Issue 71

Opinion

Typography, Education, Jan Middendorp
Formulaic, modular approaches threaten the chemistry of the master-apprentice model.
the editor, John L. Walters
This issue of Eye, a ‘type special’, celebrates a great era for the art, craft…
Letters to the editor 2,
A letter from Harry Woodrow
Letters to the editor 1, Rick Poynor
A letter from Rick Poynor
Risk and ritual
Critique / illustration, Rick Poynor
Anne Harild’s work offers a challenge to the unthreatening norms of British illustration

Features

Football, politics and the mafia
Jessica Jenkins
The walls of Naples are a canvas for the crimes, passions and contradictions of the city’s inhabitants
Heavy metal
Anthony Oliver
These tractor badges survive as relics of a more heroic age: for them, the earth still moves
Reputations: Ian Anderson
Liz Farrelly
‘When I took a back seat to allow TDR to grow beyond me, it died; its creative spark was crushed . . . the more I took myself out of the equation to see if it could do better without me, the more obvious it became that Ian Anderson and The Designers Republic were inseparable.’
Borderline
Rick Poynor
Metahaven makes visual proposals that suggest a new role for graphic design in public life
Deborah Littlejohn
The digital revolution still fuels a creative explosion in the way type is made and sold. Twelve practitioners take stock of the Zeitgeist
Catherine Dixon
‘Serifs are the new sans’
Jeffery Keedy
‘In terms of style we’re in the new Dark Ages’
Nick Bell
'The cool allure of Modernist style refuses to die’
Nicole Dotin
‘This is the age of the type designer’
Paul Carlos
‘We have yet to scratch the surface’
Sibylle Hagmann
‘The time of the garage genius is over’
Peter Bil'ak
‘The majority are guided by historical understanding’
William Hall
‘Over-friendly toasted-cheese fonts are dead’
Khoi Vinh
‘The Web is a lost opportunity’
Sean Adams
‘Capricorn speaks to where we are as a culture’
Mark Thomson
‘The variations of nuance and voice are endless’
Alfredo Trivino
‘The tools make it harder for true innovation to emerge’
Britain’s signature
John L. Walters
Margaret Calvert signed the UK – from road to rail to air. Now Henrik Kubel has digitised her Rail Alphabet
The DNA of ABCs
Sofie Beier
Multifunctional font families, crafted for every eventuality, are doing away with the need to seek out complementary faces
Drawn to be wild
Rian Hughes
Expressive, explosive and sometimes beautiful, this hand-drawn magazine lettering defies categorisation [EXTRACT]
Scale and spirit
Paul Shaw
Optically sized fonts are the ‘slow food’ trend of typography, appreciated by a minority but with far-reaching influence