Reinventing Print: Technology and Craft in Typography

With the rise of digital technology as a design tool and its acceptance as simply part of the tool chest for today’s design studios, there has been a re-evaluation and return to exploring pre-digital typography. Design studios no longer flaunt their digital hardware, in fact quite the opposite. This attitudinal change toward digital technology has coincided with a growing fascination and re-evaluation of those pre-digital skills and processes that had been considered in recent years to be irrelevant.

Mapping the rise of digital technology and examining the infinite possibilities it offers and the profound cultural and technical influence it has had in all aspects of visual communication. This text also focuses on our current post-digital age, in which the technology itself has become sufficiently common-place for us to fully recognize what it excels at and what it does less well.

Reinventing Print focuses on those skills and processes which have been re-appropriated and irreverently liberated by a new generation of typographers, designers, and artists, raised with digital technology in their pockets and forever at their fingertips. In this post-digital age, traditional typographic craft is new, different and therefore exciting, potent and culturally subversive.