 | |
| Category | Sans serif |
|---|---|
| Designer(s) | Wim Crouwel |
| Foundry | The Foundry, London |
New Alphabet is a parametric typeface designed by Wim Crouwel, released in 1967. It embraced the limitations of the display technology that it was displayed on by only using horizontal and vertical strokes. This meant that some of the letters had little resemblance to the letters they were supposed to represent. New Alphabet was notably used on the cover of Joy Division's 1988 compilation album Substance .
New Alphabet was a personal, experimental project of Crouwel. The typeface was designed to embrace the limitations of the cathode ray tube technology used by early data display screens and phototypesetting equipment, and thus only contains horizontal and vertical strokes. Conventional typefaces can suffer under these limitations, because the level of detail is not high enough, restricting legibility. Crouwel wanted to adapt his design to work for the new technologies, instead of adapting the technologies to meet the design. [1] Since his letter shapes only contain horizontals and verticals, some of the glyphs are unconventional, while others bear virtually no resemblance to any version of the letters they represent (in some examples, the frequently appearing a glyph looks like a J, K looks like a t, numeral 1 resembles a 7, numeral 8 resembles capital H, and the x glyph looks like a capital I). Because of this, the typeface was received with mixed feelings by his peers.
Most of the letters are based on a grid of 5 by 7 units, with 45-degree corners. Each glyph is represented by two or more sides of a square, with ascenders, descenders or tittles added where necessary. Glyphs with three horizontal bars (E, 3) are represented faithfully, while those with three vertical bars (M, W) are not, instead being represented by underlined N and V glyphs respectively. There is no differentiation between uppercase and lowercase glyphs.
Many of Crouwel's peers were of the opinion that the design was too experimental and that it went too far. The typeface received a lot of newspaper coverage, which sparked a lively debate over typefaces as an art form, compared to their practicality in everyday use. [2] Crouwel largely agreed with the criticism and noted that it was mostly an exercise in theory, stating in 2009: "The New Alphabet was over-the-top and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable." [3]
New Alphabet was one of 23 digital typefaces acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in January 2011 for its Architecture and Design Collection. This collection of typefaces were some of the first acquired by MoMA, and were on display in a 2011-2012 exhibition called Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design, or Standard Deviations .
New Alphabet was featured on the album cover for Joy Division's 1988 compilation album Substance , where the album title is spelled out with characters corresponding to "subst1mce". Brett Wickens, who contributed to the cover, claimed this was for aesthetic reasons. The 1991 album reissue featured different artwork, although in the same style: the word "substance" was not spelled out; rather, the artwork featured a large green "S" in the New Alphabet typeface.
New Alphabet was digitized in 1996 by Freda Sack and David Quay from The Foundry in London. It is part of the Architype 3 Crouwel Collection, and it consists of three weights. The original concept wasn't limited to three weights, but was intended as a parametric system, giving the possibly to make many different shapes by changing the parameters in the machine.
In 2015, Joshua Koomen developed, based on the original instructions, a digital [4] version of New Alphabet in the form of a web-app. The application enables the user to produce any possible setting for the New Alphabet.
Other typefaces designed by Crouwel in the same collection are Architype Gridnik, Architype Fodor, Architype Stedelijk and Architype Catalogue.
Epsilon is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel IPA: [e̞] or IPA: [ɛ̝]. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He . Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э.
The term glyph is used in typography, architecture and archaeology. Broadly, the term means any kind of purposeful mark, such as a simple vertical line incised on a building, a single letter in a script, or a carved symbol.
Q, or q, is the seventeenth letter of the modern English alphabet and the ISO basic Latin alphabet. Its name in English is pronounced, most commonly spelled cue, but also kew, kue and que.
Type design is the art and process of designing typefaces. This involves drawing each letterform using a consistent style. The basic concepts and design variables are described below.
In typography, a serif is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface, and a typeface that does not include them is sans-serif. Some typography sources refer to sans-serif typefaces as "grotesque" or "Gothic", and serif typefaces as "roman".
A typeface is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight, slope, width, and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph. Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters 'a' and 'e' are joined for the first ligature and the letters 'o' and 'e' are joined for the second ligature. For stylistic and legibility reasons, 'f' and 'i' are often merged to create 'fi' ; the same is true of 's' and 't' to create 'st'. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters 'E' and 't' were combined.
The slashed zero is a representation of the Arabic digit "0" (zero) with a slash through it. The slashed zero glyph is often used to distinguish the digit "zero" ("0") from the Latin script letter "O" anywhere that the distinction needs emphasis, particularly in encoding systems, scientific and engineering applications, computer programming, and telecommunications. It thus helps to differentiate characters that would otherwise be homoglyphs. It was commonly used during the punch card era, when programs were typically written out by hand, to avoid ambiguity when the character was later typed on a card punch.
In orthography and typography, a homoglyph is one of two or more graphemes, characters, or glyphs with shapes that appear identical or very similar. The designation is also applied to sequences of characters sharing these properties.
Substance is a singles compilation album by English rock band Joy Division. It was released on 11 July 1988 by Factory Records. It is the companion to a similar singles compilation by their subsequent band New Order, also entitled Substance. It peaked at number 7 on the UK Albums Chart and 146 on the Billboard 200, the band's only chart appearance in the United States. It also reached number 15 in New Zealand and number 53 in Australia in August 1988.
Willem Hendrik "Wim" Crouwel was a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer.
A letterform, letter-form or letter form, is a term used especially in typography, palaeography, calligraphy and epigraphy to mean a letter's shape. A letterform is a type of glyph, which is a specific, concrete way of writing an abstract character or grapheme.
Architype van der Leck is a geometric sans-serif typeface, based upon the 1941 typeface designed by Bart van der Leck for the Dutch magazine Flax, a journal of the De Stijl art movement.
Architype Van Doesburg is a geometric sans-serif typeface based upon a 1919 alphabet designed by Theo van Doesburg, a cofounder of the De Stijl art movement. The digital revival shown at right was produced by Freda Sack and David Quay of The Foundry.
In Unicode and the UCS, a compatibility character is a character that is encoded solely to maintain round-trip convertibility with other, often older, standards. As the Unicode Glossary says:
A character that would not have been encoded except for compatibility and round-trip convertibility with other standards
A numeral is a character that denotes a number. The decimal number digits 0–9 are used widely in various writing systems throughout the world, however the graphemes representing the decimal digits differ widely. Therefore Unicode includes 22 different sets of graphemes for the decimal digits, and also various decimal points, thousands separators, negative signs, etc. Unicode also includes several non-decimal numerals such as Aegean numerals, Roman numerals, counting rod numerals, Cuneiform numerals and ancient Greek numerals. There is also a large number of typographical variations of the Western Arabic numerals provided for specialized mathematical use and for compatibility with earlier character sets, such as ² or ②, and composite characters such as ½.
A subscript or superscript is a character that is set slightly below or above the normal line of type, respectively. It is usually smaller than the rest of the text. Subscripts appear at or below the baseline, while superscripts are above. Subscripts and superscripts are perhaps most often used in formulas, mathematical expressions, and specifications of chemical compounds and isotopes, but have many other uses as well.
Fodor is a geometrical typeface designed by Dutch graphic designer and type designer Wim Crouwel, around 1973.
Gridnik is a geometrical typeface designed by Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel, in 1974. It is the digital version of the typewriter typeface Olivetti Politene.
Source Han Serif is a serif Song/Ming typeface created by Adobe and Google.
