Emigre #19: Starting From Zero

One of the most iconic releases from Emigre Fonts, Barry Deck’s Template Gothic was the only typeface used in the entire “Starting From Zero” issue of Emigre. Inspired by Ed Fella’s teaching at CalArts, where Deck had been a student from 1987 to 1989, the typeface features unusual forms and awkward shapes, in tune with the “vernacular” aesthetic then championed by Fella and Lorraine Wild (see, for example, the latter’s seminal essay “The Macramé of Resistance”, published in 1998 in Emigre #47).

By featuring it so prominently in the pages of his magazine, Emigre editor Rudy VanderLans made Template Gothic an instant hit, and the ultimate typographic expression of the whole digital revolution in graphic design — indeed, the “Starting From Zero” issue also deals with this other “hot spot” of 1990s restless experimentation, the Cranbrook Academy of Art of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.