Liquidity, satura-tion, and overflow are words that describe the information sur-plus that besets us at the start of the twen-ty-first century. Im-ages proliferate in this media-rich en-vironment, and so too does the written

word. Far from di-minishing in influ-ence, text has con-tinued to expand its power and pervasive-ness. The visual ex-pression of language has grown increas-ingly diverse, as new fonts and formats evolve to accommo-

date the relentless display of the word.

Typography is the art of designing letter-forms and arranging them in space and time. Since its in-vention during the Renaissance, typog-raphy has been an-

imated by the con-flict between fixed architectural ele-ments-such as the page and its mar-gins-and the fluid substance of written words. Evolutions in the life of the let-ter arise from dia-logs between wet and

dry, soft and hard, slack and taut, amor-phous and geomet-ric, ragged and flush, planned and unpre-dicted. With unprec-edented force, these conflicts are driving typographic innova-tion today. Typogra-phy is going under

water as designers submerge themselves in the textures and transitions that bond letter, word, and sur-face. As rigid formats become open and pliant, the architec-tural hardware of ty-pographic systems is melting down.

The flush, full page of the classical book is dominated by a single block of jus-tified text, its char-acters mechanically spaced to completely occupy the designat-ed volume. The page is like a glass into

which text is poured, spilling over from one leaf to the next. By the early twenti-eth century, the clas-sical page had given way to the multicol-umned, mixed-me-dia structures of the modern newspaper, magazine, and illus-

trated book.

Today, the simultane-ity of diverse content streams is a given. Alongside the arche-type of the printed page, the new digi-tal archetype of the window has taken hold. The window is

a scrolling surface of unlimited length, whose width adjusts at the will of read-er or writer. In both print and digital me-dia, graphic designers devise ways to navi-gate bodies of infor-mation by exploring the structural possi-

bilities of pages and windows, boxes and frames, edges and margins.

In 1978, Nicholas Ne-groponte and Muri-el Cooper, working at mit’s Media Lab, published a semi-nal essay on the no-

tion of ‘soft copy,’ the linguistic raw ma-terial of the digital age. The bastard off-spring of hard copy, soft text lacks a fixed typographic identi-ty. Owing allegiance to no font or format, it is willingly past-ed, pirated, output, or

repurposed in count-less contexts. It is the ubiquitous medium of word-processing, desk-top publishing, e-mail, and the In-ternet. The burgeon-ing of soft copy had an enormous im-pact on graphic de-sign in the 1980s and

1990s. In design for print, soft copy large-ly eliminated the me-diation of the type-setter, the technician previously charged with converting the manuscript-which had been painstak-ingly marked up by hand with instruc-

tions from the de-signer-into galleys, or formal pages of type. Soft copy flows directly to designers in digital form from authors and editors. The designer is free to directly manipu-late the text-without relying on the type-

setter-and to adjust typographic details up to the final mo-ments of production. The soft copy revolu-tion led designers to plunge from an ob-jective aerial view into the moving wa-ters of text, where they shape it from

within.

Digital media ena-ble both users and producers, readers and writers, to regu-late the flow of lan-guage. As with design for print, the goal of interactive typogra-phy is to create ‘ar-

chitectural’ structures that accommodate the organic stream of text. But in the digi-tal realm, these struc-tures-and the content they support-have the possibility of contin-uous transformation. In their essay about soft copy, Negroponte

and Cooper predict-ed the evolution of digital interfaces that would allow typog-raphy to transform its size, shape, and color. Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) went on to develop the idea of the three-dimension-al ‘information land-

scape,’ a model that breaks through the window frames that dominate electronic interfaces.

Viewed from a dis-tance, a field of text is a block of gray. But when one comes in close to read, the in-

dividual characters predominate over the field. Text is a body of separate objects that move together as a mass, like cars in a flow of traffic or in-dividuals in a crowd. Text is a fluid made from the hard, dry crystals of the alpha-

bet.

Typeface designs in the Renaissance re-flected the curving lines of handwriting, formed by ink flow-ing from the rigid nib of a pen. The cast metal types used for printing converted

these organic sources into fixed, reproduc-ible artifacts. As the printed book became the world’s dominant information medium, the design of type-faces grew ever more abstract and formal-ized, distanced from the liquid hand. To-

day, designers look back at the system-atic, abstracting ten-dencies of modern letter design and both celebrate and chal-lenge that rational-izing impulse. They have exchanged the anthracite deposits of the classical letter for

lines of text that quiv-er and bleed like liv-ing things.

The distinctive use of type, which can en-dow a long or com-plex document with a sense of unified per-sonality or behavior, also builds the iden-

tity of brands and in-stitutions. Bruce Mau has described identity design as a ‘life prob-lem,’ arguing that the visual expression of a company or product should appear like a frame taken from a system in motion.

The flat opacity of the printed page has been challenged by graph-ic designers who use image manipulation software to embed the word within the surface of the photo-graphic image. A pi-oneer of such effects in the digital realm

was P. Scott Makela (1960-1999). In the early 1990s, he be-gan using PhotoShop, a software tool that had just been intro-duced, as a creative medium. In his de-signs for print and multimedia, type and image merge in diz-

zying swells and ed-dies as letters bulge, buckle, and morph. The techniques he helped forge have be-come part of the fun-damental language of graphic design. The linear forms of ty-pography have be-come planar surfaces,

skimming across and below the pixelated skin of the image.

The alphabet is an ancient form that is deeply embedded in the mental hardware of readers. Graph-ic designers always ground their work, to

some degree, in his-toric precedent, tap-ping the familiarity of existing symbols and styles even as they invent new idi-oms. While some de-signers pay their toll to history with reluc-tance, others dive ea-gerly into the reser-

voirs of pop culture. Tibor Kalman (1949–1999) led the graph-ic design world’s rec-lamation of visual detritus, borrowing from the common-place vernacular of mail-order stationery and do-it-yourself signage. Designers

now frankly embrace the humor and di-rectness of everyday artifacts. In the aes-thetic realm as in the economic one, pol-lution is a natural re-source-one that is ex-panding rather than shrinking away.

Thirty years ago, pro-gressive designers of-ten described their mission as ‘prob-lem-solving’. They aimed to identify the functional require-ments of a project and then discover the appropriate means to satisfy the brief. To-

day, it is more illu-minating to speak of solvents than solu-tions. Design is often an attack on struc-ture, or an attempt to create edifices that can withstand and engage the corrosive assault of content.

The clean, smooth surfaces of modern-ism proved an un-sound fortress against popular culture, which is now invited inside to fuel the cre-ation of new work. Image and text eat away at the vessels that would seal them

shut. Forms that are hard and sharp now appear only tempo-rarily so, ready to melt, like ice, in re-sponse to small envi-ronmental changes. All systems leak, and all waters are con-taminated, not only with foreign matter

but with bits of struc-ture itself. A fluid, by definition, is a sub-stance that conforms to the outline of its container. Today, containers reconfig-ure in response to the matter they hold.