Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

Mrs Eaves

Zuzana Licko

For those who experienced firsthand the digital-type revolution that began

in the mid- 1980 s, it was nothing short of liberating. For the first time since

Gutenberg, the means of creating complete alphabets for repeated text and

display application was not limited to rarefied specialists but was available

to anyone possessing a little beige box called a Macintosh—anyone, that is,

inclined toward letter design. At first the characters made for the computer

screen were blocky and bitmapped, as if they were boxes inked on graph

paper, which indeed they were in the digital sense. The constraints imposed

by nascent computer software, seventy-two-dot-per-inch computer screens,

and dot matrix printers gave rise to letterforms that were both functional

and aesthetically limited. Nonetheless, the very idea that designers could

compose andcreate their own type spurred an initial frenzy for custom

alphabets that ranged from sublime to ridiculous.

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