DESIGN VIEW; How the Alphabet Is Shaping Up In a Computer Age
D.J.R. BRUCKNER; D. J. R. Bruckner is an editor of the Times Book Review. His book on the American type designer F. W. Goudy will be published next year by Abrams.
Published: September 10, 1989
Of the changes being forced on the world of type by computer technology, Edward Benguiat says, ''I certainly hope that a genius will appear who can make something beautiful out of all this, but I don't see one around now.''
One of the best-known type designers in the country, Mr. Benguiat (pronounced Beng-GET) has created scores of special typefaces for clients and many fonts that are used by printers everywhere. And he is not alone in his concern about the effects of computers on the beauty, strength and clarity of the alphabets used in books, newspapers and magazines, advertising and movies, and on television sets and computers themselves.
At Photo-Lettering Inc., the New York type house where he has spent most of the last three decades, Mr. Benguiat draws alphabets freehand with a pencil on paper. ''The most beautiful thing in the world is a blank piece of paper,'' he says, even though he has made a career and a considerable reputation filling up blank sheets. ''When the paper is empty, everything is in your head and it's wonderful. The minute you make even a mark, you mess it up. It never comes out as beautiful.'' About the typeface he designed called Benguiat, one of the most widely used faces in this country, he says, ''I hate it.'' He seems always dissatisfied with what he has done. Only the next typeface is perfect, such as the type he is now designing for A. T.& T. ''I've played around with some computer designing,'' he says, ''but it is not for me. There are too many chances to make mistakes. And the computer people making the programs don't know enough about type.'' No type designer has yet used the computer, but Mr. Benguiat knows that the technology will not go away; one day designers will have to tackle it.
Many readers do not think of type as being designed at all. The Roman alphabet we use has been with us for about 2,500 years (the capitals, that is; the lower cases are about 1,000 years younger), so there are obvious limitations on what a designer can do. But the invention of movable type in the 15th century did change our use of the alphabet. Good letters were not enough; they had to fit together in all their possible combinations to make elegant, clear, inviting lines and pages produced by a new technology. For the first time comprehension passed out of the control of the human mouth or hand; something made by a machine had to speak for itself.
The earliest type makers tended to imitate the hand lettering of the best scribes of the time, and Roman inscriptions in stone. Fortunately for the future, they had wonderful vision. The types made by Aldus Manutius and Nicolas Jenson, both working in Italy around the turn of the 16th century, are vigorous, powerful and still inspiring to designers. A generation later, as printing became more familiar, Claude Garamond in France was able to design letters seen specifically as metal type and not modeled on writing.
For more than 300 years the matrices or molds into which hot lead alloy was poured to produce type were made by metal punches. The letters on the punches had to be shaped by hand in very hard metal. No punch could be exactly copied; even a larger size font in the same typeface looked distinct from the smaller fonts. The eccentricities of a page printed this way virtually tells a reader its origins; it has character.
All that began to change rapidly in the 19th century. A sharp-eyed type maker could always approximate an imitation of an existing face. Now simple pantographic devices not only allowed easier imitation but let a designer draw one set of large letters that could then be reduced mechanically to the entire range of type sizes, and grinding machines came along to make the matrices.
At the same time, photographic enlargements and new technology made it easier to change existing faces slightly, and hundreds of fonts were ''created'' by tinkerers who altered familiar ones and renamed them. But the same technology also allowed the best type designers greater freedom in making faces inspired by the classic types of earlier centuries.
Mr. Benguiat's design career has occurred exactly between the rise of photographic type in the late 1950's and the dawn of the new computer-generated type.
This autumn he will receive the Type Directors Club award, and two retrospectives of his work are scheduled for early next year, one at the School of Visual Arts, where he teaches, and one at the International Typeface Corporation's gallery on Hammarskjold Plaza. Characteristically, as he looks over his designs being mounted for the exhibitions, he wants to change them. But, however he delights in finding things wrong with his older work, a lot of recent design history is reflected in it.
The rise of photographic type coincided with the flood tide of television, and suddenly many visual influences that had made little impact on inflexible metal type became important to type design and typography. These developments required changes in the shapes of alphabets, so types designed for photographic processes acquired characteristics not found in metal type. Some of the more popular faces designed by Mr. Benguiat for the International Typeface Corporation - like his Bookman or Caslon No. 224 or even the almost ubiquitous Benguiat - have a classic look, but they could not have been designed for metal. And traditional typefaces needed adjustments when they were transferred to photographic fonts.
Nor will computerized typefaces be the same as the photographic ones; the new technology at some time will require entirely new designs. At the moment that is not what the computer programs are producing. Some allow a designer simply to make an outline of a letter and the computer will fill it in. The machine will reverse the type from black to white, turn a solid type open-faced. The variations seem endless.
More problematic is the ease with which the computer facilitates manipulation of existing types. Different faces can be mixed infinitely (and usually disastrously); bits from one face can be tacked onto others. The computer can bend letters to produce a slanted alphabet (which is not an italic). Type need no longer have set sizes; the computer can change the size to anything the typographer wants.
But thousands of elements of design go into an alphabet to give it strength, grace, balance and clarity, and a change in any of them affects all the others. Eventually, an accomplished type designer, someone who has been through all the work of the past and knows the 500-year-old art in all of its developments, will have to master computer technology and turn the machine into the artist's servant.
The idealists want higher standards, but that is unlikely for now. Mr. Benguiat is not the only person in the world of type who is a little apprehensive. ''Typography has been extraordinarily good in our time, I would say better than ever,'' he says, ''but it is not getting better. That is something to worry about.''
Photos of Edward Benguiat, a leading type designer (NYT/Fred R. Conrad); one of the Benguiat typefaces