Digital Type

Abstract

This article, originally published in 1992 in Eye magazine, examines some features and phenomena that characterised the advent of digital type. The author retraces the rapid growth of new foundries and enterprises launched by young designers – that pushed onto the sidelines the manufacturing companies that had dominated typeface production through most of the 20th century – as well as the development of larger companies such as Adobe and Apple and the birth of the PostScript language and of new design tools, such as Metafont and Ikarus. Finally, he considers some emerging trends in the design and circulation of typefaces in the digital era.