Feature
Reputations: Stephen Banham
‘Helvetica has become the generic default, a safe formula under the guise of Modernism. It’s all smoke and mirrors.’
Neon
The properties of this medium make it the plaything of artists, a cinematic cliche and a familiar, endlessly renewable element of the urban nightscape.
Reputations: Gerard Unger
‘Papers have all kinds of information on the same page; very distressing and very joyful; gossip and facts. I wanted to bring that variety, that liveliness into the typeface design.’
Why Helvetica?
Despite the changes provoked by the digital ‘revolution’, designing a typeface for serious reading remains a time-consuming task. For the designer, choosing and setting a body text font can be equally daunting, resulting in some inspired, eccentric and provocative choices
Remove specifics and convert to ambiguities
As designer, writer and educator, Jeffery Keedy is a committed proponent of postmodernism
General Idea: Infiltrate, infect and mutate
Ignoring the boundaries between art and design, this Canadian trio worked in both fields with an eclectic mix of language, humour and commercialism
Reputations: David King
‘You develop a visual style as you would a handwriting one … The content is what you concentrate on’
Words made flesh
Johanna Drucker pursues a double life as a historian of letterforms and a maker of artist’s books.
Seize the sans serif
Raw, vigorous, experimental and often funny, Ark magazine helped to transform British graphics
Dreams that money can buy
The seamless fantasies devised by designers play a crucial role in the process of selling fashion