Essays, 2005          18886 words

New Faces (Chapter Two: The West Coast)

by Emily King

The second chapter of Emily King’s doctoral thesis which focuses on typeface design in the United States, England and the Netherlands between 1987 and 1997.

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Kingston University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (1999)

Abstract
Introduction
(i) Historiography
(ii) Typographic History in the Context of Broader Design Historical Models
Chapter One: Technological and Industrial Change: Setting the Scene
Mapping Contemporary Type Design
Chapter Two: The West Coast
Chapter Three: The East Coast
Chapter Four: London
Chapter Five: The Netherlands
Conclusion
Bibliography
List of Interviews

Chapter Two: The West Coast

North America has been home to the greater part of the debate around new technologies. This is largely because the United States have been responsible for a lion’s share of the technological innovations of the last century, but it is also a reflection of the fact that enthusiasm for the new is built into American culture. While not all of the accounts of new technologies have been positive, most American authors working in this field have acknowledged that they are writing against the background of a popular technophilia.

It is appropriate to look at the typeface designs that have emerged from the West Coast directly in the wake of technological innovation against a background of current debates about new digital technologies. These designs can be seen as significant elements of a technologically driven culture and as such interpretation of them ought to be inflected by an understanding of that culture. In turn these typefaces offer evidence as to the nature of the cultures that surround certain technologies, and therefore could be used as evidence in challenging existing accounts of those cultures.

A significant early participant in the current North American debate upon technology was Alvin Toffler. Toffler’s first best-seller Future Shock was a stirring account of the rapid changes being brought about by the irresistible tide of technological change. Published in 1972, it described a state of affairs in which we must all paddle with the tide, or drown. Written eight years later, Toffler’s second influential book The Third Wave attempted to offer a more systematic account of how society must harness innovation for the good of all. In this book Toffler’s emphasis was upon the adoption of a flexible stance, a stance which would be able to accommodate change.

In the 1970s and early 1980s, at the moment when futurology was at its most glamorous and Americans thrilled as the waves of innovation crashed around them, Toffler’s proposals appeared exciting and liberating. More recently, Toffler-style arguments in favour of the unfixed and the fluid have been adopted by a new generation of techno-libertarians. But in an age when we been hardened into indifference by the apparent pace of technological change, these suggestions seem to have more to do with pandering to the needs of global capitalism than those of enabling each of us to surf into our own individually rewarding destiny.[265]

By the mid-1990s, popular writers addressing the effects of digital technology upon the broader cultural sphere have tended to adopt one of two positions: either they suggest that new technologies will liberate, breaking down existing, oppressive hierarchies and rendering individuals free; or they believe that new technologies will foster new levels of control, engendering a society in which each of us is reduced to a set of data to be marshalled in the pursuit of the ultimate consumer society.

A well-known prophet of the first is Nicholas Negroponte. Negroponte is the director of the Media Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an academic organisation devoted to exploring the means to best exploit new communications technologies, and was also one of the founders of Wired Magazine, a consumer magazine established in 1993, intended to bring the good news of technology to every home. Negroponte’s book, Being Digital, (1993) is a summary of his position.

“The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable,”[266] announced Negroponte who goes on to document North America’s enthusiastic uptake of new technologies. Assuming that Americans will continue to adopt new technologies at an increasingly fast rate, Negroponte predicted that soon they shall all “be digital”. In Negroponte’s digital nation, schools would “become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world” and people would inhabit “digital neighbourhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant.”[267] Negroponte brought this news to us in a traditional printed form primarily because it is the crusty old readers of print who most desperately need to be convinced of these truths.

Negroponte’s optimism about the effects of digital technology never once flags. Never does he pose apparently basic questions, such as who is going to fund the adoption of sophisticated technologies in schools, and how are the possibilities of global communication going to help a disaffected, underprivileged twelve year old who has not yet learnt to read. The assumption appears to be that technology itself will make all possible. Problems of accessibility will be solved as the cost of technologies continues its downward trend and problems of educational motivation will be solved simply by the apparently irresistible lure of the glowing screen.

Negroponte concluded that “a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many of the old prejudices.”[268] For him, proof of the “harmonizing effect of being digital” was making itself felt as enterprises which had previously been in competition began to collaborate. Here, Negroponte almost certainly was referring to the increasing co-operation between various software firms with the aim of making products compatible. This co-operation is to the commercial advantage of each firm and could very well have the negative outcome of reducing quality and choice.[269] To read what might in fact be a case for investigation by those who look at monopolies and mergers as a great breakthrough for humankind requires an absolute faith in the redemptive powers of new technology, a belief that the best of all technologies will always come to the fore and those that do will always be used to the maximum advantage.

Negroponte’s support for new technologies is very much determined by his position at the border between the academy and the corporation. The research projects at the Media Lab are largely funded by those with a commercial interest and it is in Negroponte’s interests to woo these sponsors. A less interested voice of support is that of George Landow, a professor of English. In his book Hypertext he discussed the confluence between post-structuralist literary theory and the communicative possibilities offered by new technologies. To Landow, the theorists’ proposition of an all-encompassing hypertext appeared to be a likely outcome of the widespread uptake of digital communications technologies. Landow suggested that, whereas industrial culture created machines which reinforced rigid linear structures, these are now being replaced by “poetic” alternatives, “machines that work according to analogy and association, machines that capture the anarchic brilliance of human imagination.”[270]

Not wholly a technological determinist, Landow acknowledged that the ways in which technologies are employed is in part a function of political context, but nevertheless he celebrated what he believed to be intrinsic properties of digital technology. Arguing against “Marxist” beliefs that products which emerge from the existing capitalist system will inevitably be used to extend the networks of control operated within that system, Landow contended that it is possible for certain technologies to have an inherent political bias. Digital technologies, he insisted, promote the politics of multivocality and as such are democratic.[271] Landow argued that new communication technologies resists co-option by an autocracy because they destabalise “the very conception of a permanent centre.”[272]

Concerning the production of textual meaning, Landow believed that new technologies function positively by restructuring the relationship between the authoring of a text and the visual representation of that text. Breaking down existing divisions of labour and class, writing is no longer considered a cerebral activity, elevated above concerns of presentation and distribution.[273] As well as breaking down hierarchies of production, Landow argued that the emergence of hypertext could also be expected to reduce the autonomy of the author. The reader hears the author’s voice against a clamour of background noise. In light of this disturbance, his authority over the text is inevitably reduced.[274]

What Landow has characterised as the creation of democratic space in which a variety of voices can claim equal weight, others have viewed as the birth of a babble in which meaning is lost. Neil Postman made these kinds of accusations in his book Technopoly, published in 1993. Postman railed against the technologically-driven society that he believed America has become. Arguing that there are three distinct phases in the relationship between a society and its technologies, the “tool using”, the “technocracy” and the “technopoly”, Postman suggested that North America had entered the third and most debilitating stage. Distinguishing between the technocracy created by the industrial revolution and the newly emerging technopoly, Postman argued: “Technocracy does not have as its aim a grand reductionism in which human life must find its meaning in machinery and technique. Technopoly does.”[275]

For Postman the most significant victim of a technopoly is America’s “cultural life”, a life he viewed as being assembled from traditional religion and canonic literature. The value of Postman’s argument rests upon the assumption of a distinction between genuine culture and any product that might be associated with new technologies. Directly contrary to Landow, Postman deplored the fact that “popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.”[276] The less authoritarian voice that was celebrated by Landow, is, according to Postman, denied the ability to participate in the creation of cultural value.

Postman argued that North America is particularly vulnerable to the onset of a technopoly because of the unthinking enthusiasm for the new that is shared by the large part of the nation’s citizens. One outcome of technopoly is increasing credulity, denied reference to “social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical or spiritual bases for knowing” people are open to accept “what is beyond belief.”[277] Particularly, Postman believes that Americans have become highly susceptible to statistics, inclined to believe the ridiculous if it is supported by apparently scientific research.

In Negroponte’s vision of the future, children are empowered by new communication technologies, follow independent enquiries and are able to form valid judgements. In Postman’s dystopia, the technology that is at the schoolchild’s fingertips cannot offset the fact that he or she has become a passive recipient of a mass of worthless statistical information and that any evaluative frameworks which might have existed have rotted away. “Technopoly”, argued Postman, “is a form of cultural AIDS.”[278] This kind of analogy between viral illness and a cultural erosion is widespread. The implication of such a comparison is that the “grand narratives” of history and the shared notion of “transcendentant purpose” that Postman mourns are the societal equivalents of a functioning immune system. But while for Postman the pursuit of the new endangers the health of society, for Negroponte the assumed goal of any healthy society must be that of innovation. For one new technologies are an illness; for the other they are a condition of good health.

Like Negroponte’s, Postman’s views represent an extreme, but he is not alone in having reservations about the possible impact of the current very fast uptake of new technologies. A more measured critique than Postman’s emerged from the cultural critic Theodore Roszak in his book The Cult of Information. Roszak claimed to be interested not in the technologies of the computer but their “folklore”, a statement which implies a belief that technologies must be a part of a culture of some kind, contrary to Postman’s insistence that they are an acultural element. Roszak’s goal was to unpick the myths surrounding new technologies, and the associated concept of information so as to allow for proper evaluation of their effects.

Roszak’s main complaint about the reception of new technologies by North Americans was that mechanical computational activity had been conflated with the human activity of thinking. In line with many leading thinkers on artificial intelligence such as Joseph Weizenbaum, Roszak stressed the need to reclaim the art of thinking. “We may see a generation of students seriously hampered in its capacity to think through the social and ethical questions that confront us as we pass through the latest stage of the ongoing industrial revolution”,[279] he warned. Roszak’s aim was to characterise the computer as something with the potential to be a “reasonably valuable public servant.”[280]

Suggesting that we are in danger of creating “messages without meaning”[281], Roszak noted that:

“Thanks to the high success of information theory, we live in a time when the technology of human communications has advanced at blinding speed; but what people have to say to one another by way of that technology shows no comparable development.”[282]

Contained within this argument is the assumption that technological means do not always lead to a predetermined end. But not always as pessimistic as above, Roszak also believed that technologies could be used to achieve long-term humanistic goals that pre-dated their invention. This is contrary to the both the gung-ho technophiles, who insist new technologies forge a bright new future, and the doom-laden technophobes, who argue they undermine beyond repair the values of the past.

Roszak was writing about these issues several years earlier than commentators such as Postman and Negroponte. The Cult of Information was published in 1986 at a time before technology had entered the mainstream political debate. The need to take a firmly pro or anti stance did not weigh as heavily upon Roszak as it did upon commentators a few years later. By the early 1990s the libertarian values associated with new technologies had begun to appeal to many politicians, particularly those from the radical right such as Newt Gingrich. The argument of Gingrich and others was that digital communication technologies would offer the poor ample means for self-improvement. Technophilia was not firmly allied to the right, many conservatives had reservations, believing that new technologies sowed the seeds for the destruction of traditional institutions such as the church and the family. But in spite of this uncertainty of alliance, the adoption of issues of technology by politicians led to the debates becoming increasingly highly charged.

Sherry Turkle, an experimental psychologist who has explored how people interact with computer technologies, has remarked that while her own project is not firmly in favour of those technologies, she is often cast as a proponent and set up against vigorous opposition. Turkle has argued that the popular media has taken a “Hate and the Hype” stance on questions of new technology which have prevented it dealing with non-partisan, questioning approaches. Turkle’s most recent book Life On Screen explores how subjects interact in multi-user domains (MUDs), spaces where one computer user can communicate with others. The thesis of the book is that these environments allow participants to take on a spectrum of interleaved identities, able to slip easily from one to other. Turkle argues that such notions of the self can be positive, but recognises that those most heavily absorbed in MUDs can be avoiding problems that have emerged in their real lives, which some of the most involved see as “just another window”.[283]

Alongside Turkle, many other commentators on new technologies are attempting to resist media pressure and carve out a sophisticated, non-sensationalist stance. Coming from an academic background in English and Cultural Studies, Andrew Ross wrote Strange Weather, a book intended to encourage the consideration of questions raised by technological innovation with particular reference to increasing environmental concerns. Ross’s project was to explore how thinking about science and technology had been moulded by intellectual and political technocratic elites and to address the challenges that had been presented to these elite languages by other groups.[284] Ross believed that rampant technophobia amongst cultural critics was leading to a failure on their behalf to address important questions concerning the shaping of the future. Ross’s account of the cultures that are associated with and responsible for technologies is wide-ranging and historically based. He goes from a mapping of alternative cultures of the 1960s which spawned the 1980s New Ager, to a discussion of contemporary international geo-politics. Understanding technology as a cultural artefact, for Ross the question of pro or anti is inseparable from a full understanding of context.

Also examining the context of technology, but adopting a different emphasis, the sociologist Judy Wajcman revealed her aim in the title of her book: Feminism Confronts Technology. In that book Wajcman’s project was to establish how technological innovation had promoted or impeded the cause of feminists. Drawing largely negative conclusions, she argued that technologies tended to reinforce existing social and gender inequalities. Characterising technology as a “masculine culture”[285], she suggested that technologies of the workplace had encouraged the employment of an unskilled female workforce, that technologies of reproduction had put the business of childbirth, once the sphere of midwives, firmly into the hands of the predominantly male medical profession and that technologies of the home effectively had transformed women into domestic slaves. Acknowledging that her account might appear “profoundly pessimistic”,[286] Wajcman was firm in her rejection of the essentialists position: that technology is necessarily anti-feminine. Her argument was purely with the ways in which that technology had been employed. According to Wajcman, women’s problem is not technology itself, “women’s problem is men.”[287]

While Wajcman offers a straightforward, empirically-based history of the relationship between gender and technology, other writers have constructed radical narratives which have attempted to find a position for women at the heart of scientific and technological change. These stories often have a liberational intent. Donna Haraway, author of A Manifesto for Cyborgs, has become a cult figure in this quest. Haraway’s Manifesto aims to reinvent nature by recognising it as part of a discourse which also embraces technology. “Technology has determined what counts as our bodies in crucial ways” she has said. Recast as Cyborgs (hybrids of machine and organism), Haraway’s aim is to “locate myself and us in the belly of the monster”, that is within the sphere of heavily militarised, communications systems based technoscience. By taking this stance rather than adopting a directly oppositional position, Haraway hopes to locate herself in the most appropriate site for contestation. Her assumption is that we can take on and transform technology.[288]

Donna Haraway has been extremely influential. Amongst her followers is Sadie Plant, a British theorist who attempts to plot a radical new course through what she sees as a drastically restructured world. But while Haraway’s Cyborg is a political agent, crucially aware of the narratives of history, Plant offers us a sensationalist account rooted in techno-hype rather than any historical understanding or political consciousness. Effectively placing technology in the role of metaphor – for example, in the statement “rotted by digital contagions modernity is falling to bits” – Plant entirely fails to assess the ways in which the technological, biological, political and cultural actually interact.[289]

Another feminist strategy for dealing with technology has been to slot it into psychoanalytical accounts. In her lecture Backwards and Forwards: Psychoanalysis and the Dialectics of Expectation, Clare Pajaczkowska argued that technologies offer us a future that we tend to characterise as ideal. Conceiving of the future in this way, we unconsciously slip into the “regressive fantasy of infantile omnipotence.”[290] Viewing the male-dominated pursuit of technological progress as an infantile activity might be intended to make it appear less threatening, but it does not address the very real ways in which it effects our lives.

The psychologist Robert Romanyshyn has made a more sustained attempt to explore how technology interacts with the psyche in his book Technology as Symptom and Dream. In that book, Romanyshyn suggested that the nature of technological development could be explained by referring to changes in our psychological selves, arguing technology amounts to a shared cultural dream. Romanyshyn took a long-term perspective, beginning his story with the invention of the vanishing point in visual representation, an invention which he saw as symptomatic of man’s perceived separation from nature.[291] Historically responsible, Romanyshyn constructs a convincing argument, yet his account seems to deny the possibility of individual agency and so reads as rather bleak. Unable to escape our collective dream, effecting positive change appears beyond us.

Those who don’t believe that technology will inevitably destroy us all (Romanyshyn’s book ends with speculation about nuclear holocaust), must still face the fact that it constantly disappoints. A sense of disappointment is characteristic of the many empirical case studies of particular applications of technology, which are intended to throw light upon more general relationships between technology, society and culture. For techno-enthusiasts the recognition that the full potential of certain technologies is far from being realised is hard to escape. Prompted to explore how computer technology was being used in the work place by a belief that it ought to be increasing levels of responsibility and involvement amongst blue-collar workers, Shoshana Zuboff found herself forced to acknowledge that new technologies were being used to replicate and reinforce old patterns of work. In her book In the Age of the Smart Machine, Zuboff had to conclude that positive change might have been made possible, but was rarely being achieved.

Any successful examination of the relationship between culture and technology must acknowledge the complex web of economic, social and political (and possibly even psychoanalytical) forces that determine the nature of that relationship. While most existing accounts, like Zuboff’s, are motivated by a pre-determined stance on the issues raised by new technologies they must set out a framework in which assumptions can be questioned. The lack of this kind of framework is why the determinedly technophilic and technophobic arguments of Negroponte and Postman fail. Without abandoning all reservations about the actual and potential impacts of new technologies, the rest of this chapter aims to argue that new technologies can be employed to create a space in which individuals and organisations can effect positive interventions. The following account of the typeface designs that are emerging from America’s Silicon Valley is in part intended to provide evidence to support that position (and also the accompanying reservations).

Silicon Valley

Each of the accounts mentioned above addresses the role of digital technologies in shaping the broad social and cultural climate of (mainly) North America. Alongside these wide-ranging discussions, there also exist a number of volumes which deal specifically with the cultures that have emerged around the production and distribution of these technologies. The large part of these cultures are located in the area of Northern Califonia which has become known as Silicon Valley. Identifying an area with a mineral element traditionally would have implied its geological home, but in the case of Silicon Valley the relationship is more tenuous. It has been factors such as the existence of certain educational institutions and industrial structures that have encouraged the exploitation of silicon in the Valley. Accounts dealing with the culture of the area include business histories, such as Steven Levy’s Insanely Great, a history of the Macintosh, and fictional accounts, for example Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs.

For the most part written by enthusiasts, these books tend toward the biographical and anecdotal. Much is made of the nature of the individuals involved, who are largely characterised as lone geniuses, non-conformists and pioneers. Explicit in his concentration upon character is Robert Cringely, author of Accidental Empires. Later made into a television series titled The Triumph of the Nerds, the book focuses upon Silicon Valley’s unlikely millionaires. Cringely’s thesis is that the innovators at the cutting edge of digital developments are spurred on not by the desire to make millions, but more by the need to show off borne of an unhappy adolescence. Whatever the truth of this thesis, Cringely did have to reconcile it with the fact that the successful enterprises of Silicon Valley have without exception been neatly tailored into a series of convincing corporate cultures. This Cringely explains by alluding to a number of commercially minded interlopers who have invaded the pristine domain of the digital.

Cringely’s factual account coincides to a large extent with Douglas Coupland’s fictional one. Coupland describes the life of a group of young software programmers who lead unhappily incomplete lives. Rooming in shared houses and eating junk food, they work ridiculously long hours for no other goal than the creation of software code itself and the very distant hope of praise from the MD/guru of their company. While explicitly critical in their characterisation of software workers as nerds, Coupland and Cringely obviously romanticise a great deal. But although they expose themselves to the accusation that they are being unrealistic about the actual nature of the enterprise that goes on behind their computer screens, Cringely and Coupland do seem to get some way towards accounting for the extraordinary atmosphere that exists within Silicon Valley’s corporations.

Rarely older than fifteen years, and for the most part operating within a building erected in the last five, these business appear to be situated at a point where everything is up for grabs. While in fact the software companies of Silicon Valley have had to conform a great deal to the world beyond, for example in terms of adopting conventions of corporate style and marketing, it is still possible to read into them something of the spirit evoked by Cringely and Coupland.

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems’s move to a new office block in San Jose in 1996 represented a significant step away from the increasingly rambling series of buildings that the company had occupied in Mountain View since its launch in 1982. Adobe’s new building fits seamlessly into the landscape of corporate America. The imposing double height lobby is encased in the glossy substances that have come to signal wealth and power: marble, reflective glass and blond wood. Yet, in spite of this emphatic display of material authority, the staff slope through the high tech security systems and along the shiny floors slightly unconvincingly. For the most part wearing jeans and t-shirts (at least 30% of which display the Adobe logo) they seem to deny the imposing corporate language spoken by the surfaces around them.

Robert Cringely introduced his book Accidental Empires with three statements about Silicon Valley enterprise:

“1. It all happened more or less by accident.
2. The people who made it happen were amateurs.
3. And for the most part they still are.”[292]

One’s initial impression of Adobe appears to support these statements. It is difficult to imagine that the group of self-effacing individuals that shuffle around the corridors of the company have had anything to do with the creation of this corporate edifice.

Later on, in the Adobe staff canteen, things become a little clearer. Alongside the tables of jeans-clad programmers, there also sit groups of people dressed in a manner more customary within large international corporations. Although these employees are dismissed as marketers by those who are directly involved with the creation of software (animosity between marketers and programmers is a theme of Silicon Valley is explored by Douglas Coupland in Microserfs), it becomes clear that they are working consistantly to maintain the empires that Cringely has insisted were accidental. Adobe Systems appears to support two completely distinct cultures amongst its personnel. Occupying different floors of the building, moves to bridge these cultures seem to be limited.

There is no doubt from which culture the founders of Adobe emerge. John Warnock and Charles Geschke were both previously employed at the Xerox research centre, Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center). Founded in 1970, PARC was built upon an academic model; researchers were largely drawn from universities and were placed in a campus setting far from any other Xerox facility. Their explicit task was to consider ways in which Xerox could maintain its dominance as the office became paper-less, but they were also there to absorb some of Xerox’s absurdly high profits. Most of the projects being pursued at PARC had no immediate commercial application.[293] At PARC John Warnock developed a computer language called Interpress that was able to describe words and pictures to Xerox laser printers. In 1982 he left PARC with his boss Chuck Geschke after having failed to persuade Xerox to develop the language into a commercial project. Together the pair founded Adobe and in 1984 they launched PostScript, effectively an evolved form of Interpress.[294]

Robert Cringely characterises Warnock and Geschke as “tweedy and professorial”[295] and certainly pictures of the grey-bearded pair confirm that impression. Cringely’s suggestion is that, not slaves to the market, the aim of the founders of Adobe was to create extremely high quality products that customers were not yet aware that they needed. Writing in 1992, he argued that “Adobe is not a marketing company”,[296] citing as evidence the rather inept handling of Adobe Illustrator, called Illustrator 88, yet still on sale in 1991. But that was the early 1990s, and a few years later it would be very hard to support the suggestion that Adobe’s marketing is anything but extremely professional. Maintaining an extremely significant stable of software products (enhanced when the company merged with Aldus, the distributor of PageMaker, in 1994), Adobe have skilfully milked customers by offering yearly upgrades of very widely distributed programmes such as Photoshop and Acrobat.[297]

The late 1980s and early 1990s, when Adobe’s marketing of graphics software products was still a little creaky, was the period in which company’s concern with typeface design was at its height. There was an alliance between the company’s initial lack of concern for the mass marketing of software and its early interest in high quality type. Releasing 1,000 fonts digitised from existing designs in 1986, the company went on to launch its Originals range about 18 months later. Burwell Davis of Adobe describes a situation in which a typeface void was created by the launch of PostScript, the creation of a new system to describe digital type led to an enormous demand for fonts in that format. Adobe were excited by the immediate profitability of PostScript type, and were also keen to maintain the initiative in the design of original digital type. Davis remembers the period between 1989 and 1991 as the “glory years”, “when type revenue was going through the roof.”[298] But those days were shortlived, and by 1992 the limits of demand for new type had become apparent. Combined with the fact that Adobe were now competing with other firms who were also manufacturing Type 1 fonts, this led to a dramatic fall in profits from type.

During the “glory years”, Adobe supported a significant type design programme, at that point employing a type team of 22. In 1992 the type team was cut to twelve, and while Adobe continues to release Originals the company is no longer a particularly significant producer of original digital faces. Dan Mills, currently the Type Manager at Adobe, describes a situation in which the tail has begun to wag the dog: type was Adobe’s first retail product, and in the beginning other software applications were viewed as a sideline. But over the years it has become obvious that products such as Illustrator and Photoshop are the company’s cash cows and type has become increasingly marginalised.[299]

The relatively esoteric culture of the early Adobe might have been more to the liking of Warnock and Geschke. Profiting largely from the wholesale of PostScript interpreters and from the retail of type they were not immediately concerned with the mass marketing of software applications. The section of the type market most assiduously courted by Adobe at that point was the high end – those professionally involved in the production of quality printed material. While the retail of software applications is now Adobe’s main business, type does remain profitable for them, but to keep it that way the company have made increasing efforts to attract the low end of the market. While Tami Donohoe, a type marketer at Adobe, has argued that efforts are made to maintain the link between Adobe and the notion of quality type, these now have to be reconciled with the company’s goal of winning the custom of the casual type user.[300] Persuading new type users to buy their type, Adobe’s type marketing has increasingly conformed to the conventional software models.

The continued existence of inelegantly clad computer programmers at Adobe is evidence that the company do still retain a part of the esoteric research culture that was an important founding element. But while these people might continue toil away on new applications in nerd-like isolation, the goals of the firm are now defined by the smartly dressed marketers.[301] In a company governed by the needs of the market, whatever Warnock and Geschke’s own feelings about the significance of developing quality original digital type (and Burwell Davis does believe the Originals project was close to their hearts[302]), they will always come second when ranked against the pursuit of profit.

Type Design within Adobe Systems

Currently the Adobe type team are housed together in a small part of the seventh floor of the Adobe tower. While the team suffered a dramatic cut in numbers in 1992, those that remain form a remarkably stable crew, for the most part having worked at Adobe for the better part of a decade. This stability is uncommon in the software industry, in which staff turnover is usually very high. Retaining skilled staff does not seem to be a high priority amongst software firms, which for the most part are happy to get a couple of years programming out of a talented individual before he or she moves on.[303] Programming skills are highly transferable between companies, and there is no sense in which long service with a particular firm is seen as a virtue. Type design skills are of a very different nature, accumulated through experience and even the new breed of whizz kid type designer (for example Tobias Frere-Jones or Jonathan Hoefler who will both be discussed later in the thesis) will admit to having a lot to learn.[304]

Not only a function of the nature of typographic skill, the composition of the type team at Adobe is also a direct offshoot of the coherent, tightly knit crowd that formed in America around digital type in its relative infancy. One of the most significant manifestations of this scene was the two year masters course in digital type established at Stanford University. Intended to be a collaboration between the University’s computer science department, in which Donald Knuth was developing Metafont, and the art department, which had appointed the type designer Chuck Bigelow, the course only ever ran once between 1982 and 1984. Dan Mills, who took the course between those years, believes its failure to be the fault of the University authorities’ inability to fully understand and support a truly interdisciplinary course.[305]

But in spite of the fact that the course did not survive, its single running span produced a core of people who were to be extremely influential in the early years of device-independent digital type. As well as Mills, Adobe type designer Carol Twombly was also in the class of 1984. Immediately after graduation, both Mills and Twombly went to work for Chuck Bigelow and his partner Kris Holmes developing the Lucida typeface (a digital typeface intended to combat the problems presented by low resolution printing). From there each of them moved on to work for Adobe, Dan Mills in 1986 and Carol Twombly in 1988.[306]

Alongside Mills and Twombly, also in place by 1988 were Fred Brady and Robert Slimbach. Coming from commercial backgrounds (each had already had experience in the production various kinds of proprietary digital type) they shared an interest in the creation of high quality digital design. Dan Mills credits Sumner Stone for persuading Adobe to put together such a high calibre team. Stone, who was the first Adobe employee hired specifically to deal with issues of type design, had come to the company with a background in lettering. His commercial goal was to satisfy the needs of the high-end print market, to prove that digital type could match and overtake traditional type in quality. In the early days Adobe’s vision of type was strongly allied to the personal vision of Sumner Stone. Ambitious and to some extent elitist, it is a vision that could be expected to appeal to the ‘professorial’ pair Warnock and Geschke.[307] Sumner Stone left Adobe in the late 1980s to set up his own foundry (which will be discussed later in this chapter), but the type team that he established at Adobe remained to a great extent in place.

The type team at Adobe have remained true to Sumner Stone’s vision. In spite of the savage staff cuts, those who have stayed in place have been allowed to continue to work on the production of extremely high quality printing types. This is even more remarkable in light of the fact that even the surviving traditional type companies have for the most part dispensed of their in-house design teams. Adobe is the only company that continues to offer full-time, waged employment to designers of original typefaces.

Two members of Adobe’s type team, Carol Twombly (born 1959) and Robert Slimbach (born 1956), are engaged in design full time. Twombly came through an art school background, studying first at Rhode Island School of Design, and going on to the Stanford Masters course that has been discussed above. She was encouraged to specialise in type design first at RISD and later at Stanford by her teacher Chuck Bigelow, an established type designer who was very interested in digital developments. Robert Slimbach had no such mentor. Initially designing and making greetings cards to sell at street fairs, he taught himself to be sufficently proficient at lettering to get a job at Autologic redrawing typefaces for digitisation in a proprietary format. Starting at Autologic in 1983, Slimbach was employed by Sumner Stone who was at that point in charge of their drawing office. Later, in 1987 Stone was to employ Slimbach again, orginally to edit existing designs but soon to work on the Originals range at Adobe.

While Twombly is grateful for the quality of her teaching, Slimbach prizes having been largely self-taught. He has said, “I would rather do something and learn that way and develop my own style as opposed to following some master.”[308] But in spite of their different roots into type design, both Twombly and Slimbach are engaged on similar kinds of projects. Each tends to explore the design of historic letterforms by digging up and offering interpretations upon original sources, and both emphasise the calligraphic basis of letterforms.

Cornerstone projects for Adobe have been the design of the Originals versions of the well-known faces, Caslon and Garamond. Carol Twombly designed Caslon, using as her primary model a specimen sheet printed in about 1738, showing type hand-cut by William Caslon. Robert Slimbach, who designed the Garamond, enlarged photographs. Adobe’s Garamond and Caslon were designed at the initiative of Sumner Stone and released in the late 1980s. By choosing to offer intensely researched and scrupulously crafted versions of already widely used faces, Sumner Stone was taking on the traditionalists. Within the type world, many saw these faces as offering the longed-for proof that new digital technologies could compete with their predecessors.[309]

Other widely used Adobe Originals include Carol Twombly’s Trajan, Lithos and Charlemagne. Another of Sumner Stone’s ideas, these sets of capitals were intended for display use. Based on Roman stone inscription, Greek stone inscription and eighth-century manuscripts repectively, the designs were described in a specimen book as being “inspired by three stylistic peaks in letterform development that occurred before the invention of movable type.”[310] In offering these faces, the Adobe type team were attempting to cover as comprehensively as possible the whole of the history of the letterform. This implies a belief that for a new technology to prove its worth it must meet every possible challenge that can be thrown up by the past.

In the same vein is the more recent Adobe Jenson. A two axis multiple master typeface, Robert Slimbach had a strong personal commitment to the project, working on it for two years before it was put upon the official production schedule. The types of Jenson have historically been regarded as an all time high in the evolution of the letterform. Slimbach’s Jenson was undertaken against a background of extensive examination of historical material, and was marketed alongside the Garamond and the Caslon as offering a “digital interpretation of the best designs in typographic history.”[311] But to combine meticulous research with the use of new multiple master technology could be seen as audacious, and possibly even foolhardy in the eyes of hardened traditionalists.

Multiple Master technology was launched by Adobe in 1992 and the first Adobe Original’s Multiple Master typeface was Myriad. A collaboration between Twombly and Slimbach, Myriad was a friendly sans serif typeface that explored the possibilities offered by the technology. Multiple master technology allows a typeface to be manipulated between two or more sets of outlines along given axes of interpolation. The technology allows the user a flexibility of form that would have been impossible with traditional technologies, but the rest of the type world has been slow to adopt it because it is extremely difficult to work with.[312] To some extent the Multiple Master is an anathema to typographic traditionalists because it facilitates the creation of letterforms not anticipated by their designer. But whatever the attitude of others in the type world, the designers at Adobe are committed to working with this and other new technologies because innovation is key to the company’s prosperity. Designing a Multiple Master Jenson, Adobe could be seen as possibly making a bid to win round the established typographic community.

As well as designing around high-end technological challenges such as those presented by Multiple Masters, the designers at Adobe must always consider the low end technological constraints. Specifically, they must always design with the low-resolution 300 dpi printer in mind. Slimbach claims to consider this within even the earliest drawings.[313] The need to work with the limits of a particular technology is one that has presented itself repeatedly to type designers over the centuries. In the eyes of traditionalists there seems to be a qualitative, almost moral, difference between designing in the face of technological constraint and designing to meet expanded technological capability. The latter is often seen as the cause of typographic excess. For example, it has often suggested that the new type cutting possibilities of the mid-nineteenth century led to a number of unforgivably mannered designs.

The most pressing technological challenge that currently faces type designers is the screen. In their present form, computer screens do not offer a conducive environment for elegant, legible type. Predictably, staff at Adobe are considering this problem: web software is an important growth area and it seems likely that type will play a significant part in any successful package. But while Fred Brady, a designer/administrator in the type team at Adobe, is looking very closely at the development of typefaces for the screens, Carol Twombly is prepared to wait until the technology comes up “to meet the standards of our existing faces.”[314] At Adobe, the potential for close contact between designers and software engineers has meant that designers, rather than simply working around a technology, feel able to make demands on it. If Slimbach finds that a technology is unable to meet the needs of a design then he will attempt to persuade those responsible to revise that technology.[315] Occasionally designers outside Adobe are sometimes given the opportunity to test new technologies, but proximity of the designers at Adobe to the development of the tools of the trade is unique.

In parallel with Twombly and Slimbach, Adobe also employ several freelance designers to contribute to their Originals range. Amongst these is Michael Harvey (born 1931), a British designer based in the small Dorset seaside town, of Bridport. Harvey trained as an apprentice under the letter carver Reynolds Stone in the 1950s, for the most part helping Stone complete the large number of war memorials that were commissioned in the period. In the 1960s he moved away from carving and became more involved in lettering, mainly for book jackets. Harvey began to design typefaces as a freelancer in the early 1960s, working for Monotype amongst other companies. In 1990 he met the Adobe type team in Oxford at that year’s ATypI meeting. At that point it was becoming hard to find traditional distributors for his typefaces because by the late 1980s, Monotype and the other established type companies had virtually ceased investing in new faces. Keen to concentrate upon type design, Harvey seized upon the opportunities offered to him by Adobe. Since then, he was been working fairly consistently for the company, who pay him both to develop new faces and a royalty on sales.

Michael Harvey is primarily a designer of display faces. His training with Reynolds Stone, who in turn trained under Eric Gill, has left him well acquainted with the history of the letterform, but he considers the inspiration for his designs to be a matter of visual intuition rather than any systematic historical enquiry. Harvey has been encouraged by the Adobe type team to extend into complete character sets many of his earlier lettering designs. As a result, while Harvey’s designs do retain much of the spontaneity of hand-drawn lettering, faces such as Mezz do have a unmistakable period quality.

Other freelance designers include Jovica Veljovic, originally a calligrapher and well known for fluid script faces such as Ex Ponto, and Jim Parkinson, who worked in publishing and explores vernacular typography through friendly display faces such as Jimbo. The Adobe Originals freelancers come from a range of disciplines, lettering, calligraphy and stone-carving, and each of them was already well-established in their respective areas before coming to work for the company. As a group, they play an important part in Adobe’s assertion of authority in the field of typography. As a new company in type design, Adobe have covered a great deal of ground in claiming their stake in this territory. But while they have convincingly got to grips with the depth and range of the existing history of the letterform, they do not seem to have considered themselves in a position to innovate. Adobe’s design project appears to have been to convince the old guard of their worth, rather than to prove they can offer something new.

Distribution of Adobe Originals

Michael Harvey has talked approvingly of Adobe’s efficient scheduling of their typeface designs. Throughout the process he is given a series of deadlines for proofs, which are in turn met with prompt feedback. Comparing this to the situation at Monotype, where Harvey has recalled that a typeface would languish untouched for many months, the typeface production line at Adobe appears extremely zippy. However, held up against other distributors, the eight month to two year production period of an Adobe Originals face seems very extended. This is largely because a company such as FontShop will only consider a face for inclusion in their FontFont range when it is already on the border of completion. Adobe’s level of commitment to the development of typefaces has become extremely unusual in a industry that has become increasingly involved in responding to the whims of fashion.

Although a considered period of development has always been at the heart of Adobe’s thinking about type, these protracted lead times do sit oddly in a software company, where the prompt shipping of product is the paramount concern. Dan Mills has argued that the Adobe Originals range does still make profits for the company, but he recognises that these are comparatively small and Adobe’s continuing support for the project in its present form is not being relied upon by any member of the type team.[316] Cuts in Adobe’s commitment have already been experienced. Heavily regretted by those in type is the discontinuation of specimen books for the faces within the Originals range. Based on traditional specimens, these beautifully produced publications offer a short history of the typeface, samples of the face in use and technical information. The last Adobe Originals specimen book was printed to accompany Robert Slimbach’s Kepler typeface, distributed in 1996.

The type team at Adobe have made limited attempts to keep up with broader thinking about type throughout the company. One of these was the release of the Adobe Originals Wild Types, a series of novelty faces. Making a bid for the ground occupied by digital type design innovators, such as those associated with Emigre, Wild Types actually look a little tired. They are cheesy, but not cheesy enough to be interesting. Adobe designer, Robert Slimbach believes the Wild Types to have been a mistake, but by writing off ventures of this sort out of hand the whole team are aware that they risk appearing locked in an ivory tower.[317]

After spending time talking to the type team on the seventh floor, going up to the eighth floor to meet Tami Donohoe in marketing is like entering another world. The price points and target markets that litter Donohoe’s conversation appear to have little to do with the design process as it is discussed on the floor below. While Adobe do still boast of being a bastion of typographic quality, much of the behaviour of the company calls that claim into question. They are becoming increasingly involved in the marketing of low-quality typefaces through their sister company, Image Club.[318] Also, within the Adobe catalogue Adobe Originals are frequently offered as part of cut price packages or bundled as free gifts with other software applications. These kinds of activities directly undermine the notion that a typeface is a product that has its own worth. In a more subtle vein, Adobe are constantly revising their typeface prices downward. This corresponds with trends in general software pricing, but to typographic traditionalists seems inappropriate. While there is a general acceptance amongst software buyers that an application is more valuable when it is new and hot, that is not the case with a good quality cut of Caslon. Typefaces are not subject to the same rate of obsolescence as other software packages, but software models dominate regardless. Adobe’s type team may be right in feeling beleaguered, perched precariously as they are in somewhat unfriendly corporate structure.

It could be argued that Adobe’s parallel concentration upon type for high-end print production and the technologies that appear to be undermining that kind of activity is contradictory. Nonetheless it would be impossible to write off entirely Adobe’s project. In the decade that the company have been involved in the design of original digital faces they have made an extremely convincing bid for typographic authority. Adobe’s Garamond is said to account for around 80% of the current use of that typeface,[319] and a number of the other Originals have become extremely familiar.

Traditionalist typographers might see the Adobe Originals project as self-defeating, because while you might be crafting quality digital faces you will be for the most part distributing these to a group of unskilled type users. Adobe designers admit to having been pained by seeing their typefaces not used as they would like.[320] Those who believe that digital technology will necessarily lead to lower standards often focus on the fact that these technologies have undermined a large part of the skilled workforce who, in the old days, would have been behind any piece of printed material.[321] But setting absolutes of good and bad typography aside, it is impossible to ignore the snobbery and conservatism that is involved in the judgement that only a traditionally trained work-force is able to produce successful printed matter. That the standards formerly set by those in the printing industry have come into question is without doubt; whether what has replaced them is worthless remains in debate.

Other arguments against digital typesetting are based on more fundamental objections to the media. There exists a suggestion that the technology is responsible for a “mass collective hallucination”, due to the fact that each image is reducible to a set of dots upon the screen.[322] As such, digital typefaces cannot be anything other than simulations of the real thing. For all its consideration of the small indents made by the cutting burr upon Jenson’s original punches, Robert Slimbach’s Jenson will remain a digital sham, no more than an illusion. These a priori statements about the nature of the technology border upon other assumptions which concern the loss of tactility implied by the digital. Within art schools, novice typographers are often denied access to the computer. The thinking behind this ban is that, without physical contact with the materials of typesetting, it will be impossible to develop a real sense of the medium.[323] Making this claim involves the questionable assumption that physical contact with a mouse and a keyboard are negligible, nonetheless it is far from uncommon.

With the Adobe Originals, Adobe crafted a library of typefaces which to many is seen as having proved Sumner Stone’s point: digital technology is not irreconcilable with quality. Undeniably the company has assembled an impressive collection, but that aside, many would insist that they can also be held responsible for the long-term demise of high-quality print production. Only a small proportion of this kind of printing activity has survived the introduction of desktop publishing technology, and many view it as ultimately doomed. Adobe has laid itself open to the accusation that their typefaces are no more than an ineffectual gesture.[324]

The Stone Foundry

Sumner Stone, the founding member of Adobe’s type team, left the company late in 1989. At that time type was still an extremely profitable business for Adobe. The increasing success of company’s type venture had led Stone to become more and more involved in administration rather than design. Finding himself jealous of the full-time designers that he had hired, Stone left the company to set up an independent digital foundry, Stone Type Foundry Inc.

Stone (born 1945) comes from a background not unlike that of many of his former staff at Adobe. Taking a supplementary class in calligraphy at Reed College taught by the Johnston enthusiast Boyd Reynolds, Stone discovered an aptitude and an interest in the activity. In the early 1970s after a couple of false career starts, Stone went to work as a letterer for Hallmark cards in Missouri, one of the few large-scale employers of those with skills in calligraphy. Stone was attracted to Hallmark by the presence of the well-known calligrapher Hermann Zapf on their advisory panel. At the company, Stone was given his first opportunity to design type, designs which were used upon an in-house photo-typesetting machine.

After working for two years at Hallmark, Stone moved back to the West Coast and attempted to establish himself as an independent calligrapher. Paid employment proved sporadic and, supporting a young family at the time, Stone decided to retrain as a teacher of mathematics. After a couple of years teaching math at Junior College, Stone discovered a way to combine an aptitude for that subject with his fascination for letterforms. Aware of the systems for the digital description of type that were being developed by people such as Donald Knuth at Stanford, Stone began to search for a job in computerised typesetting. Stone’s parallel interests in mathematics and calligraphy were the product of the interdisciplinary nature of his education at Reed. A similar combination would be very rare in Britain, where the education system encourages an early split between the artistic and the scientific.

Stone’s first job as a type designer was at Autologic, a maker of expensive digital typesetting machines that set proprietary type for printed material such as newspapers. At the time Stone joined Autologic they were using largely unskilled labour to translate existing typefaces into the bitmap formats that their machines employed. Stone attempted to change the ethos of the company by hiring specialists such as Robert Slimbach and Fred Brady. But he was never able to make a huge impact, and Autologic continued to see type design as a “necessary evil” that arose from the business of selling typesetting systems.[325] After leaving Autologic, Stone spent a brief interval working for a hardware manufacturer in Boston called Camex, before being hired by Warnock and Geschke in the Summer of 1984, about a year into the Adobe’s corporate life.

The company was still very small at that point, and concurring with Robert Cringley’s view Stone has remembered that “there were very few business and marketing people, and it had the atmosphere of a research facility.”[326] This was an environment Stone enjoyed. As well assembling his type team, in his early years at Adobe Stone was able to spend a great deal of time on the design of typefaces for the PostScript system. Those employed by Stone at Adobe were largely former colleagues or associates from the then close-knit world of digital type. Stone had been a college friend of Chuck Bigelow, who not only kept him in contact with the academic developments in digital typesetting systems but also provided him with the key members of his crew, Dan Mills and Carol Twombly.

Sumner Stone has always been interested in the development of digital type for the professional user. At Adobe he assembled a type board of established professionals such as the magazine art director Roger Black and the book designer Lance Hidy to critique existing designs and suggest possible new design avenues. Stone’s break with Adobe came as the company were becoming increasingly involved in the retail of type to new users. As an independent he has made it clear where his concerns lie, stating in his specimen book that the foundry is “dedicated to designing and producing typefaces for professional typographers.”[327]

Preferring to cater to the high end of the market and not enjoying the day-to-day activities associated with the large-scale retail of type, Stone might have preferred Adobe to keep closer to the proprietary model that the company had adopted at the outset. By opening the PostScript format, Adobe were conforming to the marketing practices established within the software trade. In the late 1980s Adobe appears to have made the decision to act in a manner more and more akin to mainstream software companies. This involved shifting their concerns away from the specialists and towards the mass market. It might have been this shift that prompted Sumner Stone to leave the company.

During his first few years at Adobe, Stone spent much of his time developing the Stone family of typefaces. The impulse behind this typeface family can be related to that behind the creation of modernist faces such as Univers. Like Adrian Frutiger, the designer of Univers, Sumner Stone was aiming to create a single family of faces that would be capable of meeting all typographic needs. But in spite of these ambitions, ITC Stone is decidedly not a modernist face in the sense of the well-known sans serifs from earlier this century. Rather than aiming to wipe the board clean and arrive at letterforms free of historical influence, Stone is explicit about the models and precedents for the faces in the family, which offers a serif, a sans serif and an informal variant. Within the design, Stone has referred to both Western and Japanese calligraphic traditions of using different but compatible faces within a single text in order to emphasise meaning. Suggesting that ITC Stone might be termed a clan rather than a family, the typeface could be seen as an attempt to bring together chapters of type history that were formerly viewed as irreconciable.[328]

The Stone typeface was released by ITC in the period before Adobe had become fully committed to the distribution of original designs. Now also sold by Stone himself through his foundry, his specimen book claims that it has become “one of the workhorse typefaces of the late twentieth century.”[329] ITC Stone was designed to meet needs that were the outcomes of the new typesetting technologies. This is particularly the case with the informal version, which was intended to be appropriate for personal communication and so was designed to be a success at the low resolutions offered by office and domestic laser printers. But in spite of his consideration of issues such as the strictures of 300 dpi, Stone is keen to remind us that his designs are shaped by “cultural and typographic reasons...not technological ones.”[330] By emphasising the typeface’s cultural rather than its technological roots, Sumner Stone is proclaiming an allegiance to traditional typographic culture above that of the newly emerging cultures of Silicon Valley: an allegiance he reaffirms annually through visiting the ATypI conference.

Sumner Stone’s loyalties are certainly in evidence in the type design programme that he set in motion at Adobe: in an article describing these activities, the designer reminds us that although “the tools and materials are new,” the “letters are old.”[331] Since setting up independently, Stone has remained firm to this ideology. After establishing his foundry in 1990, the designer’s first commission was to create a new typeface for the magazine Print. This commission was prompted by Print magazine’s adoption of the most recent electronic production methods, but in describing the project Chuck Byrne, a design consultant to the magazine, draws a direct comparison between the aims of Stone’s Print and those of Stanley Morison’s Times Roman, a face designed nearly sixty years earlier. The aim of the Print typeface was to meet the magazine’s need for a condensed, yet highly legible, typeface – twentieth-century type design’s most traditional task.[332]

Designing a typeface that was suitable for setting large blocks of condensed type, Sumner Stone was conforming to the model established by type designers during the era when typesetting was an industrial activity. To some exent it would be fair to argue that his activities at Adobe also fell into this kind of model, in that Stone was attempting to establish a single type library that would meet the needs of any discerning typographer in the manner that Beatrice Warde believed had been achieved at Monotype by the 1950s.[333] But since designing the Print typeface in 1991, it can be argued that Stone’s activities have become less akin to those of his forebears in the age of hot-metal setting, and increasingly like those of the craftsmen in the pre-industrial period. Parallel to his growing concern with small-scale, craft-like production, has been Sumner Stone’s move home. Launching his foundry from a rented office space in Palo Alto, Stone has sinced moved his operation into his garage. For Stone, the professional and the domestic environments have become unified.

One of Stone’s recent typefaces, Cycles, was designed for a retrospective book of the work of photographer Judy Dater, who is also Stone’s wife. The book was a lavishly printed, small circulation volume published by the Japanese printer Toppan. Cycles is a meticulous and elegant transitional face which is promoted in the specimen book as “a text typeface for books.”[334] With this and other typeface designs, Stone has been indulging his interest in the extreme high end of the printing trade to the full. He is very much part of the fine printing culture that thrives in the Bay Area, meeting regularly and often collaborating with the book designer Jack Stauffacher amongst others.

Stone’s home and workshop, located on a residential street in Palo Alto, are redolent of the craft culture that is unique to Northern California. Like many on the West Coast, Stone has been heavily influenced by Japanese design and his interiors are minimal and balanced. Against this background, the large nineteenth-century letterpress cabinet which he has acquired appears monumental and almost sculptural. For Stone, the craft traditions of typography have become absorbed into a specific hybrid culture, one of the many that exist and continue to cross breed in the late twentieth century.

Sumner Stone considers himself to be a craftsman, a title for which he believes he qualifies by virtue of the fact that he designs and produces his fonts from start to finish. He subscribes to the notion that the computer is simply one of a set of existing design and production tools, and usually begins a design on paper, only later editing the letterform on screen. With the typeface Silica he deliberately broke with that convention, by-passing pen and paper and going straight to the keyboard. The intention behind the face was “to grapple with [the properties of the computer] head-on.”[335] With Silica, Stone was exploring the capacities of the computer as a calligrapher might explore those of a certain pen. Rather than thinking about the broader impact of the computer upon design, it was a case of one man and his tools.

Calling himself Mr Stone in his specimen book, Sumner Stone has emphasised the parallel between his contemporary digital foundry and the type foundry in the age of pre-mechanical typesetting. The notion that new technologies are taking us back to previous models of work, re-establishing patterns which were interrupted by industrialisation, has been a theme of certain discussions around technological change.[336] But while it is true that Stone and others have been allowed to reunite their home and their work lives, to suggest that digital technology is ushering in an era in which we will all return to craft models of production is disingenuous. Stone’s ability to make and distribute typefaces at the desktop relies on an industry which mass produces and distributes the elements of computer technology. Computers might allow some to return to craft utopias, but meanwhile they offer others (mainly the poor in both the first and third worlds) horizons no more expanded than the factory walls.

Sumner Stone has managed to operate as an independent for the last six years, but over those years he has admitted that his income has been uncertain. Particularly unreliable are earnings from retail sales and as a result Stone is keen to attract typeface commissions. Not being part of the “East Coast publishing establishment,”[337] (a group of designers including Matthew Carter who will be discussed later in the thesis) this kind of work has not been regular, but Stone is determined to surmount these difficulties and continue to work in his present mode. Sumner Stone has always had a very strong design vision, and pursuing this vision became difficult for him within Adobe’s changing corporate environment. Adopting the model of the craftsman, Stone is determined to go it alone.

Emigre

Working under the collective title Emigre, the husband and wife team Rudy Vanderlans (born 1955) and Zuzana Licko (born 1961) produce a magazine and run a type foundry out of an small office in Sacremento and their home in Berkeley. The business in its present form grew out of a small independent arts magazine founded by Vanderlans and two fellow Dutch emigrés in 1984. The original purpose of the magazine was to provide a showcase for the output of young artists. Working before the dawn of desktop publishing technology, Vanderlans, who was the magazine’s designer, used a hybrid of collaging and xerox techniques to create effective page layouts on a very limited budget.[338]

Even as Vanderlans was sending his complex paste-ups to the printer, Apple was launching its Macintosh computer. Vanderlans gained early access to this equipment. Invited to try out the computer by the new San Francisco-based magazine MacWorld, he quickly realised its potential. Taking the machine home for the weekend, Vanderlans explored its image making facilities while Zuzana Licko discovered its capability to make and set type. They were sold on the Macintosh immediately. As a recent graduate of the design programme at Berkeley, Licko qualified for the student discount being offered by Apple but all the same the price of the hardware in those early days was forbidding to young designers. However their enthusiasm was such that, within two weeks, Vanderlans and Licko had bought a Mac and a dot matrix printer of their own for $2,000.

Based in the Bay Area, Licko and Vanderlans were right next door to where new design technologies were being developed. They were in a good position to gain early access to new equipment and also were very much surrounded by the buzz of excitement around digital developments. While it would not make sense to suggest that technology has determined entirely the form and content of the output of Emigre, it is fair to judge the development of foundry and the magazine as having some kind of direct relationship to technological innovation. As such, Emigre’s type design project can mapped alongside that of Adobe.

Zuzana Licko has claimed to have had little applied training in type at Berkeley. She has described the programme as having a theoretical rather than a practical bias, which left her without perconceived notions regarding type-form.[339] This is in contrast to Rudy Vanderlans, who was intensively schooled in calligraphy and calligraphically based type design under Gerrit Noordzij at the Hague Academy. Both Licko and Vanderlans view the former’s lack of rigorous traditional training as an advantage when it comes to working upon the computer. Zuzana Licko has argued that designers who come from a calligraphic background find it hard to working in a digital format because, “they have a very hard time seeing very structured typefaces, it does not at all fit into their idea of a the proper calligraphic foundation for a typeface, or letterforms.”[340] Being unaware of these rules has allowed her the freedom to experiment.

Since 1984, developments in font software and output devices have facilitated the easy reproduction of the calligraphic sweep on the digitally printed page. Given these refinements, the need for freedom from tradition seems less relevant and indeed many designers are successfully creating calligraphically based fonts in digital formats. However in the early days of the Mac, when Licko was crafting bitmap typefaces out of as little as ten bits per letter, she has argued that many traditionally minded designers were put off from trying out the new equipment:

“When I was designing type on the Mac in the mid 1980s most other type designers thought that it was a hideous machine, they would not have anything to do with it.”[341]

Licko has kept up with technological developments. She abandoned the jagged look of her early bitmap fonts when she first began working in the PostScript format in 1985, and since then her designs have become increasingly refined in formal terms. However, the starting point of Licko’s enquiries about type has remained consistent. Rather than having preconceived ideas about the letterform, and then employing the technology to create that letterform, she actively allows her designs to be influenced by the limits and capabilities of the technology itself. Even the forms of her most recent, and apparently most traditional typefaces, are intimately related to the technology by which they are crafted.

Licko has released over 20 typefaces through Emigre, many of which are families consisting of several different fonts. Completing her first faces in 1985, she has since designed and distributed more typefaces than most designers working for proprietary systems were able to in a lifetime. Licko has emphasised that the thought processes behind the design of a typeface take as long as they ever did, but has acknowledged that new technologies have speeded up the activity of design by making it possible for the designer to instantly proof and revise their own work.[342] These technologies have also allowed systems of distribution to work at a faster rate. Once the design of a face is complete it is immediately ready for use and can quickly and cheaply be made available to the customer on disk, or increasingly over the internet. From the start Emigre took advantage of the pace allowed by new technologies and very quickly built up a substantial type library.

Licko’s earliest designs are still available through the Emigre type catalogue (though they are now distributed in PostScript and TrueType formats). Sold as “Course Resolution” designs, Emperor, Universal, Oakland and Emigre, all of which were designed in 1985, now have a retro feel. The text of the catalogue reminds a generation who take PostScript for granted of the technical restrictions of the past. In these typefaces Licko took a delight in limited possibilities, sometimes using the minimum number of pixels with which it is possible to define the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Ellen Lupton has drawn a parallel between Licko’s project at this time and that of early modernist designers such Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers.[343] Similarly concerned with assembling letterforms from limited means, Licko’s typefaces also suggest a formal echo of the experimental type designs from that period. As such they are redolent of broader innovative graphic idioms that were emerging in the mid 1980s from designers such as Brody. In the face of technical restraint, Licko managed to achieve extremely evocative form.

By late 1985 the PostScript font format had rendered Licko’s early bitmaps technically redundant. Adopting the new technology, Licko nonetheless continued to explore the possibilites and limits of low resolution through typefaces such as Modula, Citizen and Triplex. Licko realised that new desktop equipment was going make low-resolution printing accessible to many and so believed that it was vital to continue specific enquiries into the aesthetics of 300 dpi.[344] Some of the faces designed by Licko in this period are still widely in use. Triplex has come to be as one of the work-horse typeface of the digital age, appearing on everything from art catalogues to Rice Krispie packets.

In 1986, Licko designed Matrix, which she has described as her first “traditional-looking text face”.[345] Licko’s task with Matrix was to describe classical letterforms using the simplest set of geometrical rules possible without losing the easy legibility of the face. Following these guidelines, Licko arrived at a relatively traditional end but was still very far from using conventional means. In terms of the look of her typefaces, many believe that Licko has increasingly conformed to the expectations of typographic conservatives.[346] But in spite of appearances, the nature of her enquiries have remained consistent from the outset.

Another landmark in Licko’s typeface design was the release of Journal in 1990. The typeface has a quirky irregular feel that was achieved by defining the curves of the letters through a series of straight lines, but it is very different to Licko’s earlier geometrical faces. A sort of revival, rather than quoting form direct from letterpress specimens Licko was attempting to recreate the feel of those printed pieces.[347] This is a strategy which Ellen Lupton has described in terms of the adoption of a “narrative sensibility”.[348] In turning to historical sources, Licko could once again be seen to be straying closer to typographic convention, however in emphasising mood above formal accuracy, she breaks significantly with the traditional notion of a revival.

Licko’s most recent typographic explorations follow a number of distinct routes. Interested in type on screen, she designed a pair of fonts which are primarily for screen use. Conventionally screen fonts are designed to look like their printed versions. With Base Nine and Base Twelve this is reversed and the form of the printer font is dictated by the look of the face on screen. Not only concerned with computer screens, Licko is also interested in designing for the very type-unfriendly environment of the television, an area that is still inaccessible because broadcast technology continues to be relatively cumbersome and expensive.

Apparently at the opposite end of the typographic spectrum to the Base fonts is Mrs Eaves, which was released by Emigre in 1996. Modelled on the transitional forms of Baskerville’s fonts, and named after a women reputed to have been that designer’s mistress, Mrs Eaves is an extended exploration by Licko of the role of the ligature. The font employs a technological device trademarked LigatureMaker which was developed for Emigre by the Dutch type designer Just van Rossum. LigatureMaker allows the user to replace specified letter combinations with a particular ligature automatically within a selected text. Mechanical typesetting technologies dictated against the proliferation of ligatures as each letter combination in effect amounted to another distinct character. Digital typesetting technology presents no such restrictions – large character sets and the potential to offer alternative characters within those sets mean that there is room for an almost boundless number of ligatures. The only limits that remain are those of the designer’s patience.

With its exploration of expanded technological capability within historically derived form, Mrs Eaves could be compared to Robert Slimbach’s Multiple Master version of Jenson. Both amount to meticulous reworkings of historical letterforms, yet the modes of enquiry behind these two faces is very different. With Jenson, Slimbach was exploring how to remain close the spirit of the model while allowing flexibility of form. Mrs Eaves, on the other hand, poses questions about the interaction between typographic tradition and technological possibilities and restraints. While the former presents a technologically enhanced reinterpretation of type-form, the latter offers a critical examination of typographic practice.

Zuzana Licko’s typeface designs have been widely vilified. Seen by many to be emblematic of the collapse of established typographic standards, they can be read as the embodiment of the threat that new technology poses to profession. Read on a purely formal level, Licko’s typefaces appear undermine centuries of practice, but in spite of this Licko does have champions from within the typographic establishment. Significantly, Matthew Carter has always been a vociferous admirer of her typefaces. Appreciating the connections between Licko’s theoretical and technological enquiries and similar explorations that are at the heart of long-term strands in typographic practice, Carter is not threatened by unorthodox form.[349]

In the first instance, Licko’s digital typefaces were used only on the pages of Emigre magazine. Very soon it became obvious that others were enthusiastic about the faces, but distribution was difficult as few people had access to Macintoshs at that point. Early on, rather than retailing the faces, Licko and Vanderlans sold their services as designers and typesetters. But by 1986, the design world appeared to catch up with the pair and soon they were able to distribute their fonts on floppy disks. The Emigre digital font foundry grew out of the magazine and since then the relationship between the publication and the product has flourished. The magazine not only acts promotionally, offering a showcase for the fonts, it also provides a discursive base for the work of the foundry.

Around 1989, Emigre shifted from being a general arts magazine to concentrating upon graphic design. This was in response to feedback, those who bought the publication appeared for the most part to be designers who were fascinated with the way the magazine looked. Also, it was intended to meet a perceived need for a new kind of discussion around graphic design:

“The entire graphic design and printing industries were being turned inside out and we felt this was an opportune time to start emphasising graphic design,” Emigre have said.[350]

The discussions pursued on the pages of Emigre arose from a particular section of the graphic design community. The designers who were writing for Emigre and whose work was being addressed within its pages tended to be self-consciously experimental, often having some kind of stake in academia. International in its readership, Emigre began to set the global agenda for a certain style of discussion around graphic design.

As well as discussing the work and publishing the writing of this experimental/academic community, Emigre also began to distribute the fonts of some of these designers. The first fonts licensed by Emigre were Keedy Sans and Template Gothic. Released in 1990, these designs were the work of Jeffrey Keedy and Barry Deck both from the California Institute of the Arts (both will be discussed in more detail later in this chapter). Not only distributing the work of American designers, Emigre were approached by designers from Europe, such as Frank Heine, creator of the very successful Emigre typeface Remedy – which in Britain found itself at the heart of controversy, appearing upon a set of extremely suggestive advertisements for Club18-30.

During the early 1990s Emigre established a convention whereby each new typeface release would be explored in the pages of the coincident magazine. For example, issue number 30 from Spring 1994 is set largely in Dead History, a typeface designed by P Scott Makela and licensed by Emigre in that year. But not only determining the look of that issue of the magazine, Makela’s Dead History is also intimately tied to its contents. Emigre 30 is concerned largely with refuting an article written by Steven Heller which had been published in the British graphic design magazine Eye. The article had criticised the emergent generation of designers for challenging wilfully the established formal rules of graphic design and coming up with a product that employed ugliness as no more than a “stylish conceit”. Makela was very much part of the crowd of “young turks” who were attracting Heller’s disapproval, and his typeface Dead History displays the discordant and disharmonious qualities that Heller believed to be a “dead end”.[351] The typeface is a digitally manufactured hybrid between two faces drawn from very different times, VAG Rounded and Centennial. With it, Makela intended to “signal the end of an era of traditionally produced fonts”.[352] In Emigre 30, by setting the pull-quotes of an interview with Steven Heller in that Dead History, Rudy Vanderlans was striking a blow in what boiled down to a generational battle amongst American graphic designers. In this instance, promotion and discussion appeared to happily coexist in the magazine’s pages.

But in spite of this apparent synchronicity, a year later Rudy Vanderlans chose to change Emigre’s format. Halving its size, he began to concentrate more upon the text of the articles and less upon the illustrative qualities of the type itself. Vanderlans has claimed that this change, which upset a significant part of his readership, was intended to emphasise the magazine as a forum for serious discussion around graphic design. Undermined by claims that no one actually read the text, achieving this status appeared to require drastic measures.[353] While the appearance of Emigre remained far from conventional – for example throughout number 34 a series of articles are run parallel – the magazine began to make a quieter visual statement. Vanderlans, who was prepared to go to some lengths to achieve his aim, was particularly proud of issue number 39 which is without illustration altogether. As well as moving from visual to verbal discussion, the magazine is also becoming less and less of a promotional tool for the foundry, no longer showcasing the hot new face. This might seem purist, but must also reflect the fact that the foundry is now so well established in its own right that it no longer demands direct promotion. Emigre’s type business may now be in a position to benefit just as much from a less straightforward association with an apparently more highbrow the publication.

Over the last ten years the Emigre’s font distributing business has grown enormously. In 1989 they licensed FontShop International to distribute their products in Europe, but even so they are still selling the greater proportion of their typefaces direct to the user. Emigre fonts are sent out to customers from a base in Sacramento, either by post on a floppy disk or increasingly down the wire through their ‘Now Serving!’ on-line bulletin board. The foundry supports a fairly sizeable office staff and Zuzana Licko claims to spend at least half her time dealing with administrative work associated with the office, such as setting up health care and pension plans for staff and paying taxes. To some extent Licko and Vanderlans feel consumed by the business side of their operation, possibly something that they did not anticipate when they were starting up in the mid 1980s. But while they might regret that administration is overtaking their “work”, they do recognise that the ability to run a business is essential if one is to operate independently and as such is at the heart of their project. Citing other designers whose output might have been more widely circulated had they been a little more concerned with the mundane world of administration, Vanderlans has suggested that business know-how is an important factor in determining what gets exposed and what disappears without trace.[354]

In the wake of Emigre, a number of independent digital font foundries were established. Mainly set up in the early 1990s, Emigre can claim a significant head-start over their competitors.[355] These outfits vary widely, from those dubbed garage foundries after their musical equivalents which churn out quantities of rough-edged typefaces, for example the Mid-Western [T-26], to others which release a limited number of meticulously crafted fonts, for example the European Dutch Type Library. Emigre tend to be associated with the noisier end of this spectrum, although unlike [T-26] and their ilk they have never been in the business of releasing large amounts of unedited digital noise. For the most part these small digital foundries identify themselves quite clearly by their pricing policy. Emigre has consistently charged from between $59 to $95 per font, which compared to prices in the pre-digital age is extremely cheap. Even so, by the mid 1990s Emigre have found themselves at the centre of the spectrum of font pricing, in between the Dutch Type Library who charge their mainly professional customers upwards of $300 per font and [T-26] which charge from as little as $29.

Many of the fonts produced by the garage foundries appear extremely derivative, often their equivalents are easy to locate in the Emigre or FontFont ranges. For the most part the product of art students or recent graduates, Emigre accept that they have been extremely influential on the contemporary graphic idiom and do not regard these fonts as a threat. However, they are concerned about those font distributing operations which situate themselves at the very lowest end of the price spectrum. Sometimes offering type for as little as a $1 a font, companies such as Optifont import, superfically change and repackage existing font software.

This kind of behaviour could be seen as the outcome of new digitally derived ethical codes, which tend to pose copyright as a outmoded concept.[356] Nonetheless, lack of copyright protection would seriously threaten the livelihood of anyone who designs and distributes font software, whatever its place in a newly elastic moral scheme. Emigre have recognised that the new technologies which have made it difficult to protect their output are the same as those which have allowed them the freedom to operate as they do. In spite of this dilemma they believe that the problem can be properly sorted out by the intervention of lawyers. Currently in the United States software is afforded a degree of protection never deemed deserved by typeface designs. Emigre have chosen to go to court, hoping to prove that it is their software that is being stolen not merely their designs, and are currently awaiting the outcome of the case.[357] Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko believe that a ruling in their favour may go some way to altering the manner in which many regard font software. No longer part of a digital free for all, it will become seen as something for which money ought to be paid.

Obviously Emigre do have a case. Some notion of intellectual property is essential in order to protect original design activity. However, for the most part, copyright laws and all other laws tend to protect the large corporation with its staff of in-house lawyers, rather than the independent operator. Enthusiasts of new technologies have found ways of by-passing large companies to distribute software and information amongst themselves. Significant amongst these is shareware, a system in which the producer relies on the conscience of the user for payment.[358] These kinds of networks might come under threat if mainstream software companies were allowed to extend their ownership rights over various kinds of software. New technologies (in tandem with changing cultural attitudes) have led to many existing notions of intellectual property being challenged. The legal system is still struggling to catch up.

The problems faced by intellectual property lawyers in dealing with new technologies are symptomatic of broader changes that in part are being wrought by new technologies. Technological change can offer opportunities, but for these to be significant they must be seized. Adobe, the developer of the PostScript language, originally conceived of the format as akin to its proprietary ancestors. As a result they followed the model of previous type companies by employing an in-house design team and supporting a fairly traditional design programme. In contrast, Emigre, who were keen to operate independently, very quickly recognised the radical potential of device-independent digital type formats. Using new technologies, Zuzana Licko has been able to distribute her work to a global market and in the process has become one of the best known of contemporary type designers, a position unprecedented for a women. She has also played a major part in bringing about dramatic changes in the popular graphic languages of the last twelve years. Technology can play a positive role in opening up spaces for intervention, although the form of that intervention will depend upon factors other than the nature of the technology itself. Emigre have demonstrated that technology can contribute to the enriching of a culture and that the products of these technologies cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Cal Arts

One of the most significant relationships struck up between Emigre and a group of outside designers has been that with the teachers and students of graphic design at the California Institute of the Arts. The post-graduate graphic design course at Cal Arts has a specific theoretical emphasis, and although Licko and Vanderlans themselves resist theory (arguing that such explanations are tacked on after the fact) much of the output of the course appears to coincide neatly with the Emigre project. Since the late 1980s the graphic designers at Cal Arts have been active in designing type. Undoubtedly they have been encouraged by the availability of the means to create and employ fonts, but it is also significant that the signs and symbols of typography appear to lend themselves to the kinds of postmodern analysis that are practised within the school.

The content of the Cal Arts post-graduate graphic design course is the outcome of a marriage between French structuralist and post-structuralist theory and design practice that is completely unique to the American Art Academy. The roots of this hybrid can be traced back to several sources. An important influence has been the work of the typographer Wolfgang Weingart. Teaching at Basel, Weingart was engaged in the controversial activity of dismantling the grid that had dominated Swiss typography since the Second World War. He accused the typographers who had proposed the grid as the only viable typographic form of being “fanatical dogmats.”[359]

Weingart’s work became known within the States through student exchange programmes, attended by designers including April Greiman and Dan Friedman, and lecture tours. Highly influenced by Weingart’s systematic challenge to Swiss dogma, American designers added to Weingart’s method concerns of their own. Most significant of these was their newly awakened interest in vernacular or pre-modern design, an interest often credited as having been the outcome of Robert Venturi’s polemic Complexity and Contradiction in Modern Architecture but which must also have had roots in the practices of the pop artists. Katherine McCoy, an American designer and design educator, has argued that, “popular culture vernaculars, history and the Basel school’s Mannerist Modernism came together in the mid 1970s to create a new, highly formal expression most often called New Wave Graphic Design.” Rather than post-modern, McCoy has suggested that this mode of design should be termed “decadent American Modernism.”[360]

Important for McCoy is the conviction that the New Wave failed to transcend Modernism. She has argued that this led to an empty formalism that only became meaningful and content driven once graphic designers were encouraged to take on structuralist and poststructuralist theory.[361] McCoy has allied the notion of content in graphic design to the adoption by designers of the models of literary theory. As co-chair of Cranbrook Academy of Art, McCoy required her students to think of graphic design in a manner akin to that of a literary theorist considering a text. Taking on these models, designers were prompted to explore the meaning or semantics of graphic design as if the visual were akin to verbal.[362] But although the designers at Cranbrook were theoretically driven, the form of their designs often remained within the ‘Weingart meets the American vernacular’ framework. Whether the body of design that emerged from the Academy at that time was genuinely engaged with content above form remains a matter of debate.[363]

A few years into McCoy’s regime at Cranbrook, certain key texts began to emerge. Particularly influential upon the designers were Terry Eagleton’s Literary Theory and Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic. Both published in 1983, these explorations of post-structuralist literary theory appeared several years after the theories had become current within the academic institutions of United States. The former provided an accessible summary of theoretical debates, the latter offered a series of essays in which writers such as Douglas Crimp and Craig Owens proposed models of how these theories could be applied to broader cultural debates. The Anti-Aesthetic encouraged the post-graduate designers at Cranbrook to mould the tenets of literary theory to meet their own purposes, and post-structuralist theory became absorbed into a less clearly defined postmodernist stance.

In the article “Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History meets Theory” Ellen Lupton and Jay Abbott Miller have documented the take-up of certain critical models within American design schools. This article noted a certain slippage between critical models and the manner in which they were applied by graphic designers. Lupton and Miller claim that “Post-structuralism did not serve as a unified methodology at the school...but was part of an eclectic gathering of ideas.”[364] Particularly striking was the graphic designer’s translation of the post-structuralist notion of indeterminacy of meaning into a “romantic theory of self-expression.”[365] This interpretation allowed a side-stepping of much of the pessimism of post-structuralism, graphic designers were able to draw a positive, postmodern agenda from the body of theory.

Jeffrey Keedy (born 1957) was a student at Cranbrook under Katherine McCoy in the mid 1980s and has been educating graphic designers at Cal Arts since his graduation. Keedy brought to his teaching at Cal Arts the hybrid theoretical model that he was encouraged to develop at Cranbrook. For him postmodernism is a positive stance, one that is allied with the concept of choice and hence intimately bound to the proper functioning of America’s democratic model.[366] For the educators at Cal Arts (who also include Lorraine Wild and Ed Fella) deconstruction, rather than either a complex theoretical model or simply a style, is an active process, a process which involves the questioning and analysis of apparent meaning.[367]

The adoption of postmodernism by American graphic designers can be examined in the context of the permeation of the postmodern into the wider sphere of American culture. In the essay “Mapping the Postmodern”, the historian Andreas Huyssen has argued that postmodernism ought properly to be seen a historical condition, one which implies a realignment of relationships between mass culture, the avant garde and modernity.[368] Huyssen has suggested that over the last three decades North America has been home to various forms of postmodernity. In the 1960s postmodernism took the form of a return to the models of the early European modernists in an attempt to reclaim the avant-garde from the establishment. A few years later, by the 1970s, the certainties that had fuelled the optimistic struggles of the previous decade had been shattered and replaced with a sense of crises. At that time postmodernism took the form of a decentering of the debate and concentration upon the margins which led to an active questioning of the perceived cultural hegemony of the Modernists. Debates around cultural hierarchies, race and feminism became absorbed into the postmodern agenda. It was this brand of politically conscious postmodernism that spawned many of the essays in The Anti-Aesthetic and also first attracted the attention of graphic designers such as Keedy.

By the time Huyssen was writing in the mid 1980s, postmodernism had become allied to various forms of conservatism by virtue of the fact that it seemed to imply an abandoning of the notion of the future in favour of a return to the models of the past.[369] But this characterisation of postmodernism was resisted by Keedy and his colleagues, who believed modernism had been reduced to a dogma in the post-war period and no longer offered a viable model.[370] Huyssen argued that contemporary postmodernism “operates in a field of tension between tradition and innovation, conservation and renewal, mass culture and high art”[371], and that this tension can be observed in the post-graduate graphic design course at Cal Arts.

One source of that tension is the current ambiguous relationship between technological innovation and the kinds of self-consciously progressive design practices that emerge from the school. Once firmly embedded at the heart of avant-garde artistic practice, the position of new technology is no longer so secure.[372] The early twentieth-century belief that technological innovation could lead to the liberation of the masses has been replaced for the most part by suspicion and disillusionment from those in the cultural sphere. In the post-war period there have been occasional revivals of technologically-driven avant-garde practice, for example in the work of artists of the 1960 such as John Cage, but no longer the winner of grand victories for all, technology is now seen as having at best the potential to gain small freedoms for the individual. The graphic designer April Greiman has been an influential early adopter of many of the new design technologies. Famously suggesting that they might lead to a rethinking of how we view the limits of our physical selves in an article illustrated by an unclothed self-portrait, she has been a keen proponent of the link between technological innovation and forms of personal liberty.[373]

Keedy’s recent introduction of a more traditional form of typographic training is symptomatic of the current ambiguity of the status of new technologies. Students are taken to the computer via woodblock and letterpress. This move makes a contribution to debates concerning tradition, innovation and technology that are at the heart of the Cal Arts course and also at the centre Keedy’s own type design practice. With this course Keedy is not making any kind of qualitative distinction between the tools and materials of various technologies, but rather is arguing that a new technology can only be properly understood in the light of those by which it was preceded. Keedy has demonstrated his active engagement with the mores and methods of the past within typeface designs such as Lushus. This decorative font, designed for Fuse magazine, employs excess as a critical device. Also significant is Keedy’s self-styling as Mr Keedy (a name he uses within the pages of Emigre and also in the literature for his recent independent font distribution venture). Unlike Mr Stone, Mr Keedy is not nostalgic for an era of craft production, but is employing the apparent disjunction between title and output to raise questions about typographic convention.

The designers at Cal Arts are encouraged to simultaneously embrace and question new technologies, an impeccably postmodern stance. A subscription to the design academy’s form of positive postmodernism requires an active recognition of the influence of technological change upon culture. Importantly technology is seen as having played a major role in breaking down the barriers that were established earlier this century between high and low culture. Huyssen (who himself espouses a form of positive postmodernism which focuses upon the decentering of the cultural debate) has argued that new technologies have encouraged much of the recycling and recontextualisation of elements of both high and mass cultures that has been experienced since the 1970s.[374]

This kind of postmodern repositioning of cultural categories is explored in the typeface Template Gothic. Designed by the former Cal Arts student Barry Deck (born 1963) and released by Emigre in 1990, this typeface was based on letterforms Deck saw on a sign in his local launderette. Intended as a form of tribute, Deck argued that the naive hand-painted letterforms of the sign “more truly reflect the imperfect language of an imperfect work inhabited by imperfect beings” than other more conventional typeforms.[375] But in spite of conforming to fashionable modes of postmodern practice, by creating Template Gothic Deck risked accusations of condescension by fellow practitioners and critics. Both Ellen Lupton and Jeffrey Keedy have espoused the active challenging of cultural hierarchies, yet both have also attacked the ways in which graphic designers have tended to employ the vernacular. In the essay ‘Low and High: Design in Everyday Life’, Lupton argued that all too often designers who borrow elements from vernacular culture are assuming a position above that culture. She went on to suggest that these designers are blind to the set of power relations that are embodied within their work.[376] A year later, in a polemic titled “I Like The Vernacular...Not”, Keedy went further by accusing designers who employ the vernacular of being not only “tiresome” but “mean-spirited”.[377]

These attacks are symptomatic of the politically sensitive nature of the debate around cultural hierarchies in the United States. For example, the exhibition “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture”, held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1990, attracted widespread criticism for having characterised mass culture as no more than a passive source from which high culture could borrow. In spite of Huyssen’s suggestion that cultural categories have been realigned dramatically over the last half century, it appears that in the United States much of the discomfort between these categories remains. No position upon these issues appears to be beyond moral reproach and the debate is rife with contradictory arguments. For example in “I Like The Vernacular...Not” Keedy suggested designers who plundered the vernacular risked a state of affairs in which “high and low cultures are levelled out into one pop culture”.[378] With this implied assumption that the popular is bland, Keedy unconsciously echoes the most hierarchical and Greenbergian of critics.

As well as influencing the manner in which culture is produced, new technologies, according to postmodern theory, play a part in determining the manner in which culture is encountered. Often building upon the work of a mixed-bag of critical pioneers including Benjamin and Baudrillard, postmodernists have put together various theories of cultural reception. Within these, it is generally accepted that any one voice will be heard only above a continuous clatter of competing authorities and that as a result the subversion and undermining of intended meaning is inevitable. But while designers such as Keedy and Deck might subscribe to the termination of authorship in theory, in practice they have found it hard to bear. Deck’s typeface Template Gothic found its way into the graphic idiom of Corporate America leaving the designer bemused, but also disturbed:

“I did monospaced numerals for it so if anyone ever wanted to use it in the financial pages of an annual report it would look good that way. It was a big joke to me – I just did it because I thought it would be hilarious – but it just happened that a year later Time Warner used it for every word on every page of their annual report – including the financial! That was when I stopped making jokes like that.”[379]

The typefaces that have emerged from Cal Arts to be distributed by Emigre form a reasonably coherent collection. As well as Template Gothic, Barry Deck released Arbitrary through the foundry in 1990. In this face, Deck combined elements of the type designer’s vocabulary in an unconventional manner to achieve a jarring, but surprisingly readable face. Arbitrary has become well used as a text face for cultural publications, particularly favoured by Vanderlans in the new text heavy Emigre magazine. In a similar vein to Arbitrary is Jeffrey Keedy’s Keedy Sans, which was released in 1989. While the ingredients of this typeface are disjunctive, they form a surprisingly appealing rounded alphabet, which has made its way into printed advertisements for Colgate toothpaste amongst other places. Referring to this face Keedy has remarked “I’ve always wanted to design typefaces, because as a designer I realized there is no escaping being Post-Modern, since the typefaces are either very old or are based on very old models. Even when you try and do something contemporary you rely on these old typefaces and conventions.”[380] Both Keedy Sans and Arbitrary explicitly deal with the inescapability of historic models.

Other Emigre/Cal Arts typefaces delve into the world beyond typography. Conor Mangat’s (born 1968) Platelet, released in 1993, was the outcome of a student project. With this face Mangat claimed to have married “Bauhaus rigidity to a slice of American car culture”[381], reducing the rough-edged characters of the car license plate into hygienically smooth forms. OutWest, designed by educator Ed Fella and also released in 1993, likewise draws from the American vernacular. Appearing celebratory in a fairly straightforward manner, OutWest refers to the idiom of the Wild West as it was filtered through the American cartoon, offering a heady mix of popular visual codes.

As suggested in the quote from Jeffrey Keedy above, type design is a task which appeals to the designer with an active interest in the postmodern. A type designer is engaged necessarily with the manipulation of a defined set of signs and symbols, a form of practice which has the potential to raise questions that are at the heart of postmodernism. As well as having a predilection for type, these kinds of theoretically engaged designers are also concerned with issues regarding the nature of cultural production and cultural consumption raised by new technologies. The postmodern designers at Cal Arts are educated to view technology as a significant factor within the culture that they both comment on and inhabit. Rather than believing technology to be a cultural determinant, they treat it as a cultural phenomenon to be explored. This stance is evident in the questioning and often multivalent nature of their typeface designs.

Conclusion

A large part of the designers who graduate from the California Institute of the Arts are likely to be employed directly to work within digital media, bypassing print altogether. Technological innovation is at the centre of West Coast culture and is an inescapable influence upon the type designs that emerge from that area. A concern with technology is common to all the designers that I have just discussed, but the manner in which these designers have encompassed technological change within their work varies very widely.

Technological innovation might be the raison d’être of the designers at Adobe, but their typeface designs and their working habits represent a bid to absorb recent changes into some kind of continuous and coherent culture that does not threaten traditionalists. Breaking away from these kinds of industrially based forms of practice, Sumner Stone and Emigre have both seized upon the opportunities created by the new typesetting technologies to operate as small-scale independents. But while Sumner Stone has modelled himself on the pre-industrial craftsman, serving a community that is largely known to him with beautifully made fonts, Licko and Vanderlans have been able to initiate ground-breaking commercial practices and also create innovative fonts. From within the academy, the designers at Cal Arts have employed and commented upon new technologies in the manner prompted by their explicit theoretical stance, undertaking type design as part of their critical project. The meaning of technological innovation is not fixed; its openness to interpretation is demonstrated by the variety of the typefaces that offer themselves as responses to technological change.

Notes

[265] . p.179, Ross & Penley eds., 1991

[266] . p.4, Negroponte, 1995

[267] . p.7, Negroponte, 1995

[268] . p.230, Negroponte, 1995

[269] . p.90, Cringely, Robert X., 1992, Accidental Empires, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth

[270] . p.21, Landow, George P., 1992, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, John Hopkins University Press, John Hopkins University

[271] . p.31, Landow, 1992

[272] . p.185, Landow, 1992

[273] . p.50, Landow, 1992

[274] . p.65, Landow, 1992

[275] . p.52, Postman, 1993

[276] . p.130, Postman, 1993

[277] . p.58, Postman, 1993

[278] . p.63, Postman, 1993

[279] . p.xi, Roszak, Theodore, 1986, The Cult of Information, Lutterworth Press, Cambridge

[280] . p.xiii, Roszak, 1986

[281] . p.11, Roszak, 1986

[282] . p.16, Roszak, 1986

[283] . Sherry Turkle, Institute of the Contemporary Arts, London, 1/4/96

[284] . p.9, Ross, 1991

[285] . p.137, Wajcman, Judy, 1991, Feminism Confronts Technology, Polity Press, Cambridge

[286] . p.163, Wajcman, 1991

[287] . p.164, Wajcman, 1991

[288] . see the interview with Donna Haraway in Ross & Penley eds., 1991

[289] . see the essay by Sadie Plant and Nick Land in Fuller ed., 1994

[290] . ‘Backwards and Forwards: Psychoanalysis and the Dialectics of Expectation’, Clare Pajaczkowska, Design History Conference, University of Middlesex, December 1996

[291] . see Romanyshyn, R.D., 1989, Technology as Symptom and Dream, Routledge, London

[292] . p.4, Cringely, 1992

[293] . p.80, Cringely, 1992

[294] . p.215 Cringely, 1992

[295] . p.210, Cringely, 1992

[296] . p.226, Cringely, 1992

[297] . p.23, Adobe Magazine, 1/1994

[298] . Burwell Davis, 15/3/95

[299] . Dan Mills, 20/9/96

[300] . Tami Donohoe, 20/9/96

[301] . Dan Mills, 20/9/96

[302] . Burwell Davis, 15/3/95

[303] . p.113, Cringely, 1992

[304] . Tobias Frere-Jones, 1/6/96

[305] . Dan Mills, 20/9/96

[306] . Carol Twombly, 20/9/96

[307] . Burwell Davis, 15/3/95

[308] . Robert Slimbach, 20/9/96

[309] . p.10, Design Graphics, No.4, 1994

[310] . Adobe Originals specimen book, 1989

[311] . Adobe Originals specimen book, 1996

[312] . Jeremy Tankard, 8/5/96

[313] . Robert Slimbach, 20/9/96

[314] . Carol Twombly, 20/9/96

[315] . Robert Slimbach, 20/9/96

[316] . Dan Mills, 20/9/96

[317] . Robert Slimbach, 20/9/96

[318] . Tami Donohoe, 20/9/96

[319] . Robert Slimbach, 20/9/96

[320] . Carol Twombly, 20/9/96

[321] . Reg White, 17/3/95

[322] . Jon Wozencroft, 20/11/96

[323] . This ban remained in effect on the graphic design courses at Kingston University in 1995.

[324] . Sumner Stone, 23/9/96

[325] . Sumner Stone, 23/9/96

[326] . Sumner Stone, 23/9/96

[327] . Stone Foundry Inc., specimen book, 1995

[328] . Stone, Sumner, ‘The Type Craftsman in the Computer Era’, Print, March/April, 1989

[329] . Stone Foundry Inc., specimen book, 1995

[330] . p.8, Print, March/April 1989

[331] . p.6, Print, March/April 1989

[332] . Byrne, Chuck, ‘Print’s New Face’, Print, September/October, 1991

[333] . p.32, Warde, 1955

[334] . Stone Foundry Inc., specimen book, 1995

[335] . Stone, 23/9/96

[336] . This issue is discussed by Charles Handy in The Empty Raincoat, Hutchinson, London, 1994

[337] . Sumner Stone, 23/9/96

[338] . The early days of Emigre are fully described in Emigre, 1993, Emigre: Graphic Design into the Digital Realm, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London

[339] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[340] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[341] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[342] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[343] . p.55, Lupton, Ellen, 1996, Mixing Messages, Thames and Hudson, London

[344] . p.34, Emigre, 1993

[345] . p.40, Emigre, 1993

[346] . Jonathan Hoefler, 3/1/96

[347] . p.15, Emigre Catalogue, 1996

[348] . p.55, Lupton, 1996

[349] . Matthew Carter, Tobias Frere-Jones, Mike Parker, 1/6/96

[350] . p.55, Emigre, 1993

[351] . Steven Heller, ‘Cult of the Ugly’, Eye, 9/1993

[352] . p.8, Emigre Catalogue, 1996

[353] . p.7, Emigre, 1994

[354] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[355] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[356] . see leaflets distributed by Mark Pawson, founder of the Copyright Violation Squad, PO Box 664 E3 4QR

[357] . Emigre, 19/9/96

[358] . see Cringely, 1992, pp.242-6, for an account of the workings of shareware

[359] Weingart, Wolfgang, Typography Today, Seibundo Shinkosha, Japan, 1980

[360] . p.14, Typographic Issue, Design Quarterly, No.148, 1990

[361] . p.16, Typographic Issue, Design Quarterly, No.148, 1990

[362] . Lupton, Ellen & Miller, J. Abbott, ‘Deconstruction and Graphic Design: History meets Theory’, Visible Language, 28.4, 1994

[363] . In the essay ‘The (Layered) Vision Thing’ published in Eye, 8/1992 Mike Mills argued that designers espousing post-structuralist theories all too often slip into a formal vocabularly that is simply assumed to convey certain critical constructs.

[364] . Lupton, Ellen & Miller, J. Abbott, Visible Language, 28.4, 1994

[365] . Lupton, Ellen & Miller, J. Abbott, Visible Language, 28.4, 1994

[366] . Keedy, Jeffrey, ‘Zombie Modernism’, pp.17-39, Emigre, No.34, 1995

[367] . Graduate seminar with Lorraine Wild and Ed Fella, California Institute of the Arts, 26/9/96

[368] . p.187, Huyssen, Andreas, 1986, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture and Post-modernism, Macmillan, London

[369] . see the essay by Jurgen Habermas in Foster, Hal ed., 1983, The Anti-Aesthetic, Bay Press, Seattle

[370] . Keedy, Jeffrey, ‘Zombie Modernism’, pp.17-39, Emigre, No.34, 1995

[371] . p.216, Huyssen, 1986

[372] . p.9, Huyssen, 1986

[373] . ‘April Greiman’, Design Quarterly, Walker Institute of Art and Design, Minneapolis, 1986

[374] . p.196, Huyssen, 1986

[375] . Emigre, Do You Read Me?, (Special Type Issue), No.15, 1990

[376] . Kinross, Robin, ‘The Digital Wave’, pp.26-39, Eye, 7/1992

[377] . Glauber, Barbara ed., 1993, Lift and Separate, Herb Lubalin Study Center for Design, New York

[378] . Glauber, Barbara ed., 1993

[379] . Barry Deck, 10/6/94

[380] . Emigre Catalogue, 1995

[381] . Emigre Catalogue, 1995

Previously unpublished