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Typography and history have been inextricably linked since the invention of printed letters in the fifteenth century. The written word is the primary medium through which history is recorded, and printing enabled the archives of modern civilization to rapidly expand. Typography can never escape history: every unique aesthetic invention can be absorbed by the past, where it is stored in our memory of reusable styles and structures.
Since the Renaissance, the culture of modernity has been fundamentally shaped by technologies of mechanical reproduction, from the printing of texts to the replication of graphic images. Contemporary type designers have addressed typographic history through faithful restorations and free interpretations of existing alphabets. Adobe Systems has built an extensive library of typefaces for the microcomputer market, working to reissue historical fonts as well as to introduce new styles. Leading the field of contemporary type design is Matthew Carter, whose career has bridged the transition from large typefoundries to independent producers and from hot metal to photo and digital type technologies. Carter's Bell Centennial (1975), an early example of digital type design, is used today in all United States phone books. Younger type designers include Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. They, like Carter, often ground their work in typographic history. While some designers create entire typefaces, the practice of graphic design involves choosing from the vast stock of existing fonts. Once a font enters the marketplace, it becomes the common property of anyone with access to its forms. The flux of meaning can be seen in the historical origins and contemporary uses of the typeface Neuland, designed in Germany by Rudolf Koch in 1923. Graphic designers often bank on the familiarity of typefaces to modulate the meaning of their work. The use of existing styles can be clever or banal, serving to reverse expectations or confirm assumptions. The work of Herb Lubalin epitomized the eclectic transformation of the familiar in American commercial typography in the 1960s and 1970s. The album covers that Paula Scher designed for CBS Records in the late 1970s tapped the history of design--from Art Nouveau to Russian Constructivism--for styles suited to the popular medium of music packaging. Another approach to typographic eclecticism is seen in the studio M&Co., open in New York from 1979 to 1993. Several important studios were directly influenced by M&Co., including Drenttel Doyle Partners, founded in 1985 by William Drenttel, Stephen Doyle, and Tom Kluepfel. The fascination with language seen at M&Co. and many of the studios that formed in its wake reflects the influence of The Cooper Union in New York, which was a maelstrom of competing design ideologies in the 1970s and 1980s. From typefaces drawn from classical and vernacular sources to books and posters that play with historical styles and structures, an important track of innovation in contemporary design openly engages an existing culture of signs, symbols, and styles. Such work builds upon a taut yet permeable web of visual literacy, a common language in which elements move in and out of currency, their meaning open to continual revision. The best work transforms the meaning of the old and the ordinary while drawing energy from its tremendous power to communicate.
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