This presentation explores the design principles of modular scripts and their relevance to contemporary parametric and generative design projects. Using specimen images, diagrams, Python code, and animations, Maurice Meilleur will reconstruct and illustrate the design spaces and logic behind scripts created by Josef Albers, André Gürtler, Wim Crouwel, and Jurriaan Schrofer.
These examples demonstrate, sometimes in ways even their designers didn’t fully appreciate, how generative design reveals new formal relationships between letters and suggests new ways for scripts to represent and convey meaning. They also show how important imagination, playfulness, and judgment are in the design of even the most rigorous formal systems.
Modular scripts are among the most popular—but in some ways, the least understood—legacies of modernist typography. The structures of their letterforms and the processes by which they’re generated express themselves independently of the writing systems, technologies, cultural contexts, and applications that scripts conventionally represent. Making sense of them relies less on memory and experience and more on discovery and extension. Put another way, a modular script plays a formal game, and invites us to learn and apply its rules.