Emigre No. 22 features an interview with Nick Bell (1992), a graphic designer and an alumnus of the London College of Printing. Bell’s experimentation with text and meaning has led him to challenge many paradigms of typography, the most important of which is legibility. A prime example of Bell’s work is ‘Psycho’, a typeface that consists of slashes made across a piece of paper using a kitchen knife. Bell proposes that a typeface can be a vocabulary of marks produced by a drawer of cutlery – stab marks, fork indentations, slicing, tearing, slashing, and gauging scars. A typography exercise can be any mark made with any medium on any surface.
Here Bell challenges the notion of what a typeface could be, by examining the process of creation and semiosis of letterforms. As these notions redefine typography, they must also inevitably redefine that which we call a typeface. If legibility is no longer seen as a fixed rule; as a primary characteristic of a typeface, and is replaced by recognizability of shapes not necessarily recognizable as letterforms. If the boundaries of legibility are so out of focus, a typeface (font?) can be any collection of recognizable forms that break away from the formal structures such as one provided by the alphabet and do not necessarily try to replace or imitate the alphabet. Now a typeface can be defined more by its programmed use, than by the design and consistency of each of its individual units.
Eric Maurier (1971) designed his labyrinthine typeface ‘Maurier’ to be used in a booklet “The Myth about Bird B”, a leporello design by Mourier and written by the poet Knud Holten. The typeface follows strict rules based on a 7×7 grid to generate a logical system of forms that narrowly escape their likeness to the ordinary letterforms to form a collection of box structures, made up of unclosed lines, that when typed together form maze-like patterns and textures. With questionable legibility, their function closely resembles that of decoration and patternmaking. And since they would respond to keys on a computer they could also be letters that disguise themselves as patterns. That would make anything enclosed in a font file a typeface.
I have always associated typefaces with their ability to be recreated, reproduced, and ease of distribution in some format, chiefly digital. And digital font files have reinforced the association that typefaces have with typing (now that most writing happens in the form of typing). So if typefaces were to be any collection of (recognisable?) marks [symbols] then what would the endless repetition and distribution of a set of marks made by a knife look like? And how compatible would it be with typing? We could perhaps expand this idea to include, not just a collection of symbols, but a collection of images, or sounds (a collection of anything). Would that mean that playing [like typing] a set of keys on a piano [like a keyboard] to generate a set of sounds assigned to those keys would give those keys the status of a typeface? Is a musical scale a typeface? Or conversely, would typography assume the status of art? Would it be possible to have a purely visceral engagement, the kind we would have with art or music, with typography?
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