‘The optimism of modernity’ aims to tell the story of an incomplete and now almost forgotten project: that of modernity in British typography. This is envisaged as a matter not of style but of ‘design as a visible form of social philosophy’ and as an optimistic claim on enlightenment.
the project’s questions
The project spans a period of three or four decades, 1945–1979. Our provisional hypotheses are that:
- The products of modern typographic designing in Britain were accompanied by newly articulate forms of reasoning through practice.
- This reasoning was mainly about standardization and norms, explaining typographic processes, classification and description, and specification.
- Modernization, here as always, was double-edged.
- In order to exercise control through specification, professional designers needed information; this need, especially about typesetting systems, was made more urgent by the new challenges of computing in the graphic industries.