![]() Order’s co-founder Jesse Reed has a hard and fast rule for selecting appropriate typefaces. “So, for example, the C’s were redrawn at the top to make sure it felt cohesive throughout.” “There were a few areas where we had redrawn spots to feel custom to what Becca was looking for and align on a better balance between sharp areas and softer moments,” Klaebe explains in making it slightly defiant. Klaebe explains what’s conformist about it and what’s not: “Chap Light is not only contemporary in that it’s a mixture between a sans serif and a calligraphic-based typeface, but it has those nods to historical design practices, which is important for the system and mirroring back Rebecca’s work as well because she’s very analogue.” And that was more important to me than the actual reading of the words.” Emily ObermanĪnd while Paula Scher re-energized the Dada approach of type movement with her iconic work for The Public Theatre in New York City in the early 90s, new technologies and frontiers are getting explored to heighten the nuance of motion like misspelling words and variable type. “It was about the emotion and joy of people being together. We wanted to express the joy of being back in the city and physicality, and it wasn’t necessarily reading the words for exactly what they were,” she adds. Still, as Oberman puts it, it was “meant to feel human and expressive and out in the world and like it was dancing with you or for you.” The secondary type, used in communication-forward touch-points like supportive copy, is set in Basis Grotesque. Some letters repeat, rendering the words misspelled. The primary typography is set in Druk, though we encounter each letter at a different position, weight, and size each time. If you look closely, type looks right back at you. It plays, feels, breathes, responds, and, to that end, is becoming increasingly interactive and experimental. Typography moves, behaves, and performs in our expansive physical and digital world. Letter setting has evolved into animated type and motion design. It hasn’t since Lewis Carrol shaped “The Mouse’s Tale” poem in his 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Type doesn’t sit well-behaved on a page anymore. ![]() But why now? PRINT spoke to six design experts to help us survey the type winds of 2022. Even so, the neat this-or-that classifications of the Fixed Era are emerging as this and that. History has charted that typography will inevitably be subject to a restoring gravitational force (youth rebellion) that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position. Typographers and designers are rebelling against absolutes. Now, form follows feelings more than function. The foundation poured by Jan Tschichold in his watershed book Die Neue Typographie (1928) is caving in and giving way. The assertions of legibility of the Bauhaus’ New Typography are getting fainter and fainter. Expressive typography has gone fully glacial. It is no wonder then, in this zeitgeist of chaos and confusion, typography is having a second coming. That, folks, is our 2022 “Spiritus Mundi,” our collective spirit of humanity. Kyle Chayka aptly summarized our current mood in a recent New Yorker piece, The Year in Vibes, writing, “It is a year that feels as though it does and does not exist, a hangover from the depths of terror in 2020 that provides a significant improvement and yet remains vacuous and unstable.” In the spaces between our shared uncertainty and collective rage, we tread optimistically in exhaustive isolation, finding creature comforts where we can. ![]() After three centuries of a Fixed Era, marked by neat walled gardens of stylistic movements, we have entered a Fluid Era, where all forms of type rove freely and intersect.ĭoes being in a Fluid Era of typography mean we can’t pinpoint our 2022 type vision? Not necessarily. And this past year, PRINT’s own typographic schematic summary (developed by design house Gretel) charts a significant swing in the design pendulum. Massimo Vignelli’s 1985 schematic chart listed ideological and design changes over the 1960s-1980s. We are well into a new decade, deeply unprecedented in nature-inherently, this causes humans to take inventory of our progress and entertain future trajectories.Īnd in the design world, we supremely can’t control this urge. If you haven’t warmed up to the notion that typography is experiencing a full-blown reformation, let me throw a log on the fire. ![]()
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