Issue 77 Eye Feature Essay / electronic type [EXTRACT] Wim Crouwel Timothy Epps LEDs OCR Screen fonts At the dawn of the computer age, new functions ushered in new forms for type design by Sarah Owens Electrifying the alphabet The advances in data-processing that revolutionised office work from the mid-1960s on – and later invaded everyday life – created special challenges for type designers. With electronic typewriters and microcomputers came the need for electronic fonts, both to translate data into electrical signals understandable by machines, and to transmit information between humans and machines via electronic displays. Typefaces created by engineers for early electronic devices reflected the limited technical capacities of the machines. Scanning lines caused television type to flicker, while video screen letters appeared rough and irregular due to the difficulty of displaying curves. The monospacing of typewriter fonts created awkward gaps between narrow letters and unsightly fusions between wide ones. Dot-matrix and LED (light-emitting diode) typefaces faced even greater technical limitations, as the mechanical components of displays restricted the actual size of dots and trapezoids arranged on the matrix. Although smaller elements would have enabled precise shapes and harmonious letterforms, they also required a disproportionately large amount of storage space. Meanwhile, phototypesetting and digital typesetting, which required mass digitisation of fonts, were transforming the print industry. While some professional typographers refused to acknowledge the validity of digital fonts, others, fascinated by the possibilities offered, experimented with completely new shapes or set out to test the adaptability of traditional letterforms. In 1975, type designer Gerard Unger (see Reputations, Eye no. 40 vol. 10) created a font for Rudolf Hell’s Digiset phototypesetting machine, assembling fairly small pixels on a constructed grid to prevent the distortion of letterforms; his Demos is now considered one of the first entirely digital typefaces . . . © eye magazine