Excerpt from Jessica Helfand, "Electronic Typography: The New Visual Language." Print, 48:3 (May/June 1994) 98-101.


In today's dynamic landscape, our static definitions of typography appear increasingly imperiled. Will the beauty of traditional letterforms be compromised by the evils of this new technology? Will punctuation be stripped of its functional contributions, or ligatures their aesthetic ones? Will type really matter?
Of course it will.

In the meantime, however, typography?s early appearance on the digital frontier doesn?t speak too well for design. Take e-mail, for example. Gone are the days of good handwriting, of the Palmer Method and the penmanship primer. In its place, electronic mail--which, despite its futuristic tone, has paradoxically revived the Victorian art of letter writing. Sending electronic mail is easy and effortless and quick. For those of us who spend a good deal of our professional lives on the telephone, e-mail offers a welcome respite from talking (although it bears a closer stylistic resemblance to conversational speech than to written language). However, for those of us with even the most modest design sense, e-mail eliminates the distinctiveness which typography has traditionally brought to our written communiqués. Though its supporters endorse the democratic nature of such homogeneity, the truth is, it's boring. In the land of e-mail, we all 'sound' alike: everyone writes in Monaco.
Oddly, it is laden with contradictions: ubiquitous in form yet highly diverse in content, at once ephemeral and archival, transmitted in real time yet physically intangible. E-mail is a kind of aesthetic flatland, informationally dense and visually unimaginative. Here, hierarchies are pre-ordained and non-negotiable: passwords, menus, commands, help. Networks like America Online require that we title our mail, a leftover model from the days of inter-office correspondence, which makes even the most casual letter sound like a corporate memo. As a result, electronic missives all have headlines: titling our letters makes us better editors, not better designers. As a fitting metaphor for the distilled quality of things digital, the focus in e-mail is on the abridged, the acronym, the quick read. E-mail is functionally serviceable and visually forgettable, not unlike fast food. It's drive-thru design: get in, get out, move on.

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