Eye Magazine

Back in 2005, I wrote ‘In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory’, a somewhat…

Piet Gerards is a craftsman. You can’t fail to notice this from the moment you…

Three new typefaces for local institutions draw on Sheffield’s cultural and typographic history

At the dawn of the computer age, new functions ushered in new forms for type design

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

‘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.’

With a substantial body of work already completed, Gerard Unger’s designs are entering a new phase.

The old manufacturing companies that dominated typeface production through most of this century have been swallowed and largely pushed to the sidelines, while initiatives in design – and in the terms and routines that condition design – have been made by a few rapidly growing software and computer hardware companies. Pathbreaking contributions have come from small studios or individual designers working, in every sense, from just a desktop. There have been ‘font wars’, corporate piracy and copyright contravention on a large scale. To use the loose terminology by which we attempt to carve up typographic history, it is clear that during the 1980s, the developed world left behind photographic typography (to which metal had ceded) and entered the era of the ‘digital’