–07 –technology, systems and patterns
The shapes, as seen under the magnifying glass, were badly distorted and very different from their traditional and original examples. Also the shape changed with every size that was requested. Especially round forms were very receptive to distortion as a result of the basic regular configuration of the underlying dot matrix. … At that time, to me it was a challenge to start from the dot matrix principle of this new technique. It intrigued and struck me mostly by its straightforward and clear regular grid.’4 _However, the creation of the New Alphabet turns out to have been a good deal more compliWhen half-way through the sixties Wim Crouwel cated than that. The typeface ‘determined by – ‘computer-happy man’1 – somehow let the contemporary man, who knows the computer and press get wind of his New Alphabet, what also how to live with it’ was preceded by somefollowed was the first wave of publicity surrounding Crouwel the man. There would be many thing else.5 Crouwel had claimed as early as 1961 that he was working on a new typeface. others. All the national and regional papers That was in the Christmas issue of Drukkersreported the event and Crouwel, in countless interviews, was big news. Within the profession weekblad, where he wrote: ‘I am taking as my starting point a single basic form which, accordtoo there was much debate both at home and ing to my needs, I can make thin, thick, italic abroad as Crouwel gave talks and published and so on by optical means. With a normalised articles about it.2 Other designers responded with their own types and alphabets. Towards the type like this, which eliminates the distinction end of the eighties the letters started turning up between upper and lower case, you get in the in the pop music scene, ushering in a true revival. first place a much more relaxed page.’6 Some of the sketches in his archive are indeed dated The alphabet really gained a second life when 1961, and on one of them he had noted that the David Quay of The Foundry digitized it in 1997. _Since the first publication as a Kwadraat-Blad new alphabet had been created ‘out of the need for a form of standardization to arrive at a from Steendrukkerij De Jong & Co. in 1967, Crouwel has told the story of the New Alphabet’s simpler text line image, a more suitable connection with our times, simpler and easier opergenesis many times.3 It began when he went to ation, simpler possibilities for new typesetting Drupa, a major printing and paper exhibition in methods’. Whether these new typesetting Düsseldorf, and saw the Hell company’s Digiset methods were to be photographic or computerdigital typesetter. ‘To me, the typefaces ized is unclear. Here Crouwel referred to the produced on these machines looked horrible. _1 Raadman 1968. _2 Talk at ATypI 1968 (typescript), articles in Delta 1969 and Journal of Typographic Research 1970; Purcell 1969, Spencer 1968, Gerstner 1972; see also Palma 2003. _3 Crouwel 1980 and 2000, Quay 2000, Broos 2003, Palma 2003, and the 2011 London exhibition catalogue.
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_4 Crouwel, foreword in Palma 2003, English text in WC/ SMA archive. The Düsseldorf printing machinery trade fair took its name from the initial syllables of the German words Druck and Papier. _5 Crouwel 1969a, p. 60. _6 Crouwel 1961, p. 96.