Modernism’s typographic principles have survived so long that clarity and legibility can feel less like choices than natural law. New New Typography asks what changes when designers treat those principles as products of their time rather than permanent rules.
Paul Moore, writing for It’s Nice That:
Are we stuck with the established typographic principles of the 20th century? This is what German design studio Matter Of is asking in its design book New New Typography (published by Sorry Press). The title is in direct reference to the proclamation of Jan Tschichold’s original “new typography” in Central Europe 100 years ago. Now Matter Of (and designer Wiegand von Hartmann) are at the spearhead of an even newer typographic revolution: the ‘new new,’ searching to unsettle established paradigms, expand vocabularies and innovate type design. That is, until it’s time for the ‘new new new’, but let’s not worry about that right now.
The book makes that challenge through form, not just argument. It switches among six sans-serif typefaces and marks its black-and-white pages with aggressive cyan, turning the act of reading into a test of what counts as coherent:
New New Typography makes itself known immediately with its minimalist aesthetic, using black-and-white print with a searing cerulean cutting through the page in disruptive squiggles or sometimes blocks of highlighted text (a conscious effort to make the book look like a textbook blasted with felt-tip markers). The book is designed using six different sans-serif typefaces that alternate across chapters, raising questions in ironic and subtle ways, such as ‘when is a typeface considered new or different?’, playfully reflecting on the evolution of Helvetica, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica Now. To find ways to bring proliferating typographies into relation, the book sketches engagement between the typeface’s different dependencies, all with a tongue planted firmly in cheek.
That makes the book less a replacement doctrine than a device for questioning doctrine:
Described as a messy and unstable anti-manual for typography, 243 figures and six theoretical proposals present an overview of the impossibility of an overview on typography – it’s adventurously speculative, blending high design theory with a modern irony and cheekiness. What if the modern typographer isn’t just a typographer, but an active negotiator of political systems? Nevertheless, it isn’t a book about delivering an answer. Nowadays, just daring to imagine the future is enough.
But refusing a single answer does not mean refusing standards altogether. If typography helps negotiate political systems, its experiments still need to account for who can read them and what power they reinforce. Imagination opens the field; judgment decides what deserves to remain.
