Type Design: Specific Ephemeral Aesthetics

Type design, is making letterforms that people use to present their ideas. Its task is to create the forms and shapes that connect the content of the spoken and written language with durable physical existence. It bridges the gap between form and content. The ability to communicate has been continuing to evolve from oral communication and handwritten manuscripts to printed and furthermore to digital. This process of creating alphabet forms is an art requiring sensitivity to techniques, social needs and cultural functions in regard to aesthetics.

The design of typefaces, in fact, is the result of a certain tension between technical constraints and the conceptual imagining of how a letter should look to work as an effective element of communication.

Moved from the heritage of utility, type design in postmodernism stepped into art galleries and liberated the passion of creativity. In an act of rebellion against the prevailing sans serif and limited aesthetics, postmodernism looked to celebrate creativity in digital typefaces from the 1960s. In this manner, type design emphasized the importance of individuality and novelty with exaggerated forms at the expense of other attributes, for instance, readability, legibility and aesthetics. Sinaloa and Dead History are deemed as the two of the best representative typefaces that presented a strong experimental spirit by using digital technology, creating visual statements to be ‘stimulating’. Whereas, designing purposefully to elicit a specific ephemeral aesthetics, the typefaces in postmodernism mostly have relatively narrow range usages and correspondingly shorter

Although design is considered as a tool to improve the exists, nevertheless, there is a potential danger that those that were already good get replaced. Being misunderstood by both designers and users, design is expected to provide ‘special’ or ‘novel’ products to appeal attention and individuality. When people observe surrounding products with such a mindset, those products outside ‘design’ are viewed as ‘normal’, ‘ugly’ or ‘boring’ non designs. However, in fact, as Jasper Morrison noted, the products that make a difference in our daily lives are often the least noticeable ones that do not try to grab attention, whereas we’d miss the most if they disappeared (Frukasawa & Morrison 2012, pp.99). Super Normal represents the design products that people always overlook when they focus too much on ‘design’ - it points to those products that people naturally hold an affinity