner of the means of production sought to control much manufacture in one building as possible. ‘Divided labor' thus tends to be

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  Appearing most similar in tone and texture to Wilhelm Pischner’s 1928 Neuzeit Grotesk, the clean compactness of Digi-Grotesk does not look particularly ‘digital’ by any stretch of the imagination. What we might expect from a computer aesthetic would await decades later. Non-remarkably complacent, Digi-Grotesk S bathed in the harsh anonymity of the corporate design office it was built from.       In the classic modern factory of the 19th and 20th centuries, the owner of the means of production sought to control as much manufacture in one building as possible. ‘Divided labor’ thus tends to be connected to Mass Production, usually all on site. In the separated process between the the sketches of the typeface designer and their industrialized producer, pre-1970s software, the translator was simply called the ‘Drawing Office’, and held chief importance as a site of production. Yet just as ‘quality control’ is a problem with outsourcing because of the physical separation between makers and translators, this Drawing office was sometimes maligned as causing ruination of the maker’s originally elaborate drawings and intentions. As a small process booklet described it, ‘a drawing, however carefully and painstakingly done, can at its best only give a rough idea as to how the type will look when reproduced in its final form’.38 As it made its way through the drawing office, the long slog of a typeface’s development was seen by makers, more than anything else, as an obstacle to overcome. The technology seemed to exist only in the way of the perfectionist. If only, the perfectionist makers thought, they could be taken more seriously, involved more deeply.       Gerard Unger, for one, was brought in for the development of new faces to be proprietary to the Hell setter. At that time, his work as individual was neither to be sold separately nor even identified by author. We would not be able to identity the work as a consumer of individual type designers, so much as someone tied down to exclusive use of a very expensive typesetting machine. In the specimen promotional for his later face ‘Coranto’, Unger heralded upcoming changes, rather than bemoaning what did not live up to his standards, as Dutch traditionalist type designer Jan van Krimpen had so

38. Dutch Type, p. 167.

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stridently done with Monotype’s translations decades before. Instead, Unger simply thought that working with advanced technology would allow for better detail, and what type designer would not want to take advantage of that?       It was with this level of pragmatism Unger began his long involvement of creating letters for digital processing for Rudolf Hell. The involvement covered six designs from the years 1975 to 1987. Demos (1977) and Hollander (1983) are of the utmost relevance here, as they provide context of the difficulty of design at the time, letters individually pieced through squares on a coarse grid, though one which refined and grew smoother over time [6].

[6] Gerard Unger’s Demos, 1976 and Hollander, 1983   Figure 06, Demos (1977) and Hollander (1983), left to right, as digitally constructed Despite the inhospitable conditions of the cathode ray tube-its coarseness and low resolution, Unger accepted the means of production he was handed. Instead of feeling backed up against the wall, he finessed the set of parameters that restricted his work. Just as visual communicators want to be seen as heroic problem solvers, battling

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strong restraints, type designers almost always are, regardless of how much personal artistic expression they are allotted. For fluency in the utilitarian morass of type design, the digital age asked for flexibility in production. Hard as it must have been, Unger was able to admit the hard-earned expertise he garnered in CRT was soon enough probably doomed for change. Times were soon to call for a reboot. Composing machines would, and did, advance. The laser beam increased speed and resolution for production, which was to increase the power of words as commodities to deal with Capital’s increasingly globalizing demands.       Everything about Unger’s approach to working with Dr. Hell’s company and composing machines was clearly inherent to its reason for being, and not just as corporate commissions, but philosophical projects. In this way, Demos and Hollander seems as much responses to their era as does Crouwel’s Proposal, yet the results could not have been farther apart. The New Alphabet was situated in a bizarre league of its own. The lack of readability did the opposite of footnoting it, instead highlighting its differences with Frutiger’s preceding Apollo.       As if nothing else dire was going on in 1968, no student protests nor political assassinations, the German lettering artist and type designer Hermann Zapf in that year feared, ‘electronics will soon force its claims upon letterforms, and let us hope it will liberate us from the dust of the past’.39 One such matter of dust, best swept away, was the previous economics of physically creating letters in metal. In that high up-front set-up, ‘a separate punch is required for each

39. Hermann Zapf, ‘The changes in letterforms due to technical developments’, Journal of Typographic Research, vol ii, no 4, 1968, pp. 351–368

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character in every font of type, and the making of them is the most expensive operation in typefounding’.40 Today’s production assembly line comes as good news, then, for the digital type foundry, the contemporary dealer of digital typography, and so often its commissioner too. There is no longer that extra cost when building letters as objects, one by one. Software would see to that.       The change-agent Mr. Zapf also came to be involved with the Hell company, whereabouts was produced his typeface ‘Marconi’. Released in 1976, it is now a much lesser-known work than could be expected. Despite both his own testimonial and that of his New York Times obituary, the claim of Zapf designing the first digital alphabets for the Hell Digiset machine, and thus the digital era, are not entirely accurate.41 Instead, his Marconi was the first original typeface to be produced with the Ikarus computer-aided design and digitization system. What was this mythically named creation, and where did it come from? 40. Alexander S. Lawson, Anatomy of a Typeface, (Boston: David R. Godine, 1990). 41. See Hermann Zapf, ‘Meine Zusammenarbeit mit Don Knuth und meine Schriftentw¨urfe’ (‘My collaboration with Don Knuth and my font design work’), Die TEXnische Komödie, 2000, pp. 37–44.

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Ships to screens – software’s scope A digitization tool from Hamburg, Germany, Ikarus was a 1973-1974 project released by Peter Karow, whose company URW was even at this early point in development known worldwide (that’s Unternehmensberatung Rubow Weber, in full!). With a laboratory devoted to advancing computer typography, Ikarus was developed ‘using logarithms originally written for shipbuilding,’ and was well received critically and commercially, even growing dominant [6]. It was also deemed (watch out for the dangerous terminology again) ‘a revolutionary programme for describing characters by means of outlines’.42       The social and economic implications of removing the mediating ‘Drawing Office’ were enormous. If ‘in the early 1980s, being a type designer was a rarity, and publishing a typeface was something special’, Ikarus began the route by which it would become less rarified.43 Succinctly explained, this new tool was geographic at its core– ‘at the heart of the programs is a unique method for storing the outlines of type characters using the descriptions of certain points around the contours of the letters and the precise locations of these points’.44       Given its underlying flexibility, truly open-ended, it’s curious Karow counteracted his own role in development not with an open-mind, but a peppering of cultural conservatism. However, this is exactly what he did when he sighed loudly that since ‘our eyes and reading habits… have remained unchanged over centuries’, the form of letter should not lose shape to be just anything. After all, he argued, the ‘rapid recognition of word images remains the primary task of type character reproduction’.45 This direct comeback, if not attack, is not so out of place in later efforts in postmodern graphic design to retain legibility, or destroy it.

42. Dutch Type, p. 180. 43. Chris Vermaas, ‘The organic type designer’ Eye 53, Autumn 2004. 44. Mike Daines, ‘Some aspects of the effects of technology on type design’, p. 78. 45. Peter Karow, ‘Digital Typefaces: Description and Formats’, vii.

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[7] Announcing Ikarus, 1975

Before the applicable computing and related software aided and abetted the democratizing of designing type, ‘processing the design Figure 08, Announcing IKARUS, 1975 of a typeface into a marketable industrial product was an enterprise of considerable scope and cost’.46 Here and now drastically reshaping, if all the work of type design was to be reduced to file formats, its distribution more and frictionless, the by commodity status ofcompan IKARUS was developed inmore Hamburg, 1973-1974, Peter Karow at his type itself was unsettled. Even more dynamically, conversion from (Unternehmensberatung Rubowfonts Weber), which at thisMacintosh juncture was ‘one of the wor Ikarus-Format to PostScript for the Apple became The dominant type designWhile and production advancedtotype available the laboratories’. market with 611989’s ‘Ikarus-M’ release. at times tool difficult to see a match the impact on an economy and the for the 1990s, IKARUS wasbetween developed ‘using logarithms originally written impact on a Design Scene, this future in flux very much merged both.       shipbuilding,’ and it was well received as ‘a revolutionary programme for desc 46. Dutch Type, p. 11. 61 Dutch Type, p. 180.

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Obstacle course – tradition and revival  When letters are just code and kilobytes, they are also more and more intangible as things. Letters of the digital are un-fleshy, unreal, untouchable until printed . They seem literally abstracted in this fashion of storage, always ready to come forth, but easily deleted too. At least it can feel this way in comparison to those materials we can see, that we touch, that we know are to be molded. A painter’s studio or sculptor’s workshop is envied as full of tools of messy process, chaotic on principle, tools jostling with one another like the genius ideas, strewn about even. It is all as in a kind of mythology. The contusion cannot be overstated- keeping up with the now while respecting what came before.       With new digital potential and skill, mix reverence to the past for a self-perpetuating recipe of the new ever more relying on the old. Because type design is so self-conscious of its history, revivals are always inevitable. Debates center around revivals when madness of change exceeds the safety zone of printers and designers to keep with what they’ve been doing.      Considering the revivalism ever present in typography’s relationship to itself, Jan Middendorp provides a surprisingly accusatory warning in his cornerstone title Dutch Type. In about as early a place as he can, the credits page, he asserts, ‘aspiring type designers are encouraged at all times to try to conceive their own letterforms instead of copying those created by others’.47 But as an ethical set of standards, they do not seem to be applied equally. When Dutch type designer Fred Smeijers designs Renard, a revival of a face cut by Hendrik van den Keere, Middendorp calls it ‘a reinterpretation of a design from the distant past’, while Smeijers’ now-obscure, and never-digitized Romanée is deemed ‘a revival in the true sense of the word’.48 Of course, type piracy does permit for

47. Dutch Type, credits page. 48. Ibid., p. 243.

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unauthorized commercial usage. But it is unfair to assume copying of long-dead punch-cutters falls out of the equation of copying, just because the copyright’s gone.      Digitality may well allow that permanent problem of easy transmit, and unauthorized copying. Yet by the very same token, the work itself is more accessible than before, much faster to find, to see and to read and to consume. We should not go on without noting the prohibitively high licensing cost of the specialty foundries such as Dutch Type Library. They are not unlike the vendors of a community farmer’s market pitted against the mass-items of the chain supermarket. Whatever other aims towards heightened artistic merit, dissemination will always be limited in such cases. As in other economic avenues, sales may be hindered by such high upfront costs, but this avoids the particularity of consumers, and the high level of self-conscious knowledge the specialist consumer may bring. To ask which foundries dominated the market is not the same as which were the most valorized by other typographers.      Type design is oft perceived in some sort of continuum between the ‘beauty’ of aesthetics and the ‘sternness’ of engineering. In this aspect of the unglamorous and uncelebrated, we can find the the missing space between ‘star’ designers and vital-but-in-thebackground engineers: A Dutch type designer like Jelle Bosma, who worked on system fonts, came up with work ‘used by millions,’ which took residence ‘on hard disks worldwide’ without much thought or attribution to the author.49

49. Dutch Type, p. 192. 50. ‘Signature Pedagogies in the Professions,’ Daedalus Vol. 134, no. 3, pp. 52. 51. In Dutch, the Royal Academy is referenced as the KabK

(Koninklijke Academie vor Beeldende Kunsten)

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It seems wise to take a detour now, back to school. Let’s go via the lead of education scholar Lee Shulman, who believed ‘if you wish to understand why professions develop as they do, study their nurseries’.50 There’s no better place for this than Gerrit Noordzij, not just a teacher, but practically titled the Teacher. His foundational studies serve as the symbolic backbone that easily form a ‘network’ of dutch digital typography students. For the historian looking to concoct one, the low countries are small enough to map in such a way. The urge is real, but complicated by the need to evaluate the contingencies of extant actors in this so-called network, which branches out from 1960.      That was the year Noordzij began to teach at the Royal Academy staying there 30 years.51 Through his ‘Letter Programme’, he established a true ‘school of letters’, also called the Hague School. Initially disallowing the use of the computer, his students built the first batch of widely used and acclaimed Dutch digital typefaces. Working intensively (sometimes in affiliation, sometimes not), a batch of alumni, including his sons, established foundries and digitally revived out-of-circulation designs from deceased metal type.      One group of Noordzij students shocked their way into history. Countering the trope of hiding behind content, Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum’s FF Beowulf is, at foremost, an image, a sight before anything read. As a type ‘design’ it randomly constructs itself within a set boundary of algorithms. Only the constraints are firmly lodged in place, only the constraints are invisible. The real and absolute visible, here, is how it appears ‘digital’, unlike the namesake of ‘Digi-Grotesk’. Certainly not a gimmick, Beowolf all the same lacked applicability, which removed it from serious consideration in some 52. Walker, John A. Design history and the history of design. London: Pluto, 1989.

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of the very quarters it required. The design more than breaks away from Calvinist austerity. There is a remarkable world of difference separating the anomaly of something such as strange and algorithmic as FF Beowulf versus the Revivalism of the ‘Dutch Type Library’, with their focus only on the ‘fine’, tracing back. The networks between Gerrit’s teaching, students, and resulting digital typefaces enables him a primary spot in Middendorp’s Dutch Type, among its already exclusive coterie.      Let us be entirely wary of a history so conceived. History is not the ‘relay race’ of those who finish on top. Historian John A. Walker eloquently describes the darkness of the ‘great men’ approach as an unfolding spiral of doom where, ‘the baton of genius or avant garde innovation passes from the hand of one great designer to the next in an endless chain of achievement’.52 It’s a no go.      The digital contexts for reading online, particularly in their most recent incarnations, are highly visible but still just a tiny, tiny stage in flux compared with the past of the printed. Rather than the triumphalist culmination of a long journey, our typographic era is not necessarily one of the be-all and end-all. It’s not a case of everything culminating in the this-and-now. Moreover, an attempt has been made here to historicize digital dutch type design so as to opens up ideas. What technologies might still be needed, but are not there yet? Typography is ever present, so what in the name of History will we be saying about it? •

Appendix A: Wim Crouwel, New Alphabet    

“Proposal for a new type that, more than the traditional types, is suited for the composing system with the cathode-ray tube (CRT) : Even today the lines of text in our books are rows of traditional signs, signs we are familiar with and that were familiar to our ancestors. The difference is that our ancestors could string these signs together at a leisurely pace, letter by letter, whereas we have to do this at a dizzying speed without even looking. Our ancestors had time to spare but we have not. It is not the intention to trace the whole history of printing, but it is a fact that basically the manufacture of type faces has not changed since the moulded type was first introduced. Only the speed of the process of manufacture has changed.  There is an element of inconsistency in this situation.  The use of alphabets, of which the letters are individually designed with meticulous care, involves the same meticulous care in the setting of type. It is the individual designer’s sense of form that determines the proportions of the letters and human imperfections, although often imparting an attractiveness and distinctive character, require corrective alignments and spacing when the type is being set. This operation cannot, of course, be performed with complete effectiveness by a machine, not even with the assistance of an elaborate computer. The precision of the human eye coupled with aesthetic feeling can never be equalled by any mechanical device. Nevertheless, the machine has to be accepted as essential if we are to cope with the demands of our age. The quantity of information which must, of necessity, be printed daily has increased to such an extent that mechanization is indispensable. 

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Appendix A

Nevertheless, the machine has to be accepted as essential if we are to cope with the demands of our age. The quantity of information which must, of necessity, be printed daily has increased to such an extent that mechanization is indispensable.  The inconsistency now becomes more apparent. The letters have never evolved with the machines.  The proposed unconventional alphabet shown here is intended merely as an initial step in a direction which could possibly be followed for further research.  The reproduction method by means of the cathode ray, the same principle as used for television, is taken as starting point.” • Excerpted from Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet: An Introduction For A Programmed Typography (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Steendrukkerij de Jong & Company, 1967)

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Appendix B: The first twenty-three digital typefaces acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art With Maker, Foundry, Date/s of Making. * = Dutch.

1 2 3 *4 5 *6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Bell Centennial (Matthew Carter, Mergenthaler Linotype, 1976–1978) Big Caslon (Matthew Carter, Carter & Cone Typography, 1994) Dead History (P. Scott Makela and Zuzana Licko, Emigre, 1990) FF Beowolf (Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum, FontShop, 1990) FF Blur (Neville Brody, FontShop, 1992) FF DIN (Albert-Jan Pool, FontShop, 1995) FF Meta (Erik Spiekermann, FontShop, 1984–1991) Gotham (Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Hoefler Type Foundry, 2000) HTF Didot (Jonathan Hoefler, Hoefler Type Foundry, 1991) ITC Galliard (Matthew Carter, ITC, 1978) Interstate (Tobias Frere-Jones, Font Bureau, 1993–1995) Keedy Sans (Mr. Keedy, Emigre, 1991) Mantinia (Matthew Carter, Carter & Cone Typography, 1993) Mason (nèe Manson) (Jonathan Barnbrook, Emigre, 1992) Mercury (Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Hoefler & Frere-Jones, 1996)

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16 *17 18 19 20

21 22 23

Appendix B

Miller (Matthew Carter, Font Bureau, 1997) New Alphabet (Wim Crouwel, 1967) OCR-A (American Type Founders, 1966) Oakland (Zuzana Licko, Emigre, 1985) Retina (Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Hoefler Type Foundry, 1999) Template Gothic (Barry Deck, Emigre, 1990) Verdana (Matthew Carter, Microsoft, 1996) Walker (Matthew Carter, Walker Art Center, 1995)

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Illustration Credits  (where available) [1]

Typesetting Over Time, 1400–2000 Malou Verlomme, ‘Technological Shifts in Type Design and Production.’ PhD Dissertation, University of Reading, 2005

[2]

Type Terminology Over Time, 1965–1995 The Author

[3]

A-Z of Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet, 1967 Crouwel, Wim, ‘New Alphabet: An Introduction for a Programmed Typography’, (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Steendrukkerij de Jong & Company, 1967)

[5]

Digi-Grotesk Series S, 1968 Modern encyclopaedia of typefaces 1960-1990, compiled and edited by Lawrence W. Wallis.

[6]

Gerard Unger’s Demos, 1976 and Hollander, 1983 Lommen, Mathieu, ed. Letterontwerpers. Joh. Enschedé, 1987.

Glossary A glossary is provided for English-speakers who might find it useful in conducting their own research. In the Netherlands, there are two words for design–‘Ontwerp’ and ‘Vormgeving’. The term ‘Grafische Vormgeving’ is more often used than ‘Grafische Ontwerp’.

Typografie Typography

Grafisch Ontwerpvak Graphic design profession

Letterontwerp Typeface

Handzetletter Hand-set type

Letterontwerpen Type design

Ontwerpbureau Design bureau

Letteruitgeverijen Letter publishers (foundries)

Communiceren Communication

Digitale Ontwerpen Digital design Grafische Vormgeving Graphic Design

Techniek Technology Tegenwoordig The present; current-day Vormgevingserfgoed Design heritage De geschiedenis van het letterontwerpen The history of type design

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Bibliography Primary Printed Sources Crouwel, Wim, ‘New Alphabet: An Introduction for a Programmed               Typography’, (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Steendrukkerij de               Jong & Company, 1967) Crouwel, Wim, ‘Type design for the computer age’, in Journal of               Typographical Research 4, no. 1, (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland                              Museum of Art, 1970), pp. 51–59 Wrolstad, Dr. Merald, ‘Introduction’,  Journal of Typo  graphical               Research 1, no. 1, (Cleveland, Ohio: Cleveland Museum               of Art, 1967) Secondary Printed Sources Baines, Phil, and Andrew Haslam, Type and typography               (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2005) Berry, John D, ‘Highlights from the Low Lands in Dutch Type’,               (CreativePro.com, 2004) Bigelow, Charles, Paul Duensing, and Linnea Gentry, eds., Fine Print               on Type, (London: Lund Humphries, 1989) Bil’ak, Peter, ‘Dutch type design’, (The Hague: Typotheque, 2004) Cabianca, David, ‘Practicing Theory: A Study of Gerrit Noordzij,               Teacher’, (MA Dissertation, University of Reading, 2005) Carter, Sebastian, ‘The Morison Years and Beyond 1923-1965’, in               One Hundred Years of Type Making 1897–1997, The Monotype               Re corder, Centenary issue, 1997 Daines, Mike, ‘Some aspects of the effects of technology on type               design,’ in Computers and typography, (Oxford, Intellect, 1993),               pp. 76-84 Drucker, Johanna, and Emily McVarish, ‘Graphic Design History: A               Critical Guide’, (Boston: Pearson, 2012) Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book, The               Impact of Printing 1450-1800, (London: Verso, 1984) ‘From Sketch to Type - The Evolution of  a Bauer Type Face’ Jubert, Roxane, ‘Typography and Graphic Design: From Antiquity to               the Present’, (Paris: Flammarion, 2006)

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Secondary Printed Sources (con’t.) Karow, Peter, ‘Digital Typefaces: Description and Formats’, (Berlin:               Springer-Verlag, 1994) —— ‘Font Technology: Methods and Tools’, (Berlin: Springer-Verlag,                              1994) King, Emily, ‘New Faces: Type Design in the first decade of device              independent digital typesetting (1987-1997)’, PhD Dissertation,               Kingston University, 1999 Kinross, Robin, ‘Modern Typography: An Essay in Critical History’.               London: Hyphen Press, 2004 —— ‘Technology, Aesthetics and Type’, Eye, no.3, 1991 Kras, Reyer, ‘Industry & Design in the Netherlands, 1850-1950’,               (Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1986) Lommen, Mathieu, ed., ‘Bram De Does : Typographer & Type Designer’,               (Amsterdam: De Buitenkant Publishers, 2003) Lommen, Mathieu, ed. Letterontwerpers. Joh. Enschedé, 1987. Mandel, Ladislas, ‘Developing an awareness of typographics               letterforms’, Electronic Publishing 6, no. 1 (1993): 3-22 Middendorp, Jan, ‘Dutch Type’, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2004) Morison, Stanley, ‘First Principles of Typography’              (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951) Osterer, Heidrun and Philipp Stamm, eds. Adrian Frutiger–Typefaces:                            The Complete Works (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2009) Printing History 23, no. 1, p. 44 Sassoon, Rosemary, ed., ‘Computers and Typography’. Oxford, England: Intellect, 1993 Sassoon, Rosemary ed., ‘Computers and Typography 2’. Bristol, England: Intellect, 2002 Saunders, David,‘Two decades of change: 1965–1986’, One Hundred Years of Type Making 1897–1997, a special centenary issue of The Monotype Recorder, New Series No. 10, 1997. pp. 26–35 Seybold, John W, The World of Digital Typesetting, (Media, PA: Seybold Publications, 1984). Sherr, Leslie ‘A tradition of departure’, Eye 6 Spring 1992 Shulman, Lee S, ‘Signature pedagogies in the professions’,              Daedalus 134, no. 3 (2005): 52-59

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Secondary Printed Sources (con’t.) Siemens Review 41 (Berlin: Siemens-Schuckertwerke, 1974), p. 114 Smeijers, Fred, ‘Counterpunch: making type in the sixteen century;               designing typefaces now’. London, Hyphen Press, 1996 Southall, Richard, ‘Character description techniques in type               manufacture’, Computers and Typography 2, ed. by Rosemary               Sasson (Bristol: Intellect, 2002) Spencer, Herbert and Colin Forbes, ‘New Alphabets A to Z’.               (New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1974) Staples, Loretta, ‘Typography and the Screen: A Technical               Chronology of Digital Typography, 1984-1997.’ Design Issues              16, no. 3 (2000): 19-34 Unger, Gerard, A Counter-Proposal / Een tegenvoorstel              (Hilversum, The Netherlands: Steendrukkerij de Jong &              Company, 1967) Unger, Gerard, ‘Preface’, Font Technology: Methods and Tools              (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994), Preface, v Verlomme, Malou, ‘Technological Shifts in Type Design and              Production.’ PhD Dissertation, University of Reading, 2005 Walker, John A, ‘Design History and the History of Design’.              London: Pluto, 1989 Wallis, Lawrence, ‘Electronic Typesetting: A Quarter Century of              Technological Upheaval’. Gateshead, UK: Paradigm, 1984 Warde, Beatrice, ‘The Crystal Goblet, Or Why Printing Should Be              Invisible’, Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the Field, ed.              by  Helen Armstrong (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,              2009), pp. 39-43 Zapf, Hermann, ‘My collaboration with Don Knuth and my font              design work’’ / ‘Meine Zusammenarbeit mit Don Knuth und              meine Schriftentw¨urfe’, Die TEXnische Komödie, 2000, pp.              37–44 —— ‘The changes in letterforms due to technical developments’,              Journal of Typographic Research, vol ii, no 4, 1968, pp              351–368

Colophon In ode to the typo/graphic designer and historian Robin Kinross, this essay was layed out in exact facsimile of his Modern typography: an essay in critical history. It was set in the Digital Dutch Typeface Arnhem, designed by Fred Smeijers of Antwerp. •

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