SourceType is, far and away, one of the best… wait, I don’t know what SourceType is. A foundry? A collective? A publisher? The ultra-hyphenate SourceType claims to be much more than that: an index, a library, a classroom, a conspiracy, a dialogue. Whatever it is, it’s one of the best. I prefer to think of SourceType as the ultimate asset, an educational tool in how a group of creatives can join together to challenge book and typeface design. Its creative director, Laurenz Brunner (also the founder of the more simply definable design studio Studio Laurenz Brunner) is a major part of SourceType’s brilliant output. Based in a converted auto garage in Zurich and informed by high, low and popular culture and concepts, his newest book Dictionary of the Illegible explores the edges of language and visual communication, looking at where language begins and where it starts to dissolve.
The book is a tour-de-force across typographic history, how it distorts, how it falls apart, how it loses meaning and in the process gains an even more significant texture. What is illegibility? Is it the same thing as unreadability? In our fast-shifting world of communication breakdown, type designers scramble to visually stand out, to offer accessibility, to achieve clarity and flexibility. But in Dictionary of the Illegible, the reader finds that type design has always created friction against ideas of media literacy, inverted how we see typography and played on our intuitions as highly communicative creatures.
For example, think of comic book speech bubbles filled with punctuation – that’s called a grawlix and it suggests a type of censored swearing, but we don’t need to see profanity to know it’s there. What about metal band logos, which are notoriously illegible, so much so that it’s become a tradition for band logos to look like exploded Rorschach paintings made out of nervous systems of lightning bolts. To a metalhead’s eye, these logos may be illegible, but they are still readable – it suggests something powerful about how text can become exclusive, protective and gatekept. Below, Laurenz Brunner discusses how illegible typography can communicate beyond words, what metal band logos and coded online messages have in common, and why unreadable text might be more important than ever.