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Bruno Maag served an apprenticeship as a typesetter at Switzerland’s largest daily newspaper, the Tages-Anzeiger in Zurich, learning the trade in metal, photo and digital type. He went to Basel School of Design where he studied Typography and Visual Communications under Wolfgang Weingart, Armin Hoffman, Andre Gürtler and others. After graduating, Bruno emigrated to England to join Monotype’s drawing offices. At Monotype he established a custom type service which he continued from Monotype’s Chicago office. During this time Bruno created the fonts for the New Yorker Magazine. Upon returning to London, Bruno started Dalton Maag with his wife Liz Dalton. Dalton Maag specialises in designing typefaces and engineering fonts for corporate clients. Although mostly Latin based, Dalton Maag have also created non-latin fonts in Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew and Devanagari.

 
FOR MORE >> www.daltonmaag.com

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L E C T U R E  | 1215h | 14.02.09 |  view programme

Global village, global fonts

Approx 2bn people, nearly one third of the world’s population, use the Latin alphabet as their primary form of communication, across about half of the geographical landmass of the world; yet only about 1% of the entire Unicode range is covered by the Latin alphabet. The success of the Latin alphabet throughout the world can be attributed to a number of factors but it can be argued that the Roman Empire and the spread of Christianity with its associated colonialism are the two main contributors. However, in neither instance this success has been a peaceful one. Even today, the Latin alphabet establishes itself at least as a secondary script, if not the primary one. But today the means are different. The Latin alphabet, and with it, the English language, is the main form of communications internationally. This has been brought about by the advance of computer technology during the last 20 years and, of course, the Internet. Type design in the Latin world is flourishing, mainly thanks to the Macintosh and pioneer programs such as Fontographer. Over the last 20 years we have found established design principles turned on its head and a lot of exciting fonts have been published, some are more successful than others. Recent years have also seen an increase in the design activity of non-Latin fonts, with some cultures asking probing questions of their own script systems, their design principles, their complexities.

Although it is only possible to skim the surface Bruno Maag will search out what the driving forces are behind the development of non-Latin font design. How do global brands influence the design of local script systems and more importantly, how does the Latin script design affect the design of a local script? And what of the local design communities – are they up to the standards that we have come to expect, or is this simply a snobbish attitude to help the Latin designer protect his market share in the world as competition is getting fiercer and fiercer?

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About the images
1. TransportDubai (detail) Latin and Arabic scripts for signage throughout Dubai’s Metro stations. Dalton Maag’s objective was to come up with a considered and harmonious design that respects both script cultures where neither dominates the other. | 2. Left: Tephra is a type family based on the lower-case typeface designed at 8vo in 1994, for interact, a special issue of the American Center for Design Journal and later used for the 1997 Flux New Music Festival poster series. The Tephra poster series (one of which is pictured here), was designed by Hamish Muir of 8vo London, and is available as a limited edition of 50 signed and numbered sets. Silk screen printed in two colours, 70x100cm. | Right: Co: a collaboration between Dalton Maag and North What at first looks chaotic and without reason has purpose. For nature only evolves with purpose. It adapts to changing environments and evolves into structures and shapes that are at once beautiful and functional. Nothing is wasted; everything makes sense. Like nature, Co Headline and Co Text are organic in structure. Every curve and every line has evolved until it could be no other. There is harmony in the tension of a soft terminal juxtaposed against a hard terminal. These typefaces are as nature intended them to be. | 3. King’s Caslon . . . in Maag’s words – This is how we started the design of our own King’s Caslon. All characters were first cut in potato, allowing us feel the spirit of the old master when he cut the punches of the original . . . No, just kidding. Of course, we designed it all on the screen, meticulously crafting and assessing every glyph. The font was originally created for London’s King’s College as the commonly available versions of Caslon did not satisfy their high typographic standards.

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