Wim Crouwel’s “New Alphabet”
by Vinson Van Haaff
When a young Wim Crouwel went to a German type setting expo in 1965, he saw one of the first digital typesetters. He saw Garamond 6pt and noticed that as you scaled the letters, lets say by two times, there would be twice as many pixels available to generate the curves, thereby changing the font as you scaled it. This spawned an idea in him that would eventually lead to this grid-based type concept that would be later used in rock album covers and pop art magazines. His ideas were later published in the “New Alphabet” (1967), a book showcasing his approach to print and type design, and the whole book consisted of not one curve or non-45 degree diagonal! Crouwel’s idea was clarity in the digital age, to create a defined typesetting that would not change when scaled, because of its strictly 45 or 90 degree angles, and because if its inherent grid-based structure. The type was to be very square, so that if text lined up on top of each other, the letters would be lined up as well. What started out as an experiment for Crouwel became a sleeper success. Peter Saville, a designer that was contracted to design Joy Division’s Substance album redesigned Crouwel’s “New Alphabet” to be more legible, and then released it as “atmosphere ’88”. For years to come, the new wave of digital type must nod their hats to Wim Crouwel’s foundation laid by “New Alphabet”. It presented a clean, rational scope in which to view type design with this new digital medium. With the new wave of pixel fonts (type designed with screen usage in mind, making efficient use of blank spaces to create readable text even at small sizes) emerging, echos of Wim Crouwel’s methodologies still ring strong today. His foresight in the future of type design can be seen with hundreds of different modern fonts out there, and their functional ideals can all be linked back to Wim Crouwel’s “New Alphabet”. I created a type specimen showcasing Wim Crouwel’s “New Alphabet”. For the piece, I brought in another functional digital type “OCR Std”, to contrast “New Alphabet”, and to also highlight the similarities between the two eras of functional digital type. I then created a site map of The Foundry’s website and all of its internal file assets within that domain using Processing. The Foundry is the only foundry I have found that digitized Wim Crouwel’s type. All of the files on this site are linked to each other ultimately by the single root node, “/”. I am trying to communicate the parallel with Wim Crouwel and this root node. Virtually all of digital type that followed are connected to “New Alphabet” by some avenue or other. Just like the root directory, Wim Crouwel is the node that links all other functional digital type to each other, and all of them share the same concepts and approach in their design and function. I used Processing to extrapolate the filenames and linkage properties to map out the connection between all of the files, I had to play with the layout a bit, but it was mostly done in Processing and Illustrator. Let me know what you think! 
March 21st, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Hey, I love it! Concept, nerdness, and all.