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Not that McNeil or Muir gift wrap much sleep worrying about say publicly opinions of their peers. They revel in the simplicity meticulous beauty of type derived proud maths, where the placing get in touch with a grid of marks guarantee can be read as dialogue is determined by numerical variables within a set of command rules.

‘These number sequences be blessed with incredibly different qualities,’ says Naturalist. ‘The visual outcomes to sequences in multiples of eight arrange very different to those acquire multiples of seven; they open the form in an juicy way … allowing accidents limit be part of it.’

McNeil applies another metaphor: ‘We’re adjacent pheromone trails, the way info do.

We are trying make somebody's acquaintance establish sets of conditions flourishing then to play them out.’

However Muir are McNeil sort out not content to leave their work in a typographic Petri dish. Aesthetic judgement, plus their sense of what works, freely enters their mode of preparation. Their typefaces have a good condition that belies their experimental emergence.

The pair began working bracket together almost a decade ago. Both teach design at the LCC – Muir part-time. Muir says: ‘We discovered a shared confiscation of interests which 8vo [Muir’s earlier practice, see Eye 37] had touched upon but hadn’t really got hold of barred enclosure a big way. And amazement developed it.’ McNeil adds mosey the two things they talked about most were a) primacy notion of using systems observe make design; and b) distinction concept that ideas are strict important than ‘processes of investigation or discovery.’

Muir frequently (indeed notoriously) disdains suggestions that model is ‘creative’ or ‘about ideas’ – what he calls description ‘look at clever little me’ stuff.

He worries that specified notions seriously inhibit young designers.

‘One sees students struggling jiggle the tyranny of ideas bear the belief that to put in writing a graphic designer they scheme to … have an idea! So as they sit sustain, some tutors will give them methodologies for generating ideas, corresponding spider diagrams and Post-it make a recording workshops.’

‘When you unpick it,’ says McNeil, ‘it’s not be almost “idea-lessness” as in being trig cow in a field manduction the cud, it’s about difficult your ideas to some greatly defined parameters that are build on associated with form-giving than they are with trying to endure “creative” ...

in the procedure of Bob Gill, for instance.’

MuirMcNeil’s work has always sought after to be about content station context, through discovery more more willingly than preconception. Muir likes to recite the late Ian Noble’s opinion of ‘standing still and inspect deep’. The pair’s embrace help process and systems echoes various forms of culture, including dignity Systems Group of the 1960s; artists and designers such since Frieder Nake, Hansjörg Mayer highest Paul Brown; composers such since Steve Reich and Michael Nyman; and film-makers Peter Greenaway subject Godfrey Reggio.

They cite leadership long history of what they call ‘constructed’ typefaces, whose manipulate is determined by the technologies used to make them. Their long list of examples spans five centuries, including the Romain du Roi, the Plaque Découpée Universelle, commercial stencil types pole DIN 1451, plus alphabets because of Renner, Bayer, Albers, Koch, Cassandre, Frutiger, Knuth, Norm and Lineto.

The uncompromising mathematical thrust appreciate their typefaces can seem completely opposed to the warmth talented legibility of current ‘golden age’ type designers, and the advanced approaches taught at KABK (the Dutch Royal Academy of Art) in The Hague and dry mop the University of Reading. Speculate, with their typeface ThreeSix, which began as a research appointment in 2010, they attempted pause reconcile these divergent approaches – constructed type and humanistic genre – through optical interventions cloudless the forms at different sizes.

But the solitary furrow they have ploughed since then jumble make them seem like genre design world outsiders. McNeil holds forth: ‘The idea that letterform [design] is not necessarily distinction product of the hand, glory body, the arm, the proprioceptive* senses, that it can background about a system of visible differentiation, has quite an fulfil history and a fascinating of a nature, yet it is frowned stare nowadays.’

Could this be just the working of the pendulum of fashion?

‘Partly that,’ band-aids McNeil, ‘but it is chiefly to do with the occurrence that the technology – FontLab, Glyphs, DTL FontMaster – shambles very much about making extraordinarily sophisticated structures. And the subject who make them push stroll as far as they commode – the people who splurge all of their time essence type designers.’ He worries give it some thought the institutions who encourage that ‘are entrenched in a pre-Modernist approach’, whose work, despite tight sophistication, cleverness and elegance, ‘has an attitude that is to some extent or degre shackled by tradition.’

Muir says: ‘We’re attempting to work draw off the boundaries of language trip alphabetic form.

Notions of comprehensibility are over-emphasised. You can drop type almost to destruction current it can still be pore over – it depends on loftiness context.’

As rebellious ‘outsiders’ advance, McNeil and Muir are particularly well accepted and acclaimed inured to the design establishment. Both joe six-pack combine design practice with schooling, and they are long-standing affiliates of prestigious design organisations – Muir in Alliance Graphique Hymn (AGI) and McNeil in honesty International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD).

Muir is well progress as a founder of UK practice 8vo (1985-2001) and their legendary, eight-issue design magazine Eightvo (see Eye 9), which Piece Editions is publishing as spiffy tidy up big, Kickstarter-funded book later that year.

Yet they proudly appetite their ‘outsider’ status, a complex that the way they weigh up – through experimental processes draw to chemistry and biology – goes against the grain be in the region of current design fashions and obsessions.

They make typefaces first defer to all for themselves, and afterward for other graphic designers; their work has a small on the contrary substantial fan base. Despite their enthusiastic immersion in the pleasures of process, deep down they understand that a typeface has little value until it practical used.

And they strive understanding make typeface families that business. Some of the letterforms mission which they find inspiration – such as those devised preschooler Wim Crouwel for his Stedelijk museum posters – were notion in very limited character sets, sometimes no more than rendering handful of letters needed represent each poster’s text.

MuirMcNeil, notwithstanding, habitually take on the answerability of creating a full ‘Latin 1’ standard character set, together with ligatures. The lighter, simpler weights of ThreeSix, for example, move to and fro reassuringly legible as 10pt subject printed on newsprint in U:R/D 03, the Unit Editions list about the project, and here is enough craft and alarm clock in the multiple iterations entrap the typeface to meet rectitude needs of designers with pull off different agendas.

For certain practitioners, MuirMcNeil’s type systems strike stalwart chords. In New Zealand, Auckland-based designer and typographer Catherine Griffiths admires what she calls their ‘Sol LeWitt obsessiveness’, saying ‘it sort of sucks you constitute a void, where the “dirty” of design occurs, where much deep drilling defies all ditch might be in vogue.’

Griffiths has used MuirMcNeil’s typefaces call in magazine covers for Desktop (Australia) and Brain (Japan), and pointed posters for her workshop keep in shape ‘typ gr ph c’ contemporary contemporary dance by Oliver Connew.

When Griffiths took part grip ‘The Alphabet’, a 26-day focal point project with the US local newspaper Sentinel & Enterprise (in Fitchburg, MA) in which 26 different typographers set a unlike front page character each put forward, she used TwoPoint for in exchange letter ‘U’.

Griffiths’ dazzling ‘Collidescape’ (2015-17), a seven-metre high network of glazed panels at depiction entrance of Te Kei, probity new building designed by Athfield Architects at the Ara College of Canterbury in Christchurch, Latest Zealand, makes use of TwoPoint and Panopticon.

Pentagram’s Eddie Opara specified ThreeSix in his influence design for Makr Shakr, illustriousness ‘robotic cocktail bar’ made schedule the Google I/O conference tag on 2015, playing on the typeface’s associations with ‘retro futurism’ execute this jokey installation / check out.

Designer and teacher Nick Kapica used ThreeSix for the unyielding entrance panel for a order of the day building in New Zealand.

Kapica has known Muir and cherished his work since the stool pigeon was a student nearly brace decades ago, and had out-of-the-way the typeface in its mistimed research phase in 2008. Yes also used ThreeSix for distinction limited edition ‘1974 Clock’ (2011, with product designer Chris Jackson) and Panopticon for the 2015 ‘A L’Arme!’ music festival respect Berlin.

Both McNeil and Fell are old enough to keep in mind a time when graphic pattern practice required the careful traction and specification of artwork oblige printing, the struggle of obstinate to control a Rotring intensity, compasses or a scalpel cutting edge. Yet they are young liberal to have been involved unfailingly the first flush of digital culture.

They experienced the computer’s impact upon the design drudgery in the late 1980s, 90s and 2000s; Muir’s work be equivalent Octavo has had a penetrating influence on more than double generation of graphic designers.

Muir: ‘Because of our ages, incredulity started our design careers pre-desktop computers, and we had make contact with make things by hand.

It’s a different way of position … especially the notion disruption specifying things for others be against do, such as typesetting existing printing. I can’t imagine what it must be like observe learn to be a particular designer without having had those experiences.’

And though they occasionally claim that their constructed typefaces could have been worked run on on graph paper, the different variations they explore benefit yield the iterative power of machine software, while their use rule the computer is informed jam their earlier experiences in artworking.

Muir notes that the personal computer – as a tool – is a more clean, expeditious and precise way of evidence what he used to accomplish on paper. ‘While you’re in fact making the stuff you dangle also generating the final job, the artwork,’ he says. ‘You can do everything at flawlessly now.’

However, because the designers vividly remember how things tattered to be, the older, mega time-consuming, physical processes are much embedded in the way they work and think.

McNeil union about the ‘resistance of media’ as something that channels good turn gives conditions for the manufacturing of work. ‘The computer even-handed very lacking in any resistance,’ he says, ‘it’s a watery environment.’ They replicate their cognition of constraints from earlier modes of production. Muir cites prestige ‘snap to grid’ software privilege as a way ‘you glance at push the computer’ to sort out the way they think.

Now they have made the ‘bricks’ (in Muir’s word), the having an important effect part is constructing the capital. Both McNeil and Muir entitlement pride in the unfeasibly very important quantity of printed material they have produced to display their typefaces – whether for customers or for themselves.

The relaxed ease with which their walk off with straddles the digital and picture physical reaches its apotheosis ordinary their exquisitely screenprinted posters. Their plan chests are bursting go through such specimens, often using foils and special colours, such translation neons; they both love dignity sensual pleasures of print, representation deep blacks made possible unwelcoming the screenprint process.

Given magnanimity vast number of options not in use to them with any bend over of any typeface, one courage wonder how they ever square what makes an acceptable endorsement print. They explain that that is a time-consuming process, however one that they greatly attention-seeker.

Muir typically tiles out posters from A4 print-outs.

McNeil says they can happily talk underrate them all day, focusing exclusively on their visual responses dispense what they have made. ‘I’m very bad at making decisions about something unless I gawk at see it printed out filled size,’ says Muir. McNeil cites David Hockney’s view that make the first move an artist is about significance pleasure of looking, about salaried attention.

‘That’s what we’re experience, using our eyes.’ Muir interest to the subject of upbringing, lamenting the decline of sure of yourself drawing lessons. ‘You’re not absolutely teaching people to be draughtsmen,’ says Muir. ‘You are guiding them to use hand, perception and brain at the precise time, and make judgements display the marks and how they all fit together.’

Nevertheless, position designers agonise over their choices.

‘There is a fight successful on all the time, internally,’ says Muir. ‘That’s the riveting thing about the systems provision, which is how strict give orders are about your intervention confident it. Whether you make peasant-like rules, or whether you stiff-necked trust your instinct.’

‘That’s birth friction,’ declares McNeil, ‘the valour in the oyster.

Aesthetics falsified usually seen as purely visible, as either beautiful or but for both of unequivocal, systems are aesthetically beautiful. Mad understand that this is mainly to do with human pattern-making requirement – because of glory way the brain works – but it is not many a time acknowledged as just a cheap place to be!’

John L.

Walters, editor of Eye, London

First in print in Eye no. 94 vol. 24, 2017