By Michiel Terpelle

Originally written as a thesis for the ArtEZ Honours Programme (2018), supervised by professor of Theory in the Arts Peter Sonderen and graphic designer Jeremy Jansen. Shortened and revised.

Richard Hamilton’s 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? envisions the future of consumer culture with an ironic eye on modern technology. Among its domestic clutter, a woman on the stairs uses a vacuum cleaner with a ridiculously long hose—its length proudly advertised as an advantage. Today the image feels quaint. The Roomba has no hose at all. The supposed advantage of yesterday was completely eliminated. Hamilton’s work was shown in the exhibition This Is Tomorrow, a daring title, since tomorrow often turns out differently than we imagine. What we now consider advantageous may be shortsighted. This essay asks whether the same holds for typography: will today’s cherished innovations appear as outdated as that extended hose?

This is today

In recent years, the type world has been reshaped by consolidation and new distribution models. Monotype absorbed Linotype, Ascender, Bitstream, and FontShop, becoming the largest distributor of professional fonts. Typotheque launched Fontstand, a rental platform for high-quality type. Then came variable fonts—OpenType 1.8, allowing multiple font instances to be interpolated along design axes. These developments sparked a lively debate about abundance, relevance, and what Dutch designer Rudy VanderLans, co-founder of Emigre, called “infill-ism.” He used the term to describe the practice of merely filling the few remaining gaps in type design: “How many more Helvetica or Futura inspired designs do we really need?”

New Zealand type designer Kris Sowersby fired back. In Welcome to the Infill Font Foundry, he argued that VanderLans’ criticism was hypocritical. Emigre’s own methods of creation and distribution were similar to what VanderLans now rejected. Worse, Sowersby suggested, the charge of infill-ism served as a marketing tactic that discredited younger designers. The debate simmered, but its question lingered: what makes a typeface original, and when does an area of competence become filled?

Sowersby later released Story Sans, a custom design that itself aligns client preferences with three sans-serif archetypes: Akzidenz-Grotesk, Futura, and Helvetica. Even in defending against infill-ism, he acknowledged that designers inevitably fall back on archetypes. So why are Helvetica and Futura archetypal? To answer, we need to examine what made them the opposite of infill—and whether a font distribution network can ever be the solution.

This is yesterday

VanderLans cited Helvetica and Futura as the overly imitated, yet both are themselves re-inspired by past forms. Every letter ‘a’ must look like an ‘a’ to function, so some imitation is inherent. To understand when type achieves a kind of irreducible essence, Clement Greenberg’s modernist thesis is helpful. In Modernist Painting, Greenberg argued that modernism uses the methods of a discipline to criticise that discipline, entrenching it in its area of competence by eliminating effects borrowed from other arts. A “pure” form would then be one stripped of everything extraneous to its medium.

Sans-serif typefaces illustrate this self-criticism. Early 19th-century grotesques removed serifs, contrast, and gesture—elements inherited from the pen. Writing had shaped letterforms through the limitations of the tool. Punch-cutters and printers initially imitated that look for efficiency’s sake, but sans-serifs began discarding it. Greenberg’s logic holds: sans-serif types eliminated what belonged to the medium of another art. Helvetica and Futura are products of that reduction.

Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1928, went further. It sought elemental geometry: circles, squares, triangles. Heinrich Jost, art director of the Bauer foundry, wrote that Futura could steer elementary typography in a sophisticated direction. It paralleled the Bauhaus, Constructivism, De Stijl—movements seeking rational, functional form. Jan Tschichold declared that “the elementary form of type shall be sans serif.” Yet Futura never became pure geometry. Its letters still had to function, and that limitation revealed that the medium itself imposed boundaries. It remains a singular archetype of geometric sans-serif design.

After the war, the geometric pre-war look felt dated. Helvetica, released in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann, emerged from a desire for neutral, rational clarity. It derived from Akzidenz-Grotesk, which itself traced and simplified classic serif models like Didot and Walbaum. David Jury describes Helvetica’s characters as “closed, simplified in construction … logic presides throughout, providing an overall effect of monotony.” Helvetica achieved a neutrality that suited the post-war mood, becoming the archetypal Neo-Grotesk.

But the purity of these typefaces is medium-dependent. Arial, the much-maligned screen font derived from Helvetica, exposed this. On low-resolution screens, Helvetica’s print-optimised forms became clumsy. Arial’s adaptations—however derivative—eliminated those screen-specific problems. When the medium changes, what counts as irreducible changes with it. Futura and Helvetica may have been pure for print, but the computer screen, the distribution network, and the library introduce new limitations. “Infill-ism,” then, might be less about the typefaces themselves and more about the medium in which they now circulate. In a font library, one Helvetica may be enough. For an independent designer, a reinterpretation can still be valid. The term’s meaning shifts depending on the frame.

This is tomorrow

A font distribution network is essentially a library. When the product is no longer a single typeface but access to thousands, the position of the individual font changes. The irony of VanderLans calling out infill-ism upon Fontstand’s release is that the platform itself is an empty vessel that must be filled. It creates no original content, it merely aggregates. Yet the library suggests a solution to overabundance: you don’t need to own hundreds of fonts, just rent them. But if the library itself becomes the medium, can we find a purer typographic form suited to it? Two cases offer answers.

Case 1: Sandberg Institute’s Type Tool

In 2013, Dutch design studio LUST, Carvalho Bernau, and the Sandberg Institute created Bill, a type system that treats the alphabet as a library in itself. A still from the video matrix of possibilities shows an 8×8 grid of rotating circular shapes, transitioning endlessly from light to bold, compressed to extended. A static image reveals 200 variations of the letter ‘a’, forming a gradient of possible styles. Bill is built on a skeleton that can be transformed along multiple axes, generating infinite iterations. It detaches the typeface from physical restrictions, making the font itself a library of potential forms.

The idea of a typographic skeleton has precedent. Martin Majoor’s Nexus principle connected serif, sans, and mixed styles via a shared underlying structure. But Bill goes further, shifting from historical connection to parametric possibility. It does not simulate the past, it simulates digital potential. The system becomes a “meta-typeface”—a medium that contains the possibility of any typeface. In a digital context where form is fluid, irreducible purity might be achieved not in a single shape but in the design space itself. Bill suggests that, before form becomes physical, infinite variability can be “pure.”

Case 2: Dot Dot Dot № Six

The cover of Dot Dot Dot № 6 features a woman in red striking three poses, repeated in a grid. She impersonates the letters D, O, T—the magazine’s title. The photographs document Polish artist Paulina Ołowska’s performance Alphabet (2005/12), inspired by Karel Teige’s typographic book ABECEDA. Unlike many earlier anthropomorphic alphabets—such as Anthon Beeke’s Naked Ladies Alphabet, which used bodies to literally form Baskerville’s letter shapes—Ołowska’s poses are legible only as suggestions. They are modern dance positions, slightly adjusted to evoke the basic principles of the letters. The body does not fill a pre-existing letter-shape. It reinterprets the alphabet, freeing it from fixed embodiment.

Here, typography becomes pure concept rather than pure form. Like Bill, the alphabet exists before it is given shape. The user’s parameters complete it. Ołowska and designer Peter Bil’ak manifest the idea of typography, not a specific font. In doing so, they reduce type to its most elemental unit: the alphabet itself. Everything beyond that—the particular curves, weights, serifs—is infill.

This is the day after tomorrow

References