Many innovations in design over the past two decades derive from an active and skeptical exploration of the avant-garde movements that revolutionized art and design in the early twentieth century.

In the late 1960s, Wolfgang Weingart, teaching at Basel's Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Design), began to build complex, overtly personal page compositions out of modernism's vocabulary of grids, bars, open spaces, and unadorned letterforms.

The American designer Dan Friedman went to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in 1968, the same year Weingart began teaching there.

Weingart's American students included April Greiman, who, returning to work in Los Angeles in 1976, infused the new typography with energetic impulses from punk culture.

The new typography flourished at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which became a center for experimental design in the 1970s and 1980s.

Emigre Fonts was founded in 1984 by Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko in Berkeley, California.

Dramatic experiments with narrative typography have been performed by Edward Fella, who attended Cranbrook following a two-decade career as a self-taught graphic designer.

Another creator of narrative typography is Jeffery Keedy, who received his MFA from Cranbrook in 1985 and now teaches at Cal Arts.

What constitutes the "new" is an uncertain question in contemporary culture.

As a new typeface enters the currency of cultural use, it becomes part of history. The impurities of quotation can convert any unique gesture, endowed with the personality of its maker, into a sign, a repeatable mark. Some designers treat the past as a warehouse of images to be revised, repackaged, or transformed. Others try to escape from history, only to see it swallow up the fragile newness of their work. The mixing of styles and symbols is not only a deliberate strategy employed by individual artists; it is a symptom of the circulation of signs in contemporary culture.

© Copyright 1996 Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum