The strategies High Modernist designers concocted to advance the cause of anonymous typeforms, under the guise of legibility or historicism, are generally misread. Conventional post-modern grumbling imagines a hygienic programme aimed at stripping the world of decoration. But Modernist promotion of characterless or timeless typeforms is in fact a self-serving endeavour to protect the precious commodity of originality ascribed to the designed object. If artistic originality is key to the notion of Modernism, the Modernist object must, by its very nature, speak of the genius of its maker. The authority of the designer lay in his or her ability to manipulate standard forms into images which told of individual originality.
As letterforms have become more personal and have in themselves become intimately connected to their makers, the authorship of the designed object is increasingly muddled. If a poster is designed using a typeface that is clearly identified with Neville Brody, is the genius of the design in the letterform or in the arrangements of the letterforms? Who is the author of the work? Whose originality is paramount? At the same time, the genius of the type designer is dissipated as his or her fonts become widely available, allowing their signature style to be easily appropriated. As typefaces increasingly become design statements in themselves, the crisis of design authorship intensifies.
As Krauss puts it, ‘a prison in which the caged artist feels at liberty’.