"Type should be invisible": This old dictum was design dogma for so long that it might as well have been a law of nature. While writers were freely experimenting with everything from beat poetry to cyberpunk fiction, type jockeys were generally expected to behave themselves, faithfully rendering every precious word un-"interpreted" and uncolored by superfluous serifs or violations of the sacred page grid. As one authority said, typography should be a wine goblet, not of "solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns," but of "crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble and transparent...designed to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain." In other words, as a casting director once told a guitarist friend of mine who had been picked off the stage at CBGB to be an extra in a major film: "Smile, look cute, and for Christ's sake don't say anything!"
This unwritten rule has changed in the last decade, however, and typographers can largely give thanks to Emigre, a small Sacramento-based graphic design magazine. Founded ten years ago by publisher/editor/art director Rudy VanderLans and type designer Zuzana Licko, the magazine has played an important part in the widest-ranging revolution to hit the printed page since Dada. Since its inception, Emigre has relentlessly scorned the traditional subordinate role of the typographer and celebrated the freedom of expression now available to designers. They have consistently presented the work and theoretical writing of some of the most outré design experimenters (and often pushed even further with VanderLans's art direction). It's success is evident not only in the increasing circulation of the magazine itself, but also in the tremendous popularity of Emigre's fonts and the growth of their influence in the design world.
Emigre attempts to offset the long-accepted imbalance between form and content, to make full use of the printed page, and to create a richer interpretation of the underlying text. Whereas in the past typography functioned as little more than a plain white envelope, the minimum necessary to deliver the writer's words to the reader, it can now be an exciting work of graphic art in its own right. It works in tandem with or adds seasoning to the author's words. The finished page, book, or article is a genuine collaboration between the writer and graphic designer, an organic whole.
The results of this new typographic freedom evoke many reactions ranging from praise to expressions of shock and horror. Predictably, some established designers working in more conservative or "classical" styles have been less than sympathetic to the results of some of the new typographical experiments. (In an interview in Print magazine, for example, Italian designer Massimo Vignelli referred to Emigre's work as "typographic garbage.") The main concern of the new typography, which has been addressed repeatedly in the pages of Emigre, is the question of legibility: Do the magazine's multi-layered, overprinted, spindled, mutilated, and deconstructed typographics render the writers' words unreadable? This of course begs the question of what legibility is in the first place, and the answer is by no means clear.
Critics of the new typography on grounds of illegibility claim that the no-holds-barred, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to design just makes for a cluttered page. Disparate graphic elements of all shapes and sizes battle with the author's words for the reader's attention. This greatly increases the time it takes to simply get through the text. The reader is forced to navigate through twisting blocks of type of different sizes and weights, some black-on-white and some "reversed out," some upside-down, some split between pages of a spread or chopped right down the middle.
But what's the hurry? The same person who complains about the time it takes to read a page of Emigre would probably never dream of rushing through, say, a glass of wine, a good meal, or an afernoon of sex. Years and years of reading words unadorned by extraneous ornamentation have conditioned people not to expect it. But asking that designers not "interfere" with the words they're committing to the page is like expecting all songs to be sung a cappella, all food to be taken intravenously, all sex to be gotten over with quickly and without undue fondling. Reasonable people may differ on how much time should be spent on dessert, foreplay, or the occasional magickal ceremony, but only the dreariest puritan would abolish them altogether. A well-composed page can provide sensual pleasures no less wonderful than the baroque twists of a piece of Moorish architecture or the sonic complexities of an Adrian Sherwood recording. It can also help attract someone to the writing who otherwise might not have been interested.
The second argument for the purported illegibility of the Emigre style invokes well-established rules based on scientific studies and generally adhered to without question by typographers: Serifed typefaces are more readable than sans-serif faces; lines of type should never go beyond a certain length; the more idiosyncratic faces should be used for titles only, never for running text; certain very idiosyncratic faces should not be used at all; etc. There is a certain logic to this argument; however, it's far from clear that a page that takes longer to read but is beautifully designed, keeps the reader's attention riveted, and forces him or her to get involved in some way is inferior to one that the reader can tear through without thinking about it. There are a few situations where text indisputably does need to be read as quickly and effortlessly as possible, and few designers would debate about them. Playing with the rules of legibility on traffic signs, for example, could easily get someone killed; doing so in reference books that are intended to be scanned quickly would render them useless.
But, these practical exceptions aside, rules based on readability research are not at all the sacred and unchanging laws of the universe that people often believe them to be. One truism repeated endlessly in the pages of Emigre, and in the font samples in their type catalog, is that "it is the reader's familiarity with typefaces that accounts for their legibility; readers read best what they read most." A look at the type of 500 years ago bears this out: The "black letter" faces common in the Middle Ages were as readable then as Times Roman is now. Set in a book today, however, black letter would be considered all but unintelligible. Readability is evolutionary, a result of years and years of experience with particular typefaces set in particular formats. As such, it doesn't exist as an unchanging law. Emigre pushes this particular point by regularly using its own highly individual fonts, which would be considered "display faces" by many conservative designers (and undoubtedly completely avoided by others), in solid running text in the magazine. So is type evolving away from Caslon and towards Emigre's Remedy? Will Times Roman be the black letter of 2493? "I wish I knew," says VanderLans, who concedes that the next evolutionary change may just as likely be in media, away from paper and towards CRTs and CD-ROMs, for example.
As with much avant-garde art, from free music to guerrilla theater, Emigre's power lies to a large degree in the consistent newness of the art and design work it features. This is the flip side of the legibility problem, and it works to the magazine's advantage: Given the surprising uniformity of most book and magazine design, the strangeness of most Emigre spreads is in itself pleasantly jarring. Merely poring over a brand new issue of the magazine is always an adventure, since no two issues are quite the same in any way except for their size. Though the "Emigre style" is easily abused, in the right hands it is stunning by its very nature, and this is due in large part to the wonderful anarchy and unpredictability inherent in it. But if merely reading the magazine can be a game or puzzle, the game has to be kept interesting; the solution to the maze must be different every time. The continued success of Emigre has been largely due to the fact that it has always kept its level of surprise and unpredictability high, while remaining aesthetically beautiful. This is not as easy as it may seem.
The problem of being consistently "new" was discussed in Emigre recently. In an interview with David Carson, the award-winning designer of Ray Gun (a magazine that pushes "illegibility" to the limit and features some of the most extreme typographic experimentation being done today), VanderLans pointed out that "you [Carson] are, of course, creating towering expectations when you design these brilliant issues; you have to constantly outdo yourself." VanderLans acknowledged that he too felt these pressures. This may be more of a problem for a magazine like Ray Gun than it is for Emigre, since Ray Gun--in spite of its ultra-radical production values--is still a relatively traditional music magazine, with interviews, artist profiles, reviews, a letters section, and a broad target audience to satisfy. Ray Gun, regardless of the tremendous leeway given to Carson, still has to fit a certain amount of text in its pages in a format that imposes certain limits. Thus Carson has to work harder to maintain the magazine's cutting edge. But even for a magazine like Emigre, which has a smaller, artsier readership, no advertisers, and a much more flexible mission, there are only so many new design tricks available. Keeping the game interesting might be easier now than it was thirty years ago, but can't a designer run out of new ideas even today, and if so, what happens then?
This problem doesn't exist for most magazines, which have static designs that are revised every few years as fashions change. But when newness is the main goal, and appeal, of a magazine, what happens when the designer just burns out or exhausts the ways of presenting what is largely similar material month after month? Furthermore, what if the audience simply gets tired of newness--reaches sensory overload, or decides that maybe there are better things to do with an hour than spend it reading a page of Emigre after all? This is not a far-fetched scenario: As has been pointed out in Emigre itself, even Neville Brody, one of the most brilliant experimental designers of the early eighties, eventually chucked it all and went back to "the safe refuge of the International Style"--the functional, Modernist style first championed by the artists of the Bauhaus in the 1920's, and marked by simple, mathematical grids and clean, asymetrically placed sans-serif type. The pressure on Brody was so intense (as one explanation goes), and his innovative work so shamelessly ripped off by others, that the change was simply an attempt to save his sanity. Before stepping out of the spotlight, however, Brody tried another tack to retain his edge: designing his own typefaces.
The astounding proliferation of new typefaces is one of the most visible manifestations of the new design revolution, and has no precedent in the history of typography. New faces are being designed by the hundreds every week, by newly established foundries around the world. In addition to the larger-than-ever selections being offered by established foundries like Adobe, Monotype, Font Haus, and Cassidy & Greene, new fonts--most of them one of a kind--are now being created by amateurs at home as well. Font-generation software like Altsys's Fontographer has done for font creation what Quark XPress did for page design: made it possible for humble PC owners to create a professional-caliber product at home easily and relatively inexpensively. In addition, with the low cost of commercial fonts (and, of course, the rampant spread of illegal copying), faces offered by the large foundries are now in the hands of more people than ever. This widespread availability of professional typefaces, as well the unchecked spread of new type designs, has worked hand-in-hand with other technological advances to provide support for the freedom that graphic designers are now demanding.
But as it turns out, the sheer number of new fonts being produced increases the pressure for newness still more. As designers continue to churn out new font designs at breakneck speeds (and, incidentally, sell them to the public, as both Emigre and Ray Gun do--though font sales are a much bigger part of Emigre's business than Ray Gun's), they tend to get dissatisfied with everything out there relatively quickly. And so do their readers. So the designers design more new fonts: In the case of Emigre, each new issue generally features one or more never-before-seen fonts, which adds to the excitement and unpredictability that the magazine's readers expect. An issue of Ray Gun can feature dozens of new fonts, though many of these are digitally generated hybrids created for one spread only. New Emigre Fonts releases, always popular, are eagerly gobbled up by hungry graphic designers looking for something different. Like everything else in the world of cutting-edge typography, their half-life tends to be fairly short, as they make the journey from avant-garde design magazines to MTV to subway advertisements. And so the cycle continues.
In a feature on Emigre in the magazine Communication Arts, Patrick Coyne wrote: "It would be difficult to discuss the effect of the Macintosh computer on the aesthetic of contemporary design and typography without mentioning Emigre magazine and Emigre Fonts." This is undoubtedly true, but the role that the computer plays in Emigre's designs, at least superficially, has changed greatly since 1983. In the magazine's earliest days, the Mac, and hence the whole field of desktop publishing, was still in its infancy. The selection of fonts available to the desktop designer (and Emigre has been produced completely on Macs almost since day one) was extremely limited--so limited, in fact, that VanderLans and Licko felt compelled to design their own, and thus was Emigre's font foundry born. But the technology available to VanderLans and Licko was still primitive, and there was no way to hide it. So they didn't try to. The early Emigre designs (and fonts) are a celebration of low-tech--art with the pipes and wires showing. Bit-mapped MacPaint graphics and bit-mapped type, blown up to almost comic proportions, were an important part of the early Emigre aesthetic, as was more obvious Mac imagery like mouse pointers, menu fragments, scroll bars, etc.
However, while Emigre continues to push the available hardware and software (not to mention its margins) to the limit, VanderLans now feels less compelled to wear his technology on his sleeve. The computer's role in Emigre's production is as important as ever, but as the Mac has advanced from the bit-mapped stage to its current level of sophistication, it has become a tool no different from pen and ink or pasteboard. And how does VanderLans feel about this? "I'm glad it's becoming a little more invisible." Which is the one thing Emigre's type will never be.
[Previously published in "bOING bOING" in a slightly different form]
Mail: dmandl@panix.com or davem@wfmu.org