Postmodernism's New Typography

In an act of rebellion against the prevailing Sans serif aesthetic, designers looked to celebrate creativity in their digital fonts

  • By Jess Righthand
  • Smithsonian.com, December 20, 2010, Subscribe
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Fox River Promotion Booklet 2006
Fox River Promotion Booklet, 2006
Designed by Marian Bantjes (Canadian, b. 1963)
Booklet designed by Rick Valicenti (American, b. 1951) and Gina Garza (American, b. 1979) (Matt Flynn)

Photo Gallery (1/5)

Visuele Communicatie Nederland, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 1969

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Other designers use computer software to perfect ornate hand drawings that appear far removed from the digital world. The Cooper-Hewitt has a 2006 booklet published by the Fox River paper company, that is ornamented with finely drawn, intricate black designs that resemble black lace on white paper. Its designer Marian Bantjes is one of a growing group of designers interested in what author Steven Heller calls “new ornamental type.” In this instance, she drew the flowery designs by hand and then used the computer to trace and replicate them in a modular pattern.

“There are times when I think I can take a shortcut, and work directly on the computer, and there’s maybe one or two times when that’s been successful for something very specific,” says Bantjes. “But usually, I find that it somehow controls the way I think, and I can’t articulate how it’s affecting me but I do know it’s affecting me. It causes me to make strange decisions.”

HorseProjectSpace Presents: Ritual Tendencies (2007), the most recent work in the Cooper-Hewitt installation, represents a camp of more “machine oriented” designers. The poster pointedly obscures words in a sharp geometric design that resembles jagged crystal. The words meld into its crags, their meanings eclipsed by the poster’s dynamism.

Davidson believes that no matter what, “Typography conveys meaning. The kinds of letters that you use say something about what you’re trying to project. They can portray hipness, they can portray authority, they can convey playfulness, they can convey power.”

“Of course,” says Davidson, “the early modernists thought that they were being objective in their pairing down of the type so that it looked neutral, but in fact it wasn’t. It was an expression of modernists.” Today’s digital typography, she says, is a response to the fallacy of objective design. At its core, she says, the movement—aided largely by the world of possibilities that digital technology affords—celebrates rather than restricts the designer.


In today’s digital world, most words we read reach us via computer, television or smartphone. Even hardcover books are designed with the help of digital technology. Typographers have meticulously sculpted each individual letter, whether on the page or the computer screen, all with the help of copious mouse clicking.

It wasn’t always this way. Through the early 1960s, before the advent of digital technology, typographers used metal type, often hand drawing on graph paper and using photocopiers or ink transfer to create typefonts. From the end of World War I until the 1960s, “Sans serif” fonts, distinguished by their lack of feet, or “serifs” on the ends of each letter, ruled typography’s proverbial roost. Sans serif fonts had existed as early as William Caslon’s 1816 “English Egyptian” type, a round, simple lettering that faded into obscurity almost as soon as it was invented. In the wake of World War I, typographers connected to the German-based Bauhaus design school found aesthetic value in utilitarianism over artifice and adornment.

“The prevailing philosophy of typography at the time was to show letters in their most pure form,” says Gail Davidson, curator of an installation on digital type currently on display at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York City.

Sans serifs epitomized the “form follows function” approach that characterized modernism. Clean, crisp and to the point, they let the information do all the talking. But by the mid-1960s, a small group of typographers, who felt more stifled than liberated by the entrenched modernist ideology, started a new movement in which the designer’s hand figured prominently in each and every letter. “Revolution might be too strong,” says Davidson, “but they certainly reacted against the hard and fast rules of modernism, respecting designers’ creative abilities.”

Coinciding with this stylistic break were major advances in digital technology. Dutch designer Wim Crouwel was at the forefront of the movement with his 1969 “Visuele Communicatie Nederland, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,” one of five posters featured in the Cooper Hewitt’s installation. At the time, computer imaging, then in its infancy, used a dotted matrix to create images. This raised the question of how computers could represent the sharp edges of certain fonts. Crouwel’s poster makes the issue explicit through lettering comprised of fluorescent pink dots. Each letter has rounded edges; set off against a barcode-like grid (“gridnik” was Crouwel’s reported nickname), the lettering was a startling departure from the modernist code and set a precedent for new typography.

With the emergence of the Apple Macintosh in the mid-1980s, the first computer design software—Fontographer (1986), QuarkXPresss (1986) and Adobe Illustrator (1986-87)—entered the picture. The avant-garde, San Francisco-based Emigre magazine published by Dutch-born Rudy Vanderlans and his wife, Czechoslovakian-born art director Zuzana Licko, was one of the first journals created on Macintosh computers. The Cooper-Hewitt has a 1994 cover of the magazine designed by Ian Anderson for the Designers Republic (or tDR), a firm Davidson calls “deliberately contrarian,” that was primarily interested in breaking with modern type.

The cover features black shadowing on the numbers, as well as a creative use of overlapping and fragmenting numbers and letters. The images and lettering are “loud and blaring, not neat and crisp,” says Davidson. Here, she says, “the onus is on the reader to stretch their visual literacy to understand the designers.” Emigre folded in 2005, but this issue, which was dedicated entirely to tDR, remains the magazine’s bestseller.

Game Over, a poster created by Swiss designers Cornel Windlin and Gilles Gavillet for an exhibit on computer games, displays two different typefaces made using computer game design software. As if reinterpreting Crouwel’s grid-based experiment of the 1960s, the poster contains the word “OVER” on the face of a die divided into four cells. Each cell contains one letter of the word, forming what looks like a grid out of the word. Windlin completed the entire design on the computer, without so much as a preliminary hand-drawn sketch. The computer not only served him in a methodological sense, but also as a source of direct inspiration.

Other designers use computer software to perfect ornate hand drawings that appear far removed from the digital world. The Cooper-Hewitt has a 2006 booklet published by the Fox River paper company, that is ornamented with finely drawn, intricate black designs that resemble black lace on white paper. Its designer Marian Bantjes is one of a growing group of designers interested in what author Steven Heller calls “new ornamental type.” In this instance, she drew the flowery designs by hand and then used the computer to trace and replicate them in a modular pattern.

“There are times when I think I can take a shortcut, and work directly on the computer, and there’s maybe one or two times when that’s been successful for something very specific,” says Bantjes. “But usually, I find that it somehow controls the way I think, and I can’t articulate how it’s affecting me but I do know it’s affecting me. It causes me to make strange decisions.”

HorseProjectSpace Presents: Ritual Tendencies (2007), the most recent work in the Cooper-Hewitt installation, represents a camp of more “machine oriented” designers. The poster pointedly obscures words in a sharp geometric design that resembles jagged crystal. The words meld into its crags, their meanings eclipsed by the poster’s dynamism.

Davidson believes that no matter what, “Typography conveys meaning. The kinds of letters that you use say something about what you’re trying to project. They can portray hipness, they can portray authority, they can convey playfulness, they can convey power.”

“Of course,” says Davidson, “the early modernists thought that they were being objective in their pairing down of the type so that it looked neutral, but in fact it wasn’t. It was an expression of modernists.” Today’s digital typography, she says, is a response to the fallacy of objective design. At its core, she says, the movement—aided largely by the world of possibilities that digital technology affords—celebrates rather than restricts the designer.


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Comments (9)

I seem to recall a few years ago the recommended font style for text on a computer display was sans serif type. This type style was more "readable" when dealing with pixels in a computer display especially if the user/reader needed to enlarge the text. Serif type styles were recommended for printed text for the same reasons... readability. I also seem to recall there was some research to support these recommendations in the early days of computer interface design. Take note of your keyboard. If you are using a "Western" character encoded interface, the letters are sans serif. The discussions in this article seems to border on calligraphy vs. typography. I have thought of calligraphy as an artistic expression of letters and words. I think most of the examples in this article are impressive and worthwhile as works of calligraphy as art, not typography.

Posted by J. Ford on March 9,2011 | 03:55 PM

There's a saying in the design world, "Genius breaks the rules, but genius knows the rules."

To this I would like to add a corollary: Every intentional breaking of the rules does not constitute a work of genius.

Those who call themselves postmodern typographers can break the rules by giving the world unreadable type like what we find on the book-cover graphic, Visuele Communicatie Nederland. They can break the rules by creating type that, as Mr. Righthand says in his closing sentence, celebrates rather than restricts the designer. Any such celebration will be dim and lightly attended.

Good catch, Dr. Nasou, in the previous posted comment on pairing vs. paring; the context clearly calls for paring.

Posted by Michael Maher on January 14,2011 | 09:36 AM

Having worked for a textbook company in the 70's well before the computers, you are correcting someone speaking about a totally different subject.

Secific printing of books and newspapers were created by photo-off-set printing ... rather than having the older style -- the typographer actually setting the type using a key board method.

Photo-off-set method was cheaper and faster than old fashion graphic designers by hand creating the printing plates for the photos.

The paste-up artist were created just for the purpose of artisticly correcting the(proof copy)or galley by slicing & pasting onto a board to be photographed by a very special camera.

After being developed in an acid bath ... would be placed onto a printing press. (A lot more to this ... just trying to define the term)

Actually, you are both correct ... but are really speaking about two totally different subjects, because Typography once was a very big technical field ... before the desktop computer allowed people without any knowledge of the rules of type selection or any training in the field of design & composition called layout.

Who created a lot of garbage by poor secretaries told to learn how to make so many things that they never wanted to do before. They were called ... Desktop Publishers; however, it did improve somewhat after company trainers and outside graphic design trainers came to the rescue.

Posted by Catherine on January 7,2011 | 08:12 PM

I'm a great fan of experimental type and type usage but not of that ill-defined concept 'postmodernism' which seems to have given some writers permission to write almost incomprehensible verbal dross.

I think the bulk of what this exhibition seems to be about is display type, rather than what is known as body-copy. However, having not seen the installation or the catalogue I may be wrong, and you can't really separate the two anyway.

Letterforms provide a basis for almost infinite visual experimentation ranging from comprehensible to almost non-comprehensible letters and words. I'm all for it, its fun mashing letters up and digital manipulation is just one technology for doing it.

I wonder if the exhibition includes experimental material from other cultures ie Japanese, Arabic etc which feature a lot of brush and pen forms as their basis.

Posted by Barrie on January 7,2011 | 05:05 PM

What bothered me most about the article "Postmodernism's New Typography" by Jess Righthand is the use of the word typography. What he describes and the items presented as examples has nothing to do with typography - art yes, but useless as a means of communicating useful information to those who desire to to learn what the author desires to convey. Passionate understanding of what an author wishes to convey is really art, but the contents of what is written is meant to convey noetic truths and these are better expressed by simple type fonts unassociated with emotions. By the way, in his final paragraph Jess states “Of course,” says Davidson, “the early modernists thought that they were being objective in their pairing down of the type so that it looked neutral, but in fact it wasn’t."
Did he mean to use the word "pairing", or the more appropriate word "paring"?

Posted by John P. Nasou, M.D. on January 7,2011 | 01:26 PM

Great! As lyrics in so much contemporary pop music are impossible to comprehend, the same seems to be the standard in the font examples shown on the web version of this article. The message, at least to me, is lost in the visual noise.

There is much beauty to be found in new art and imagination and there must exist fonts where the message is enhanced by printed beauty and creative thought. This beholder's eye wants to read the message and certainly would enjoy a newly created font that would compliment that message, not hide it.

Posted by J Green on January 7,2011 | 07:50 AM

My favorite font is Antiquarian Scribe based on Henri Abraham Chatelain who was a cartographer and publisher of the famous Atlas Historique, ou Nouvelle Introduction a l'Histoire, a world atlas released between 1705 and 1732 in Amsterdam. Brian Willson of Old Fonts does a fabulous job of recreating old handwriting into fonts! Love, love, love!!

Posted by Elizabeth on December 28,2010 | 12:26 PM

the art of typography has all to do with reading. If one wants to explore the letter by deconstructing it , ok; but don't call that typography. Lead letters were designed to be cut into a steel punch which morphed into a mold from which letters could be cast in metal. Each size was designed separately so that letter spacing could be maintened. The punches were cu by a pantograph which traced the drawing of the letter and reduced it o a size that would fit the punch head. Each letter was arrangedf in a line and the lines into a page. The art of typography is the use of this system to make a beautiful reading device.
When manufacturers got lazy they photographically enlarged each letter in the font from a master font of a standard size, most often 12 point. Result, each size is really a new font only resembling the original.

Posted by R. Sutter on December 25,2010 | 10:05 AM

I think you mean Fontographer, not Photographer, as the software introduced in 1986. My father used it to design fonts for mathematics (algebra).

Posted by John L on December 22,2010 | 11:14 PM



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