Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

beyond the traditional concerns of type designers,” Deck explained in Eye
(No. 6 , Vol.2, 1992),“such as elegance and legibility, and to produce
typographical forms which bring to language additional levels of meaning.”
Some designers hold the traditional approach as sacrosanct as any
religious doctrine. “Type is rigid and implacable,” wrote Frederic W. Goudy
in Typologia( 1921 ). But others see the past as a foundation upon which to
build new traditions. “We’ve had five hundred years of movable type now we
have mutable type,” conceded Matthew Carter in Fine Print on Type ( 1990 ).
This mutable type requires mutable typographic rules. As Katherine McCoy
wrote in Design Quarterly(No.148, 1993), “Gone are the commercial artist’s
servant role and the Swiss designer’s transparent neutrality....Forms are
appropriated with a critical awareness of their original meaning and
contexts. This new work challenges its audience to slow down and read
carefully in a world of fast forward and instant replay....”
After twenty years of grid-locked design, reappraisal was inevi-
table. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre had already opened
up the laboratory doors, while academic hothouses, such as Cranbrook and
CalArts, were encouraging students to push the boundaries. Conventional
typeface design reprised or adapted historical models while strictly adhering
to the tenets of balance and proportion. Conversely, the “new” typography
started from zero. Without the benefit of precedent to guide them, type
designers sought more eccentric influences both from exotic and mundane
sources. Template Gothic was literally taken off the wall. “There was a sign
in the laundromat where I do my laundry,” Deck said. “The sign was done
with lettering templates and it was exquisite. It had obviously been done by
someone who was totally naïve.” Although the stencil was itself
professionally designed, manufactured, and commonly sold in stationery
stores, the untutored rendering of the ad hoc laundry sign exemplified a
colloquial graphic idiom that many designers viewed as a foreign language.
Designers have for a long time dug up and collected visual detritus
from the street as a kind of deep background. Even the moderns
appreciated old hand-painted signs as quaint artifacts from an era before
sophisticated design methods brought light and order to the world. Given
the postmodern ethos for revaluation, many of these same artifacts were
elevated to monuments of visual culture. In much the same way that the
Trajan Column in Rome provided the ancient inscriptions for the
subsequent design of roman letters, the template inscriptions that
influenced Deck were the basis for a distinct alphabet. Deck did not simply
mimic the original, he built an aesthetic principle that challenged the
prevailing concerns about legibility and accessibility.
Perhaps the best reason for Template Gothic’s success was that it