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Digital typography: 4.3 New trends in Europe

4.2 Swiss Punk and the Pacifi c Wave 4.4 Technology and beyond

New trends in Europe

Fuse magazine

Fuse was a magazine designed by Neville Brody and

written by Jon Wozencroft that aimed to widen the

context within which typography was discussed in

the early 1990s. The contents of the 20 different Fuse

issues was arranged in a systematic order to discuss

the cultural and technological progression of written

languages. To achieve a conclusive judgment on the

relevance of typography it is generally insuffi cient

to discuss the zeitgeist – the spirit of the age – of a

particular point in time. To tackle this problem, Fuse

discussed typography as a dynamic cultural product that

responds to, as much as it evolves from, social, cultural,

and technological developments. Various Fuse issues

indicated that the subject of virtual typography is by no

means restricted to postmodernist styles or technological

achievements. Virtual typography may likewise be related

to the roots of writing such as hieroglyphs and runes as

well as to other forms of linguistic codes such as Braille

and Morse.

Fuse Fonts

Fuse Fonts is a range of typefaces that evolved alongside

Fuse magazine. After fonts and layouts had suffered from

the technological restrictions of the fi rst generations of

Macintosh computers, as well as from the early versions

of design and font-editing software, typographers could

challenge the pixel aesthetics of low-resolution computer

graphics in the early 1990s.

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