I used to feel that the essence of the web is being lost, but the proliferation of personal publishing has revitalised it already… blogs, diaries, journals, photo galleries, photoblogs, moblogging, forums, bulletin boards… community is where it’s at these days. Above all else though, the web is simply a network for the dissemination of knowledge, ideas and experiences. I like to think of this online world we jointly create as an ever-expanding library – not just of text but of images, moving images, sounds and personalities. There are toys, games, diaries, records, databases… But all of them are knowledge when you break them down to their essence. Hell, most of what’s out here is visual – because we are experiencing the web through a two-dimensional computer screen. But that’s no reason to feel constrained. The printed page has served us well, enabling the expression of concepts in as many forms as there are individuals doing the expressing. The web enables us to add motion to that existing model, alongside sound and masses of interactivity. So there’s no reason to mourn it’s limitations – instead celebrate them, they give us something to kick against, some boundaries to push.

Type design has become pop. Does that make sense? Back in the day (as it were), a single typeface—it’s different weights, italics, etc, etc—could be a man’s (and it was always a man) life work, his design legacy. They were mostly self-named, like Gill, Baskerville, Bodoni … Named after the guy who spent his life perfecting them. Fair enough. Type design was a serious business. Now it’s easier.

With the computerisation of the graphic design process and the print process, the introduction of the ubiquitous Apple Mac and a piece of software from now-defunct publisher Altsys called Fontographer, it slowly but surely became possible for everybody to be a type designer. Quickly too—You can easily knock together a simplistic alphabet (or whatever) in a couple of hours. Not quite the same as a lifetime of diligent effort. So type design is not approached with the same reverence it once was. Now it can be fun, because if it is flippant, if it is frivolous, you have not wasted your whole life creating it. Maybe you’ve just wasted a day or two. So it’s fun, it’s easy and it’s accessible.

Naturally it’s pop then—fashions change in days and weeks, not decades and now typefaces come and go with them. This has freed the wilder end of the design world. If type design is no longer going to consume your life, there is no real barrier to experimentation any more. Where a flight of design fancy would in the past have been buried at the back of a designer’s mind, nowadays it can be pursued and executed quickly and with a minimum of hassle. Experimentation therefore is rife—and exciting. Alphabets? Who says they are inviolate? Why not create a typeface entirely out of characters culled from corporate logotypes? Why not destroy our roman letterforms and replace them with something more meaningful? Or less meaningful? Want to see what would happen if you cross-bred two existing typefaces? Go on then—it’s easy. Relatively speaking anyway.

In fact, why not go the whole hog and ignore language completely … I think of the framework of typeface as just that—a framework. It is a delivery medium for monotone images—glyphs, shapes, pictures, words, textures, anything I want to put into that framework. The only limit is what I can dream up.

I always wondered what the most efficient alphabet would be. Not the most legible, not the easiest to print, but the essence of the letterforms. I boiled our roman alphabet down to one commonly used phrase—A to Z. Beginning to end. Start to finish. I thought—what is the shortest route from A to Z? Seems to me the shortest, purest, most obvious route is to morph the letter A into the form of the letter Z. That should do it. So I did—in a 26 frame animation. Then I took each frame one at a time and made it a character for my typeface. I ended up with the alphabet as the crow flies—AytoZed, as I called it.

Pointless? Maybe. Useless? Almost definitely. Fun though.

I need rules when I’m designing. Otherwise I get that dreaded blank canvas feeling. But with some rules, some expectations… I have something to kick against. Something to react to. I think it’s fair to say that everything I do is a reaction. I think it’s fair to say that the same is true for most people. We live in such a media-rich environment that every thought we have is influenced from all sides by those of other people—which leaves us constantly reacting, constantly standing on the shoulders (or the toes) of others.

I think what I’m getting at here is that those rules I need, the rules that give me freedom to react, don’t need to always be specifically spelled out. There are whole social and environmental structures around me at all times which provide plenty of those rules for me whenever I care to notice or acknowledge them.