Experimental Typography

DDD30013 Publication Design Laura King Experimental typography. Whatever that means. by Peter Bil’ak Bil’ak, P. (2005). Experimental typography. Whatever that means, Items, No.1. Retrieved from https://www.typotheque.com/articles/experimental_typography_whatever_that_means

The Typography Idea Book by Gail Anderson and Steven Heller Anderson, G and Heller, S. (2016). The Typography Idea Book : Inspiration from 50 Masters, Laurence King Publishing. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/swin/reader. action?docID=4790216

Lettering and Type by Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals

Willen, B and Strals, N. (2009). Lettering and Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces, Princeton Architectural Press Publishing. Retrieved from https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ swin/reader.action?docID=3387364

Typefaces: Arial Black, FreightSans Pro, Shree Devanagari 714, Earwig Factory, Blenny, Barricada Pro, Tomarik, Bodoni 72 Oldstyle, Helvetica, Chinchilla, Oskar, Prater Block Pro, Indie Flower, Didoni URW D, Bowlby One SC, KonTikiJF Revive Recycled White 250gsm and 150gsm Swinburne University of Technology School of Design Published and Printed in Melbourne, Australia for the School of Design 2020 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from Swinburne University of Technology.

Declaration of Originality and Copyright Unless specifically, correctly and accurately referenced in the bibliography, the publication and all other material in this publication is the original creation of the designer as the author. While very effort has been made to ensure the accuracy, the publisher does not under any circumstance accept any responsibility for error or omission.

Copyright Agreement I agree for Swinburne University to use my project in this book for non commercial purposes, including: promoting the activities of the university or students: internal educational or administrative purposes: entry into appropriate awards, competitions and other related non-commercial activities to show my work in lectures and as an example for future students online and face to face and in lectures. In some situations, this may involve re-purposing the work to meet

06 0 Chapter Two - Legibility, Context, and Creativity

Chapter One - Experimental Typography: whatever that means

Introduction

CONT

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Chapter Three - Conceptual Alphabets and Lettering

24 Chapter Four - The Opaque Word

38 30

Conclusion -

Chapter Five - The Experimental Approach

TENTS

INTRO DUCTION MAKE GREAT TYPOGRAPHY

x Not every designer is a good, much less a great, typographer. Actually, to be a great typographer you have to be a highly skilled graphic designer in the first place. Typography is, arguably, the most important component of graphic design. It requires a distinct ability to make readable messages while expressing, emoting and projecting concepts to audiences, large and small.

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Typography can be copied and, therefore, it can be taught. Like the classical painting student learning to perfect the rendering of human form by repeatedly drawing from the same plaster cast, the best way to learn typography is to do it over and over again. Theory is fine, but practice necessary in order to develop a visceral feeling about the way letters page or screen. You must know if they are in harmony, or unsuited marriage.

Playing with typographic puzzle pieces is one of the joys of typography. While the end result must be understandable – though please note that doesn’t necessarily mean legible, for illegibility is relative and what is illegible can often be deciphered – the process can be intuitive. What you see is more than what you get: playing with type is an opportunity to create typographic personalities both for yourself and for your clients.

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This book is geared towards helping you evolve different typographic characters or styles, or perhaps even your specific design signature. What this book is not is a tutorial in typographic basics – kerning, spacing, selecting, and so on. There are many excellent existing volumes that will give you that essential knowledge. Our intention here is to lay out many of the fun, esoteric and eccentric options a typographer has at his or her disposal. These ‘commonly uncommon’ approaches include type transformation and mutation, as well as puns and metaphors, and typographic pastiche and quotation.

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In other words if typographic basics are the ‘main course’ in your typographic feeding frenzy, the ideas herein are the dessert. It’s time to indulge yourself in what is offered on the menu of typographic confections.

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An epistemology of the word ‘experimental’ as it applies to design and type, contrasted with its scientific connotations.

Examples of past and current design, type and reading/ language, as well as scientific experiment, are taken into account.

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Very few terms have been used so habitually and carelessly as the word ‘experiment’. In the field of graphic design and typography, experiment as a noun has been used to signify anything new, unconventional, defying easy categorization, or confounding expectations. As a verb, ‘to experiment’ is often synonymous with the design process itself, which may not exactly be helpful, considering that all design is a result of the design process. The term experiment can also have the connotation of an implicit disclaimer; it suggests not taking responsibility for the result. When students are asked what they intend by creating certain forms, they often say, ‘It’s just an experiment…’, when they don’t have a better response.

In a scientific context, an experiment is a test of an idea; a set of actions performed to prove or disprove a hypothesis.

Experimentation in this sense is an empirical approach to knowledge that lays a foundation upon which others can build. It requires all measurements to be made objectively under controlled conditions, which allows the procedure to be repeated by others, thus proving that a phenomenon occurs after a certain action, and that the phenomenon does not occur in the absence of the action.

An example of a famous scientific experiment would be Galileo Galilei’s dropping of two objects of different weights from the Pisa tower to demonstrate that both would land at the same time, proving his hypothesis about gravity. In this sense, a typographic experiment might be a procedure to determine whether humidity affects the transfer of ink onto a sheet of paper, and if it does, how.

A scientific approach to experimentation, however, seems to be valid only in a situation where empirical knowledge is applicable, or in a situation where the outcome of the experiment can be reliably measured.

What happens however when the outcome is ambiguous, non-objective, not based on pure reason? In the recent book The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovation in Contemporary Type Design, the author Teal Triggs asked thirty-seven internationally-recognized designers to define their understandings of the term experiment.

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As expected, the published definitions couldn’t have been more disparate. They are marked by personal belief systems and biased by the experiences of the designers. While Hamish Muir of 8vo writes: ‘Every type job is experiment’, Melle Hammer insists that: ‘Experimental typography does not exist, nor ever has’. So how is it possible that there are such diverse understandings of a term that is so commonly used?

Among the designers’ various interpretations, two notions of experimentation were dominant. The first one was formulated by the American designer David Carson: ‘Experimental is something I haven’t tried before … something that hasn’t been seen and heard’. Carson and several other designers suggest that the nature of experiment lies in the formal novelty of the result.

There are many precedents for this opinion, but in an era when information travels faster than ever before and when we have achieved unprecedented archival of information, it becomes significantly more difficult to claim a complete novelty of forms. While over ninety years ago Kurt Schwitters proclaimed that to ‘do it in a way that no one has done it before’ was sufficient for the definition of the new typography of his day — and his work was an appropriate example of such an approach — today things are different. Designers are more aware of the body of work and the discourse accompanying it. Proclaiming novelty today can seem like historical ignorance on a designer’s part.

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Letters and the words that they form are homes for language and ideas. Like buildings, letterforms reflect the climate and the cultural environment for which they are designed while adopting the personality of their content and designers.

Although letters are inherently functional, their appearance can evoke a surprisingly wide range of emotions and associations— everything from

FORMALITY

and

professionalism

to

playfulness,

sophistication,

crudeness, and beyond.

Designers and letterers balance such contextual associations with the alphabet’s functional nature, melding the concerns of legibility and context with their own creative voices.

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As in all applied arts, functionality lies at the heart of lettering and typography. Legibility is what makes letterforms recognizable and gives an alphabet letter the ability and power to speak through its shape. Just as the distinction between a building and a large outdoor sculpture is occasionally blurred, a written or printed character can be only so far removed from its legible form before it becomes merely a confluence of lines in space. Legible letters look like themselves and will not be mistaken for other letters or shapes— an A that no longer looks like an A ceases to function.

Letters or words whose visual form confuses or overwhelms the viewer disrupt communication and diminish their own functionality. Such disruptions are generally undesirable, but the acceptable level of legibility varies according to context. Some letterers and designers pursue an idea or visual style rather than straightforward utility. In these cases, the appearance of the letters themselves can take on as much importance as the text they contain or even more. When used appropriately, less legible letterforms ask the reader to spend time with their shapes and to become a more active participant in the reading process.

Unusual, illustrative, or otherwise hard-toread letters often convey a highly specific visual or intellectual tone and are meant to be looked at rather than through.

Unlike contemporary art’s voracious quest for new forms, the impetus to create unconventional or groundbreaking letters is generally less urgent to type designers and letterers, whose subject matter is based on thousands of years of historical precedent. As a letterform becomes more radical or unorthodox, it begins to lose its legibility and usefulness, requiring designers to balance the new with the familiar. This has not prevented letterers, artists, and designers from creating an endless variety of novel and experimental alphabets. New forms and experiments slowly widen the spectrum of legibility, shifting and expanding the vocabulary of letters.

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Two thousand years of reading and writing the roman alphabet have shaped the standards of legibility and continue to sculpt it today. What was regarded as a clear and beautiful writing style for a twelfth-century Gothic manuscript is to today’s readers as difficult to decipher as a tortuous graffiti script. NineteenthLaptop century typographers considered sans serif typefaces crude and hard to read, yet these faces are ubiquitous and widely accepted in the twenty-first century. Familiarity and usage define what readers consider legible.

Letters’ connotations and contextual relationships shift over time. Unexpected usage of a specific style of type or lettering can create an entirely new set of associations— psychedelic artists of the 1960s co-opted nineteenth-century ornamental type styles as a symbol of the counterculture. More routinely, the connotations of fonts change through hundreds of small blows over the years.

Type styles like Bodoni, which were considered revolutionary and difficult to read when first introduced, are today used to imply elegance and traditionalism.

Likewise, the degraded lettering of the underground punk culture in the 1970s and 1980s is now associated with the corporate marketing of soft drinks, sneakers, and skateboards.

While these contextual relationships often suggest a specific style or approach to a lettering problem, the unlimited possibilities of lettering and type accommodate numerous individual interpretations. Even subtle changes to the appearance of letters can alter the content’s voice. Designers sometimes add new perspectives or layers of meaning by introducing an unexpected approach or contrast. Lettering a birth announcement as if it were a horror movie poster might not seem entirely appropriate, but, depending on how seriously the new parents take themselves, it may express the simultaneous joy and terror of birth and child rearing.

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The voice of the designer or letterer, whether loud or soft, can add as much to a text as its content or author.

The designer’s ability to interpret context and address legibility underlies the creative success and the ultimate soul of lettering and type.

Individual artists and designers inject creativity into the process of making letters through their concept, approach, and personal style. Sometimes this individuality takes a very visible form: an artist’s emblematic handwriting or lettering technique acts as a unifying visual voice to words or letterforms.

More frequently, a particular idea or discovery informs creative type and lettering: a type designer stumbles upon an especially well-matched system of shapes for a new typeface, or a letterer adds a subtle-yet-decisive embellishment to a word.

Despite the countless numbers of letterforms that have been written, designed, and printed, the possibilities of the roman alphabet have yet to be exhausted. The skills, motives, and knowledge of letterers and type designers continue to influence the way that text is understood and perceived, placing the creation of letters within both visual and intellectual spheres. The designer’s ability to balance and control legibility, context, and creativity is the power to shape the written word.

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While the majority of fonts and lettering treatm some designers refuse to compromise their o letters or alphabets rarely aim to create the occasionally lack recognizably alphabetic charact or embody ideas, sets of constraints, and through letterforms rather than strictly pictor begin with a concept, whether straightforward apart is a rigid adherence to their guiding pri these alphabets tackle complex subjects or abstract idea, opinion, or process. Other con constructed alphabets of the Renaissance, forcing their forms into the constraints of an many conceptual alphabets emphasize their being less important than how they get there. its designer to create letterforms under a ve particular, sometimes unusual, set of tools. U alphabets do not strive to convey a particula surprise even the alphabet’s creator. Concep treatment, word, or poster created for a part form and are never arranged into words. An

ments accept the practicalities of legibility, original vision and system. These conceptual e most readable text, and their letterforms teristics. Ins conceptual alphabet illustrate editorial perspectives, illustrating concepts rial means. All type and lettering treatments d or elaborate. What sets conceptual letters inciples above other concerns. Sometimes associations, typographically translating an nceptual letters, such as the geometrically apply a rigid formula to their structure, n inflexible system. Like performance art, r creation process, with the end result A process-oriented alphabet may force ery specific set of conditions or with a Unlike typical fonts or letters, some conceptual ar lettering style or look, and the result may ptual letters can take the form of a lettering ticular application. Others exist only in A– Z n increasing number of contemporary artists While the majority of fonts and lettering treatments accept the practicalities of legibility, some designers refuse to compromise their original vision and system.

These conceptual letters or alphabets rarely aim to create the most readable text, and their letterforms occasionally lack recognizably alphabetic characteristics.

Instead, conceptual alphabets illustrate or embody ideas, sets of constraints, and editorial perspectives, illustrating their concepts through letterforms rather than strictly pictorial means.

All type and lettering treatments begin with a concept, whether straightforward or elaborate.

What sets conceptual letters apart is a rigid adherence to their guiding principles above other concerns. Sometimes these alphabets tackle complex subjects or associations, typographically translating an abstract idea, opinion, or process.

Other conceptual letters, such as the geometrically constructed alphabets of the Renaissance, apply a rigid formula to their structure, forcing their forms into the constraints of an inflexible system. Like performance art, many conceptual alphabets emphasize their creation process, with the end result being less important than how they get there. A process-oriented alphabet may force its designer to create letterforms under a very specific set of conditions or with a particular, sometimes unusual, set of tools.

Unlike typical fonts or letters, some conceptual alphabets do not strive to convey a particular lettering style or look, and the result may surprise even the alphabet’s creator. Conceptual letters can take the form of a lettering treatment, word, or poster created for a particular application. Others exist only in A– Z form and are never arranged into words. An increasing number of contemporary artists and designers view the alphabet as a subject for art and experimentation, not just a set of tools used to convey language. Conceptual letters are dedicated to their idea above all else.

Designers traditionally consider text and image as two separate compositional elements. Written content supplements or is supplemented by imagery, which may be photographic, informational, or illustrative.

In some cases, however, letters themselves become the design’s image and focal point.

The abstract nature of letterforms enables them to easily assume new visual personas— to adopt expressive, emotive, and informational qualities typically associated with images. When letters become imagery, they function on two levels: as a container for textual content and as an expression of a visual idea. Using lettering as image goes against book typography’s precept that type should be an invisible crystal goblet.

By making letters something to look at as well as to read, the designer asks the viewer to spend more time Artists have turned letterforms considering their forms and into imagery for thousands context, not just their content. of years, distorting, warping, and reinventing the shapes of the alphabet to augment the underlying meaning and message of their words.

Early Muslim artists avoided representational imagery, which they believed would lead to idolatry. Instead of the ubiquitous iconography of Christianity, Buddhism, Such examples of decorative and Hinduism, Islam and illuminated lettering communicates its faith through inspired nineteenth century the abstract beauty of Arabic artists and designers to inject calligraphy. The supple strokes renewed levels of craft, detail, of the calligraphic alphabet and ornament into lettering and type. Artists melded reflect and glorify the text’s letterforms with plants, animals, and other physical transcendent message, not objects, and illustrators wove alphabet letters and unlike the intricate letterforms human figures into the same pictorial space. The Arts found in medieval Bibles. and Crafts movement renounced the mechanical commercialism of the Industrial Revolution for a more personal aesthetic of softer forms and handcrafted production methods. The small press movement’s renewed emphasis on the hand of the artisan set the The artists of the Art Nouveau movement broke stage for the experimental down distinctions between fine art, design, and craft. lettering and organic Architects, sculptors, and painters with and without modernism of Art Nouveau. formal lettering training turned to the alphabet as another avenue for their artistic creations. With fewer preconceived notions about the way letters should look, Art Nouveau artists broke free of traditional forms to create new and highly expressive alphabets that embody the movement’s organic aesthetics.

The letters in Art Nouveau signage and posters bend and curve with the elastic structure and flourishes of the plant world, also displaying an idiosyncratic touch of gothic lettering.

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Contemporary artists and designers have revived and reinterpreted the spirit and conceptual approach of psychedelic artists into a new psychedelia adapted to the digital age. Like its precursors, contemporary psychedelia can be viewed as a reactive movement — in this case a response to the speed, precision, and logic of digital technology. While many of these contemporary artists reject the computer in favor of obsessive hand-drawn lettering, some also exploit digital technology in an antithetical way to create dense, barely legible alphabets or compositions.

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Moscoso combined elements of Art Nouveau’s flowing headlines with heavy ornamentation borrowed from nineteenth-century wood type to create a new language for letters. Just as the psychedelic music that their posters advertised was a reaction against social norms, these intensely human, acid-bent letterforms were a challenge to the era’s prevailing cold modernism and orderly design. Letters curved, swelled, and squeezed across their designs, blurring the lines between text and image.

Psychedelic experimentation meant not only to challenge the accepted forms of letters but also to inject new levels of meaning into words simply through their appearance.

Where the molten letterforms of the 1960s reflected a fun-seeking, free-flowing subculture, today’s psychedelia commonly summons two opposite sides of the zeitgeist, evoking a paranoid and violent society or the overwhelming presence of commercial culture. Other contemporary letterers exploit digital tools to create highly rendered letters with a psychedelic disposition.

As letterforms transform into pattern or imagery, their text can become extremely difficult to decipher.

Not everyone finds this problematic. What a designer loses in legibility might be recovered through the heightened graphic or narrative importance of the letters. Occasional trespasses across the boundaries of legibility or convention can sometimes enhance a visual or editorial statement. Letters that become imagery blur the lines between form and function as well as design and art.

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Does type design and typography allow an experimental approach at all? The alphabet is by its very nature dependent on and defined by conventions. Type design that is not bound by convention is like a private language: both lack the ability to communicate. Yet it is precisely the constraints of the alphabet which inspire many designers.

A recent example is the work of Thomas HuotMarchand, a French postgraduate student of type-design who investigates the limits of legibility while physically reducing the basic forms of the alphabet. Minuscule is his project of size-specific typography. While the letters for regular reading sizes are very close to conventional book typefaces, each step down in size results in simplification of the letter-shapes. In the extremely small sizes (2pt) Miniscule becomes an abstract reduction of the alphabet, free of all the details and optical corrections which are usual for fonts designed for text reading. HuotMarchand’s project builds upon the work of French ophthalmologist Louis Emile Javal, who published similar research at the beginning of the 20th century. The practical contribution of both projects is limited, since the reading process is still guided by the physical limitations of the human eye, however, HuotMarchand and Javal both investigate the constraints of legibility within which typography functions.

Attention is paid to the process of creating innovative solutions in the field of type design and typography, often engaging often engaging experimental processes as a means to approach unknown territory.’

An experiment in this sense has no preconceived idea of the outcome; it only sets out to determine a cause-and-effect relationship. As such, experimentation is a method of working which is contrary to production-oriented design, where the aim of the process is not to create something new, but to achieve an already known, pre-formulated result.

Belgian designer Brecht Cuppens has created Sprawl, an experimental typeface based on cartography, which takes into account the density of population in Belgium. In Sprawl, the silhouette of each letter is identical, so that when typed they lock into each other.

The filling of the letters however varies according to the frequency of use of the letter in the Dutch language. The most frequently used letter (e) represents the highest density of population.

The most infrequently used letter (q) corresponds to the lowest density.

Setting a sample text creates a Cuppens representation of the Belgian landscape.

Does type design and typography allow for an experimental approach at all?

The second dominant notion of experiment in The Typographic Experiment was formulated by Michael Worthington, a British designer and educator based in the USA: ‘True experimentation means to take risks.’ If taken literally, such a statement is of little value: immediately we would ask what is at stake and what typographers are really risking.

Worthington, however, is referring to the risk involved with not knowing the exact outcome of the experiment in which the designers are engaged.

A similar definition is offered by the E.A.T. (Experiment And Typography) exhibition presenting 35 type designers and typographers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which coincidentally will arrive in the Netherlands shortly. Alan Záruba and Johanna Balušíková, the curators of E.A.T. put their focus on development and process when describing the concept of the exhibition: ‘The show focuses on projects which document the development of designers’ ideas.

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Another example of experiment as a process of creation without anticipation of the fixed result is an online project . Ortho-type Trio of authors, Enrico Bravi, Mikkel Crone Koser, and Paolo Palma, describe ortho-type as ‘an exercise in perception, a stimulus for the mind and the eye to pick out and process threedimensional planes on a flat surface…’. Ortho-type is an online application of a typeface designed to be recognizable in three dimensions. In each view, the viewer can set any of the available variables: length, breadth, depth, thickness, colour and rotation, and generate multiple variations of the model. The user can also generate those variations as a traditional 2D PostScript font.

Although this kind of experimental process has no commercial application, its results may feed other experiments and be adapted to commercial activities. Once assimilated, the product is no longer experimental. David Carson may have started his formal experiments out of curiosity, but now similar formal solutions have been adapted by commercial giants such as Nike, Pepsi, or Sony.

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project can be seriously considered experimental. It is experimental only in the process of its creation. When completed it only becomes part of the body of work which it was meant to challenge. As soon as the experiment achieves its final form it can be named, categorized and analyzed according to any conventional system of classification and referencing.

An experimental technique which is frequently used is to bring together various working methods which are recognized separately but rarely combined. For example, language is studied systematically by linguists, who are chiefly interested in spoken languages and in the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

Pierre di Sciullo, a French designe research in a wide variety of med the letters of the French alphabet which distinguish one word from 16 characters. Di Sciullo stresses system, with an average book bein when multiple spellings of the sa For example, the French words fo both reduced to the simplest repr po. Words set in SintĂŠtik can be u returning the reader to the mediev

Although this kind of experimental process has no commercial application, its results may feed other experiments and be adapted to commercial activities. Once assimilated, the product is no longer experimental. David Carson may have started his formal experiments out of curiosity, but now similar formal solutions have been adapted by commercial giants such as Nike, Pepsi, or Sony.

Following this line, we can go further to suggest that no completed project can be seriously considered experimental. It is experimental only in the process of its creation. When completed it only becomes part of the body of work which it was meant to challenge. As soon as the experiment achieves its final form it can be named, categorized and analyzed according to any conventional system of classification and referencing.

An experimental technique which is frequently used is to bring together various working methods which are recognized separately but rarely combined. For example, language is studied systematically by linguists, who are chiefly interested in spoken languages and in the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

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Linguists rarely, however, venture into the visible representation of language, because they consider it artificial and thus secondary to spoken language. Typographers on the other hand are concerned with the appearance of type in print and other reproduction technologies; they often have substantial knowledge of composition, color theories, proportions, paper, etc., yet often l ack knowledge of the language which they represent.

A this kind o process has no application, its resu experiments and be a activities. Once assimilat longer experimental. David his formal experiments out o solutions have been adapted Pepsi, or Sony.

These contrasting interests are brought together in the work of Pierre di Sciullo, a French designer who pursues his typographic

Following this line, we can go fu project can be seriously conside

er who pursues his typographic dia. His typeface Sintétik reduces to the core phonemes (sounds another) and compresses it to the economic aspect of such a ng reduced by about 30% percent ame sound are made redundant. or skin (peaux) and pot (pot) are resentation of their pronunciation — understood only when read aloud val experience of oral reading.

Although of experimental o commercial ults may feed other adapted to commercial ted, the product is no d Carson may have started of curiosity, but now similar formal by commercial giants such as Nike,

urther to suggest that no completed ered experimental. It is experimental

project can be seriously considered experimental. It is experimental only in the process of its creation. When completed it only becomes part of the body of work which it was meant to challenge. As soon as the experiment achieves its final form it can be named, categorized and analyzed according to any conventional system of classification and referencing.

An experimental technique which is frequently used is to bring together various working methods which are recognized separately but rarely combined. For example, language is studied systematically by linguists, who are chiefly interested in spoken languages and in the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time.

Linguists rarely, however, venture into the visible representation of language, because they consider it artificial and thus secondary to spoken language. Typographers on the other hand are concerned with the appearance of type in print and other reproduction technologies; they often have substantial knowledge of composition, color theories, proportions, paper, etc., yet often l ack knowledge of the language which they represent.

These contrasting interests are brought together in the work of Pierre di Sciullo, a French designer who pursues his typographic research in a wide variety of media. His typeface Sintétik reduces the letters of the French alphabet to the core phonemes (sounds which distinguish one word from another) and compresses it to 16 characters. Di Sciullo stresses the economic aspect of such a system, with an average book being reduced by about 30% percent when multiple spellings of the same sound are made redundant.

For example, the French words for skin (peaux) and pot (pot) are both reduced to the simplest representation of their pronunciation — po. Words set in Sintétik can be understood only when read aloud returning the reader to the medieval experience of oral reading.

Linguists rarely, however, venture into the visible representation of language, because they consider it artificial and thus secondary to spoken language. Typographers on the other hand are concerned with the appearance of type in print and other reproduction technologies; they often have substantial knowledge of composition, color theories, proportions, paper, etc., yet often l ack knowledge of the language which they represent.

These contrasting interests are brought together in the work of Pierre di Sciullo, a French designer who pursues his typographic

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As the profession develops and more people practice this subtle art, we continually redefine the purpose of experimentation and become aware of its moving boundaries.

Quantange is another font specific to the French language. It is basically a phonetic alphabet which visually suggests the pronunciation, rhythm and pace of reading. Every letter in Quantange has as many different shapes as there are ways of pronouncing it: the letter c for example has two forms because it can be pronounced as s or k. Di Sciullo suggests that Quantange would be particularly useful to foreign students of French or to actors and presenters who need to articulate the inflectional aspect of language not indicated by traditional scripts. This project builds on experiments of early avant-garde designers, the work of the Bauhaus, Kurt Schwitters, and Jan Tschichold.

Although most of the examples shown here are marked by the recent shift of interest of European graphic design from forms to ideas, and the best examples combine both, there is no definitive explanation of what constitutes an experiment in typography.

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Letters are the throbbing heart of visual communication. For all the talk of the death of print and the dominance of the image, written words remain the engine of information exchange. Text is everywhere.

It is a medium and a message. It is a noun and a verb. As design becomes a more widespread and open-source practice, typography has emerged as a powerful creative tool for writers, artists, makers, illustrators, and activists as well as for graphic designers. Mastering the art of arranging letters in space and time is essential knowledge for anyone who crafts communications for page or screen.

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Today, the applications and potential of lettering and type are broader than ever before, as designers create handmade letterforms, experimental alphabets, and sixteenthcentury typeface revivals with equal confidence. Type design is a hugely complex and specialized discipline. To do it well demands deep immersion in the technical, legal, and economic standards of the type business as well as formidable drawing skills and a firm grasp of history.

We hope that readers will find similar insight and inspiration within these pages, no matter what their relationship is to the alphabet.

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