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After returning to the United States to teach at the Yale School of Art and the State University of New York, in Purchase, Friedman sought to ground Weingart's "new typography" in an explicit methodology. A pedagogical manifesto he published in the journal Visible Language in 1973 influenced design courses across the United States. The essay, which features typographic interpretations of a weather report, rejects the objective standard of "legibility" and replaces it with the overtly relativized theory of "readability." Friedman argued that complex arrangements can engage an audience's intelligence and emotions.
Through his teaching as well as his practice as a corporate designer in the 1970s, Friedman (interview) became a leading spokesman for the new typography. In 1994, he recalled: "Unlike Wolfgang Weingart, I wasn't reacting against Swiss typography, because that rational system didn't really exist in the United States except in isolated instances. Whereas Weingart was teaching based on intuition, I was trying to verbalize and demystify the structures of typography. I wanted to create a method. I had to find a way to teach the rules and also how to break them at the same time, since nobody knew the rules." Friedman recognized the tenuous position of modernist graphic design in America: because rationalist methods had never been firmly established here, both the new typography and the rational system that it rejected carried a progressive edge. For young American designers, the new typography did not simply revise a stale and discredited tradition, but brought with it knowledge of the radical formalism of the European avant-garde. Friedman showed young designers how to honor and challenge the principles of modernism simultaneously.
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