d to believe that modern designers where trying to perceive a new future even though it had not actually happened yet, however there future was utopian. Bayer designed Universal with the complete opposite agenda to the Nazi’s ideals, he saw the need for a typeface that would be understood by all and wouldn’t be more meaningful to one country or another. He new this was needed as countries had begun to trade and communicate; he wanted everyone to understand even if they spoke another language. It is also argued that ‘ universal type was designed only in the lowercase alphabet. Bayer argued that since speech does not recognize capital letters, they are no longer needed in typography. A single case alphabet would be easier for children to learn, more efficient to write, the lack of uppercase letters would reduce the printer’s storage space, set-up time, and overall costs’. Lupton E. Abbot-Miller J. (1991) ‘The ABC’s of Bauhaus and Design Theory’. London, Thames and Hudson. pp 41. This argument describes the forces of modernity having a direct impact on Bayer’s Universal typeface. Lowercase means that all the letters where equal, and they would all have a certain height, which meant they would not change on a page. Speech doesn’t contain capitals and so a lowercase copy would read like speech and not like type. Which in turn would be easier for an individual from another country to read and learn, therefore people would be able to communicate internationally easily. Another key point that this argument points out is that people had begun to care about education and the need to read, if future generations could read and write and communicate with each other than trade and wealth would continue to grow globally. The typeface universal was also meant to embrace new technology and the machine age, a lowercase font that had no serifs would take up less space, would cost less to make, and without capitals it would be easier to set up, and therefore production would be faster and quicker and therefore more could be shipped out and sold within the country and outside of the country, and in turn the more produce going out to other countries means a greater sense of connection and the need to communicate and understand one another. As well as this the typeface was meant to represent the machines and technologies of the factory as they where like the font functional, geometric and uninfluenced.
‘The decade of the select 1960’s became the time… designers were concerned with ever-lasting values such as permanence, structure, timelessness and the quest for purest form possible’ Remington, R. Roger Bodenstedt, L. (2003) American Modernism, Graphic Design 1920 to 1960’, London, Laurence King. pp 162, describes the style adopted by Massimo Vignelli, you could argue that these designers wanted their work to be at its purest form, which was organized structured and legible, suggests that they wanted their work to be understood by wide audience and therefore they wanted to communicate to as many as they could, pushing towards a style everyone could understand and so this could of even been on an international basis. The argument also suggests that the use of a grid and structure was important to the understanding of a piece. ‘Semantics in design means to be understand the subject to the sender and the receiver in such a way that it makes sense to both.’ Vignelli, M. (2010) ‘The Vignelli Canon’. Mulgrave, Victoria, Images Publishing. pp9, alongside the next argument ‘ Syntactic consistency is paramount of importance in graphic design… Grids are one of the several tools helping designers to achieve syntactical consistency in graphic design.’ Vignelli, M. (2010) ‘The Vignelli Canon’. Mulgrave, Victoria, Images Publishing. pp10. Makes for a strong case that Massimo Vignelli’s Underground Map was designed with the purpose to be understood by a mass amount of people. In 1972 Massimo Vignelli’s new map for the first time showed the underground of New York. He showed the geographic location of the city above. Drawn as shapes. Massimo Vignelli used a gr