History of Graphic Design

Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture
By Jessica Helfland, John Maeda

Electronic Typography: The New Visual Language

- A digital age, the relationship between design and sound, particular between the spoken words and written words.
- Visual language has been a source of inspiration to artists and writers.
- For designers, there has always been an overwhelming interest in formalism, in analyzing the role of type as medium, message, and muse.
- Typography as the physical embodiment of such thinking, has quite a way to go.
- Typography’s early appearance on the digital frontier does not bode well for design.


The talking Barbie, Jessica thinks that was her first computer. You can pull a little string to make her talk. If you held the string back slightly as she was talking, her voice would drop a few octaves, transforming her from a chirpy soprano into a slurpy baritone. But between back then and today, the spoken words and written words go far beyond puling a string. The change was brought by recent advances in technology indicate the needs for designers to broaden their understanding of what it is to work effectively with type.




“One cannot speak a capital letter.” Adolf Loose. This is how he explained the expressive limitations of the western alphabet.





“Written words are the symbols of spoken words.” What happens when written words can speak? When can they move? When an they be imbued with sound and tone and nuance, with decibel and harmony and voice?





The New Illiteracy

- Design principles are not the real problem, but more resonant issue is the degree to which we have come to accept this sort of ill-defined, anything-goes expressionism.
- “Angry Websites make people feel good: but are they god or people? ”
- There are no rules.


The new illiteracy is an incubator for anger a breeding ground for self-importance. Designers these days tend to use childlike grammar, “kinda”, “gottta”, and horrifyingly precious misspelling of the word “cuz”. It’s nothing compared to the warped perception of inflated self-worth evidenced in this writer’s final posting: “I’m gonna write a book.”


On the website the opportunity to say anything is both seductive and eminently achievable. “Undecipherable type and vibrating colors as if to day: I’m angry, and my site says I’m angry too, so don’t mess with me.” Design tells designer's mood.


There are no rules, anybody can do, say, think, be anything, so is design principles. Every designer has experience, so everyone should be able to learn more about the problem of creating.