A FUTURE FOR TYPE DESIGN

Hi, my name is Frank Wildenberg. I am at the helm of Linotype, the company that has brought some of the world’s greatest fonts to your digital desktop. We’d like to present to you a little story about type designers.

At a typographic company like Linotype, there are sales managers and marketing specialist; programmers and secretaries. But we would be nowhere without the people who actually invent the fonts that we produce – the type designers. Some are employed by companies like ours. Many others are independent, and work long hours to provide us with all those sensible, imaginative and seductive typefaces that make visual communication so much more interesting. Not only do type designers come up with new ideas and new forms; they also keep abreast of the latest developments in order to make their fonts work smoothly with new text-processing and production technologies.

Type design is a highly specialized activitity that requires years of education and experience, but it is not always recognized as such. Fonts are often taken for granted, and copied from one person’s harddisk to another. Even experienced graphic designers and pre-press specialists sometimes make unlicensed copies of digital typefaces without giving the matter much thought. Yet those fonts may be the life’s work of a fellow designer. When more and more fonts are distributed without being licensed, type designers may find it harder to make a living. And what may happen next is something we can only fantasize about. That is what this booklet does. The story is fiction – science fiction even – but its message is real.

We hope you’ll enjoy this playful homage to our type designers. We also hope to have offered you some food for thought.

Frank

This was the official introduction to the comic written by Frank Wildenberg.

And here a double spread from the comic itself.