Present generations of type designers have greater technical freedoms, but also unexpected burdens. Useful restrictions are harder to perceive, paradigms increasingly more difficult to transgress: the archive of our forebears looms all around us. This situation suggests important questions. How might we structure methodologies in the relative absence of formal or programmatic limitations? How do we position our practices in relation to the archive? What should we value as a community of designers and readers?

Digital production permits us to exploit the mutable and the itinerant. These are the characteristics of a maturing digital language. We can build unstable alphabets. In doing so we must be alert and responsive: not merely to the mechanics of production, but to the contexts in which letterforms are to be applied and the meanings that they are to be read in support of. It is the cognitive machine of the human eye and brain that we must engage with our designed messages, not the transient technologies through which graphic language will continue to be manifested.

Ulys(ses 31), Stan(ley Kubrick), Jean (Arp) and Walt (Disney) are still the children of matrices, but their supports are now multiplied into near invisibility. These characters negotiate the digital freedoms of their production through playful typologies of form. They are open and various, and their spirit is this: to resist normative tendencies and to reject the idea of definitive form.

James Langdon, 2011*