Eye Magazine

We are all subject to the dominant technologies of our age, consciously or otherwise. The innovative work of Veronika Burian and TypeTogether over the past two decades has thrived through a global network that enables the creative breakthroughs and research that underpin today’s digital type design ecosystem.

Today’s digital foundries regularly adapt and reinvent typefaces made for earlier systems in ways their creators could hardly imagine – see TypeTogether’s extensive new version of Futura, and the display fonts shown in our type review section. In a similar fashion, art director and photographer Harri Peccinotti rejuvenated Windsor wood type to make an era-defining masthead for Nova and titles for the film Alfie. Peccinotti’s work, still startling and visceral, rode the tide of technological advances in colour reproduction and printing, an era evoked by the nostalgic vista Serge Ricco shot in Peccinotti’s Paris studio.

Relentless progress has its downsides. Nigel Ball’s ‘Voice at the table’ addresses the harms of ultra-processed food, its design and branding. Michael Collins’ unsettling, awe-inspiring pictures of nuclear plants also remind us of the debts technology can run up. Some units documented in Collins’ The Nuclear Sublime will endure, decommissioned but dangerous, long into the next century.

By contrast, the practice of Kate Dawkins uses analogue thinking and ingenious tech to make large-scale work that celebrates, informs and delights. Her work is a welcome reminder of design’s power to frame worthwhile content, and to give it graphic form far beyond the printed page and screen.

John L. Walters, editor of Eye, London

First published in Eye no. 109 vol. 28, 2025