ART : Putting on a New Face : A daring breed of designers--armed with personal computers--create their own versions of type.

It is not just the words you read. It is the words you see. It is the shape and size of each letter printed on the page.

No one notices a typeface unless it looks different. Jagged serifs or curlicues, uneven kerning. Radically different.

That’s where the design instructors and students at CalArts in Valencia bust in.

Across Europe and America, a new breed of designers--armed with personal computers--are creating their own versions of type, spinning a time trip back to Gutenberg, launching skyward toward the infinite possibilities contained in a single, black letter. It is a cross-your-t’s and dot-your-i’s party where the guest of honor is the alphabet. And CalArt’s graphic design department has crashed the party.

Lushus.

Nail.

Bradbury.

“Typefaces are like voices,” Jeffery Keedy, a CalArts faculty member said. “There are so many voices out there that haven’t been heard before.”

Listen to words of reason: Traditional designers insist that typefaces are not infinite, not so dizzying in potential. Stick to the proven fonts. Function over form. At conventions, typographers wrestle protecting the integrity of their craft.

“There are libraries full of books full of rules about typography,” Keedy mused.

A voice in the wilderness: Conor Mangat, one of Keedy’s graduate students, has designed a new set of letters and numbers based on California license plates. Margo Johnson, another student, has split her time between hand-crafting traditional letters and creating a computer program that takes standard typefaces and spits them out fragmented and blotchy.

“I call them hybrid digital typefaces,” she said. “They use numeric variables and allow for a lot of unexpected possibilities.

“And,” she said, “half of them are completely illegible.”

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“Typography is not a fine art.”

--Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th Edition

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In the 550 years since Johannes Gutenberg began tinkering with type, thousands of typefaces have been invented.

Gutenberg’s famous bible--the first book printed with movable type--appeared in 1456. Its “black letter” font was used for many years but is, to modern eyes, thick and cluttered. Italian printers eventually lightened these letters to form an early version of “Roman” type. By 1495, a Venetian named Aldus Manutius had cut a stylized alphabet, the first italic type.

That’s where the fun began.

For instance: In the 16th Century, Claude Garamond created a French version of a Manutius “Roman” for machine reproduction. In the 18th Century, Giambattista Bodoni refined Garamond’s version. Next came Englishman Stanley Morison, who arrived in the early 1900s with a font regarded as the most successful of this century.

Times New Roman was both economical and legible, perfectly suited for high-speed presses. It conformed to Morison’s insistence that type exist solely to transmit words and ideas.

This strict philosophy has dominated the modern publishing world. Sure, the Bauhaus designers preferred asymmetrical layout and the Dadaists experimented with typefaces and sizes. But other typographers have fought to narrow the field to a handful of “perfect” typefaces adhering to universal rules: flush left, ragged right, no more than 52 characters and 12 words to a line.

“It’s a sad notion that from now on, we’re always going to be content with Times Roman,” said Rudy Vanderlans, whose Emigre magazine has led the new type revolt.

“That would mean the guy who created Times Roman created the ultimate typeface for mankind. I don’t think it works that way.”

How typography works:

It’s no mastery of science. There is nothing about a serif letter that makes it more comfortable to the eye or simple for the mind. Instead, we prefer typefaces we’re used to seeing.

So Frederic William Goudy, an American typographer, took the Roman capital letters inscribed from Trajan’s Column to develop his Trajan type. At CalArts, Mangat used the letters and numbers we see on the highway to create his Platelet. And Kaz Matsune, an undergraduate classmate, took an existing typeface and used a computer to cut the serifs off. He was following in the footsteps of faculty member Edward Fella who, as an art student in the pre-computer days, took knife to paper to slice himself new typefaces.

How typographers work:

Men with huge forearms pouring molten lead--that’s the old breed. Modern typographers are children of the microchip, sweating over keyboards. They can place a single letter on their screen, twisting and distorting it to their soul’s content.

“Being at CalArts, you’re surrounded by new and experimental typefaces,” said Austin Putnam, an undergraduate student. “I started by using other people’s and, after I used them for so long, I started to pick up on what I liked and what I didn’t like. Then I started designing my own.”

For his Ray Gun font, Putnam decided that less is more.

“I wanted to design another style of typeface, but I didn’t want to add things or do ornamentation,” he said. “Instead of creating new parts, I took away from the existing font.”

But to create a complete font, the typographer must manipulate every single letter in the alphabet, as well as numbers and punctuation marks.

“It’s very laborious, sitting there moving tiny little points around on the computer,” Mangat explained. “It takes forever.”

So why bother?

Mangat said: “It kind of suits my nature.”

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“You can make anything look good, if you know how to use it. That’s the trick.”

--Tom Ockerse, head of the graphic design department, Rhode Island School of Design

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Sting used one of Keedy’s fonts on the cover of his latest album. Details, the slick New York monthly with a fashion attitude, uses another throughout its pages.

They are following cautiously in the steps of Southern California magazines like Beach Culture and Ray Gun, which have experimented with type to audacious extent. The new typefaces, Ockerse explained, are largely a West Coast phenomenon. Designers in the East are traditional, Keedy said. In the wild West, designers are more willing to shake things up.

At the epicenter of this temblor is Emigre, based in Sacramento, which began some 10 years ago as a small design quarterly. Vanderlans and his wife, Zuzana Licko, created their own typefaces on a rudimentary Apple Macintosh. It was cheap and it was shocking.

“People have accused our type of being not only illegible and butt-ugly but also an aberration of culture that foreshadows the downfall of reading and writing,” Vanderlans said.

Those were the criticisms of traditionalists. Others liked what they saw.

“Vanderlans knows how to use type well,” Ockerse said. “When you use sufficient line space and type space, you can begin to read. You can be fun and you don’t have to use these singularly autocratic, classic forms that typographers tell you about.”

Eventually, publishers began asking to borrow Emigre’s typefaces. So Vanderlans started a side business.

“Up till the point that the Macintosh was introduced, type was created and distributed by only a handful of very large companies,” he explained. “They had a monopoly because the equipment used to manufacture type was very expensive. The Mac, when it was introduced in 1984, made it possible for people to design type and freely distribute it.”

These days, companies like Emigre and Fuse, in London, sell typefaces to magazines and advertising agencies around the world. Emigre’s fonts have also shown up in the titles of films such as “Batman Returns” and on television shows including last year’s Emmy Awards. Vanderlans’ catalogue includes typefaces submitted by independent designers. One of these, Template Gothic, was designed by CalArts alumnus Barry Deck.

“I am really interested in type that isn’t perfect,” Deck is quoted as saying in the catalogue. “Type that reflects more truly the imperfect language of an imperfect world inhabited by imperfect beings.”

Template Gothic is popular now, but this is not the sort of business where a designer can strike it rich. Emigre sells fonts for about $100 each, of which the designer gets only a percentage.

“If you have two typefaces out there,” Vanderlans said, “you’re not even going to make a living.”

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“Keep the irregularities inconsistent, variously differentiated and otherwise unmatched in all manner of ways and variety sorts.”

--Edward Fella, CalArts faculty member

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Matsune is hoping to shop his Nail font to one of the new-style foundries. Mangat has already received interest in Platelet. Vanderlans, in particular, likes the work that comes out of CalArts.

“What I’ve always been attracted to is their high level of experimentation,” the designer said. “And they have a very open mind as to what design can be.”

So if you walk around the design studio at the school, you’ll see piles of sketches for fonts both subtle and radical. Lest you think that these fonts are merely the fancies of young minds, know that the students are made to study traditional typefaces and the heritage of their craft.

“There is a logical history behind what we’re doing here,” Fella said.

And there is a new history just beginning to write itself. Fonts have been broken wide open. It’s not just graphic designers tinkering with letters, Vanderlans said. It’s students doing papers for school and secretaries putting together reports.

“We can never have enough fonts,” Matsune insisted. “Some people say, ‘Why do you have to mess around with the traditional, beautiful typefaces?’ But when you create your own typeface, it has a contemporary, beauty. It speaks its own language.”

Strange Voices

A few of the new typefaces that have been designed by instructors and students at CalArts.

Lushus, designed by Jeffrey Keedy, a CalArts instructor.

Ray Gun, designed by Austin Putnam, a CalArts undergraduate.

Nail, designed by Kaz Matsune, a CalArts graduate. Matsune also designed the Hidarite font in the background.