The Brody Müller-Brockmann Problem

Luke Archer, 2012


CONTENTS

  1. Part 1: Let’s make things clear, the origins of FF Blur
  2. Section a: Why was it made?
  3. Section b: How was it made?
  4. Section c: Why is it used?
  5. Part 2. Neutral vs Expressive Typography
  6. Section a: Defining neutral and expressive
  7. Section b: Examples of neutral Modernist typography
  8. Section c: Examples of expressive Postmodernist typography
  9. Section d: The Brody Müller-Brockmann problem
  10. Part 3: Drawing a line
  11. Section a: Conceptual types of type
  12. Section b: My approach
  13. Paul Barnes email exchange

To be delivered as a lecture.

I will begin with a statement from Rick Poynor, taken from the introduction to his 1991 book Typography Now;

“In the age of the desktop computer, font design software and page make-up programs, type has acquired a fluidity of physical outline, an ease of manipulation and, potentially, a lack of conceptual boundaries unimaginable only a few years ago. Everyone agrees that the new digital tools remove typography from the exclusive domain of the specialist — whether type designer, typefoundry or typesetting company — and place it (not always firmly) in the hands of the ordinary graphic designer. The results of this freedom, however, are the subject of intense and continuing debate. Traditionalists argue that the accessibility of the technology will accelerate the decline in typographic standards that started when the first clumsy photocomposition systems began to replace lead type. Evangelists enthuse about a soon to be realised digital paradise in which everyone will compose letters in personally configured typefaces as idiosyncratic as their own handwriting.”

This lecture is about several different themes. It is about Modernist and Postmodernist typography, it is about expressive typefaces, it is about the tools of type design, and it is about the question of whether or not fonts, can or even should have a conceptually driven idea behind them. The thread that ties these themes together is a typeface called Blur.

PART 1:
LET’S MAKE THINGS CLEAR, THE ORIGINS OF FF BLUR.

SECTION A: WHY WAS IT MADE?

For a year or two now I have been noticing the typeface FF Blur everywhere—coffee machines in hospitals, French rail passes, posters for headache tablets and aluminium recycling, youth club signage—places you would not believe.

It’s been said that Helvetica is “the most ubiquitous of all typefaces”, well if this is true, for me FF Blur comes in at a close second. It’s rare that I don’t go a week without spotting it. It is not so much the fact of noticing a typeface on a daily basis — I probably see Helvetica over fifty times a day — it’s the fact that this particular typeface is remarkably peculiar in its design, and in its reason for existing. Helvetica has become so commonplace that it practically has no personality, it blends in to the vernacular voice of the street wherever it is used. FF Blur on the other hand certainly has quite a persona—aesthetically it seems like one of the thousands of terrible fonts from dafont.com, yet with a closer look it is somehow pleasing, and in terms of the tradition and skill of type design it is hard to place in the field. These things come as no surprise considering it was designed by the “original bad boy of graphic design”, Neville Brody.

I first started frequently noticing FF Blur in 2010 when Brody launched the Anti Design Festival in London. Part of the promotion was the release of a free font called ADF Gun. I knew the work of Brody well, and his fonts vaguely, but nothing could have prepared me for what I saw. I thought I had a good understanding of the basic concept of a “typeface” — “in printing, a particular style of design of type”, the profession of “type design” — “the art and process of designing typefaces” and what constitutes a definition of the 26 “letters” — “a symbol, usually written or printed, representing a speech sound and constituting a unit of an alphabet”, that make up the “Roman alphabet” — “the alphabet used for writing most European languages, based on the alphabet developed in ancient Rome”. However, on the release of ADF Gun, I began to question all of what I thought I previously understood.

My initial reaction to ADF Gun was “what the hell is this piece of shit he is calling a font?” Once the rage and confusion had subsided I decided it was necessary to survey Brody’s previous type design works in order to assess from what kind of typographic maniac, or genius, this font came. An important piece in the history of FF Blur is FUSE. FUSE, loosely described, was a magazine (once referred to as a “laboratory”, which is my personal favourite description, bringing visions of a mad typographer, creating ghastly letters) started in 1991 by Brody and Jon Wozencroft as a place to “break open typography’s closed circle, to question its traditions, and to support risk-taking”. Each issue of Fuse had a different theme, and “designers [were] commissioned to develop an experimental typeface that follows through a thought process on the state of the visual word.”9 The typefaces pushed the limits of legibility and comprehension, often including glyphs whose design were barley recognisable as letters of the Roman alphabet, and sometimes totally unrecognisable.

The number of commercially available typefaces design by Brody numbers in the twenties, the majority of them having been released in the early nineties, around the same time as the beginning of FUSE. Looking at an overview of his typefaces, it is clear that many of them share the same aesthetic as the FUSE fonts, and presumably the same approach — that of taking an idea or concept, and using it as the basis for a typeface. Of course most typefaces start with an idea, but historically these have been driven by market need, or by artistic convention and rejection. Take for example Gill Sans, which was designed to be “fool proof”, with forms that are “measurable [and] patient of dialetical exposition” with nothing being left to the “imagination of the sign-wrier or the enamel-plate maker”. And the letters of the design being “more strictly normal [and] freer from forms depending upon appreciation and critical ability in the workman who has to reproduce them.” Essentially the idea behind the typeface was to design something non-decorative that could be easily reproduced by sign-writers, because Gill considered that this was missing from the market. Another example is Helvetica, with the design concept being to create a typeface with the main characteristic of “clarity and readability”. However, in the case of the FUSE fonts and many of Brody’s fonts, the concept comes completely from outside the sphere of type design, often being abstract and unrelated. Fuse 7 had the theme of “Crash” (possibly a reference to the David Cronenberg film) with the idea being to “[underline] the fragility of our language system, probing the connection between violent imagery and physical violence, drawing a parallel between this form of information overload and the possible collapse of the systems we depend on to communicate.” The resulting typefaces of the issue include F Crash by Neville Brody, F Reactor by Tobias Frere-Jones and F Fingers by David Carson. It’s not easy to see any discernible link between the theme and the resulting design, the whole process is very abstract.

An example of a typeface by Brody is FF Autotrace, which is based upon the idea that the autotrace process makes the “irregularities in the contours become over exaggerated” using “this disturbed effect is the aesthetic basis for FF Autotrace.” Both FUSE and Blur were born out of the beginning of the desktop publishing era; the Mac was introduced in 1984, PageMaker in 1985, Fontographer in 1986, Freehand in 1988, and Photoshop in 1990, Blur was released in 1991. The creation of Blur utilized three of the five mentioned technologies. It was these digital technologies that seemed to become the driving concept behind Blur.

Full PDF soon available to download.