New Alphabet is a parametric typeface designed by

Wim Crouwel Willem Hendrik "Wim" Crouwel (; 21 November 1928 – 19 September 2019) was a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer. Early life and education Between 1947 and 1949, he studied Fine Arts at Academie Minerva in Groningen, the ...

, released in 1967. It embraced the limitations of the display technology that it was displayed on by only using horizontal and vertical strokes. This meant that some of the letters had little resemblance to the letters they were supposed to represent. New Alphabet was notably used on the cover of

Joy Division Joy Division were an English Rock music, rock band formed in Salford in 1976. The group consisted of vocalist, guitarist and lyricist Ian Curtis, guitarist and keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bassist Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris (musici ...

's 1988 compilation album ''

Substance Substance may refer to: * Matter, anything that has mass and takes up space Chemistry * Chemical substance, a material with a definite chemical composition * Drug, a chemical agent affecting an organism Arts, entertainment, and media Music * ' ...

''.

History

New Alphabet was a personal, experimental project of Crouwel. The typeface was designed to embrace the limitations of the cathode ray tube technology used by early data display screens and

phototypesetting Phototypesetting is a method of Typesetting, setting type which uses photography to make columns of Sort (typesetting), type on a scroll of photographic paper. It has been made obsolete by the popularity of the personal computer and desktop publ ...

equipment, and thus only contains horizontal and vertical strokes. Conventional typefaces can suffer under these limitations, because the level of detail is not high enough, restricting legibility. Crouwel wanted to adapt his design to work for the new technologies, instead of adapting the technologies to meet the design. Since his letter shapes only contain horizontals and verticals, some of the glyphs are unconventional, while others bear virtually no resemblance to any version of the letters they represent (in some examples, the frequently appearing ''a'' glyph looks like a ''J'', ''K'' looks like a ''t'', numeral ''1'' resembles a ''7'', numeral ''8'' resembles capital ''H'', and the ''x'' glyph looks like a capital ''I''). Because of this, the typeface was received with mixed feelings by his peers. Most of the letters are based on a grid of 5 by 7 units, with 45-degree corners. Each glyph is represented by two or more sides of a square, with ascenders, descenders or

tittle The tittle or superscript dot is the dot on top of lowercase ''i'' and ''j''. In English writing the tittle is a diacritic which only appears as part of these glyphs, but diacritic dots can appear over other letters in various languages. In mos ...

s added where necessary. Glyphs with three horizontal bars (''E'', ''3'') are represented faithfully, while those with three vertical bars (''M'', ''W'') are not, instead being represented by

underline An underscore or underline is a line drawn under a segment of text. In proofreading, underscoring is a convention that says "set this text in italic type", traditionally used on manuscript or typescript as an instruction to the printer. Its u ...

d ''N'' and ''V'' glyphs respectively. To differentiate between

uppercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''#Majuscule, majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally ''#Minuscule, minuscule'') in the written representation of certain langua ...

and

lowercase Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (more formally '' minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing system ...

glyphs, uppercase letters are added with an extra horizontal line at the top of a lowercase letter. Many of Crouwel's peers were of the opinion that the design was too experimental and that it went too far. The typeface received a lot of newspaper coverage, which sparked a lively debate over typefaces as an art form, compared to their practicality in everyday use. Crouwel largely agreed with the criticism and noted that it was mostly an exercise in theory, stating in 2009: "The New Alphabet was over-the-top and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable." New Alphabet was one of 23 digital typefaces acquired by the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

in January 2011 for its Architecture and Design Collection. This collection of typefaces were some of the first acquired by MoMA, and were on display in a 2011–2012 exhibition called ''Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design'', or ''

Standard Deviations In statistics, the standard deviation is a measure of the amount of variation of the values of a variable about its mean. A low standard deviation indicates that the values tend to be close to the mean (also called the expected value) of the ...

''.

Usage

New Alphabet was featured on the

album cover An album cover (also referred to as album art) is the front packaging art of a commercially released album, studio album or other audio recordings. The term can refer to: * the printed paperboard covers typically used to package: ** sets of a ...

for

's 1988

compilation album A compilation album comprises Album#Tracks, tracks, which may be previously released or unreleased, usually from several separate recordings by either one Performing arts#Performers, performer or by several performers. If the recordings are from ...

'', where the album title is spelled out with characters corresponding to "subst1mce". Brett Wickens, who contributed to the cover, claimed this was for aesthetic reasons. The 1991 album reissue featured different artwork, although in the same style: the word "substance" was not spelled out; rather, the artwork featured a large green "S" in the New Alphabet typeface.

Digital New Alphabet

New Alphabet was digitized in 1996 by

Freda Sack Freda Sack (born 23 September 1951, died 13 February 2019) was a British type designer who began her career at Letraset in 1972, joining as a photographic retoucher. Colleagues attest to her skill at cutting letters from rubylith at Letraset where ...

and David Quay from The Foundry in London. It is part of the ''Architype 3 Crouwel Collection'', and it consists of three weights. The original concept wasn't limited to three weights, but was intended as a parametric system, giving the possibly to make many different shapes by changing the parameters in the machine. In 2015, Joshua Koomen developed, based on the original instructions, a digital version of New Alphabet in the form of a web-app. The application enables the user to produce any possible setting for the New Alphabet.

Other typefaces by Crouwel

Other typefaces designed by Crouwel in the same collection are

Gridnik Gridnik is a geometrical sans serif typeface designed by Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel in 1974. It is the digital version of the typewriter typeface ''Olivetti Politene''. History Around 1974, Crouwel was commissioned by typewriter manufact ...

, Fodor, Stedelijk and Catalogue. *

* Fodor

References

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External links