Cornel Windlin: Fresh inflatable type

Lehni & Windlin: Rubik maker

If you are looking for a font foundry with impeccable style and effortless conceptual cool, look no further than Swiss Lineto. Named after a PostScript command, Lineto was founded in 1993 by the influential designers Cornel Windlin and Stephan Müller. In 1998 they began distributing fonts, books and typographic bric-a-brac, bringing much type-related pleasure to the world. Claiming collaborators like Norm, Reala, Jürg Lehni and a host of others, Lineto has been a reference point ever since.

Lineto and its designers were players in the spirit of experimentation that dominated graphic design in the 1990s. They challenged typographic conventions with fonts such as Windlin’s classic Moonbase Alpha, and championed the new role of the designer as author. Also apparent in projects like Lego Font Creator, Rubik Maker and Sign Generator is an understanding of form as system, manifested as software.

This is not a surprising conclusion for typography lovers to arrive at. Typography has always been about systems and the programming of space. That is precisely why non-conformist typographers like Makela, McCoy, Carson, Deck and other American deconstructivists scared people with their apparent lack of control. Of course, as soon as one was willing to see beyond the apparent messiness of these rebels, deconstruction was a system too.

This post is dedicated to P.Scott Makela. Rest in peace, brother from another mother.

Norm: The things

Swiss graphic designers Manuel Krebs and Dimitri Brun founded their company Norm after meeting in art school, and have been exploring system-based forms ever since. In 2003 they won the Jan Tschichold Prize for their book designs, and Norm is always on the list of usual suspects whenever young Swiss design is talked about. Their book The things does not explain much of their thinking, but what it lacks in text it makes up for in wonderful graphics.

Norm’s work, while usually not programmed in a traditional sense, is clearly concerned with systems. Their [Sign Generator 1.0->http://www.norm.to/pages/generator_3.html
] is a particularly clear case, consisting of a software that generates all possible combinations of a given set of lines on a grid. At the Abstraction Now exhibition it was shown as an interactive installation with a LED display, but you can also play with it online. (It’s a small world: Jürg Lehni was also involved in this project.)