Discourse 1

1992 American Gothic
Rick Poynor

• In Britain fate has overtaken the angular post constructivist type designs of Neville Brody, Zuzana Licko, and Max Kisman.
• These faces, once so urgently new, are judged less “contemporary” than san serif.
• In 1990 the critic Robert Hughes called “the shock of the new” to a typeface that evokes an authentic sense.
• Template Gothic designed by CalArts graduate Barry Deck.
• Tony Arefin, one of the first designers to use the typeface.
• Fontographer was the type design program used to create digitally the typeface.
• For now Template Gothic is one of the most interesting and original new faces we have.

I chose this image because is shows the Template Gothic characters from uppercase letters to numbers and symbols. Like the article said this is one of the most interesting and successful new typefaces in 1990.

I found this image of the Cornelia Parker exhibition catalogue designed by Tony Arefin in which he used the Template Gothic typeface for all the text in the catalogue. I think this typeface works really well, it’s easy to read, gives an interesting look and mood to the design.

This image shows a screenshot of the Fontographer program, this program was used to create the digital version of the Template Gothic typeface. With this program the face embodies a post-modern narrative on the methods of character-generation it supersedes.