Twenty-nine plates, six sections, oldest object first

Traces Claude Garamond's sixteenth-century punches through the Imprimerie Royale matrices and into the twentieth-century revival by the Stempel foundry. Argues that nearly every 'Garamond' in circulation is a revival of a revival, and identifies which specimen sheet each version actually derives from.

Describes how Behrens — appointed artistic director to AEG in 1907 — unified the company's typeface, product design, and architecture into a single visual argument, and why this is routinely called the first corporate identity programme. Covers the Behrens-Antiqua type and the turbine factory as parallel objects from the same hand.

Reconstructs the 1956–57 commission that produced Helvetica: Eduard Hoffmann's notes at the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenbuchsee, Max Miedinger's drawings, and the decision to market the face under a Latin name rather than a Swiss one. Positions the typeface against Akzidenz-Grotesk, which it was designed to update.

Follows Adrian Frutiger's 1968 commission to letter-sign Charles de Gaulle Airport at Roissy, and the subsequent release of the Frutiger typeface by Linotype in 1976 for general use. Examines how a wayfinding requirement produced a typeface that outran its original brief.

Examines the arc from Jan Tschichold's 1928 manifesto Die neue Typographie — with its rules against serif type and centred composition — to his 1947–49 tenure at Penguin Books, where he reformed the covers using classical symmetry and Times New Roman. Treats the reversal not as inconsistency but as a considered argument about mass production versus the avant-garde.

Dates Akzidenz-Grotesk to the Berthold foundry's 1896 release, traces its adoption by Swiss designers in the 1950s as the de facto International Style text face, and establishes its direct relationship to the Helvetica commission. A short comparison of the two faces at the same point size, using named specimens.

Reads Paul Renner's 1927 typeface as a position in a debate about what a German letter should be — geometric, universal, free of historical ornament — and traces the Bauer foundry's campaign to sell it internationally. Covers the early specimen sheets and the competing claims between Futura and Gill Sans for the progressive market.

Compares Helvetica (Haas, 1957) and Univers (Deberny & Peignot, 1957) as products of the same moment and different philosophies: Miedinger working from an existing grotesque tradition, Frutiger designing a coordinated family of twenty-one weights from a single concept before drawing the first letter. Shows how Adrian Frutiger's numbering grid for Univers was itself a typographic object.

Covers the 1958–63 development of Transport by Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert for the British motorway and trunk-road sign system, the legibility tests run on the A1, and why mixed-case lettering was chosen over capitals. Pairs the typeface's history with the sign system it was designed for.

Traces Hoefler & Frere-Jones's Gotham (2000) back to the mid-century sans-serif lettering on New York Port Authority buildings and transit infrastructure, establishing the photographic survey that preceded the drawings. Distinguishes the typeface as a documented revival from vernacular sources rather than a geometric construction.

Describes Matthew Carter's 1996 commission from Microsoft to produce typefaces readable at screen resolutions below 100 dpi, the hinting decisions that distinguish them from print faces, and what happened to their design rationale when screens surpassed 200 dpi. Treats them as historical objects shaped by a specific technical constraint.

Reads Josef Müller-Brockmann's Zurich concert posters of the 1950s and 1960s — particularly the Musica Viva series — as arguments that mathematical structure was not only efficient but ethically preferable to subjective composition. Examines the grid not as a technical device but as a published stance.

Documents Lance Wyman's identity for the Mexico City Olympics — the logotype derived from the op-art and Huichol pattern, the colour system, the pictograms, and the typeface drawn specifically for the games. Establishes Mexico 68 as the first Olympic identity to treat every surface as part of one coordinated programme.

Profiles Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast's Push Pin Studios from its 1954 founding, and places its revival of Victorian ornament, Art Nouveau curves, and historical pastiche directly against the Swiss International Style that dominated serious design discourse in the same decade. Uses named posters and the Push Pin Monthly Graphic as primary documents.

Covers the concentrated two-year period in which Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and the Family Dog collective produced concert posters for the Fillmore and Avalon Ballroom, using illegible lettering and simultaneous colour contrast as deliberate effects rather than failures of craft. Dates the movement precisely and identifies its printed sources — Jugendstil, Beardsley, psychedelic culture.

Reconstructs the documented circumstances of the I ♥ NY mark — the 1977 commission from New York State's Commerce Department, Glaser's account of sketching it in a taxi, the American Typewriter typeface, the red heart — and traces its subsequent life as both a licensed mark and an unlicensed global template.

Examines Henry Beck's 1931 drawing and 1933 published London Underground map as an argument that a transit diagram should represent connections, not distances — the distortion of geography that makes the map usable, and the London Passenger Transport Board's initial reluctance to publish it. Uses the original printed poster as its primary document.

Follows the 1957 Anderson Committee commission that led Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert to design the complete British motorway and road sign system — the typeface, the symbols, the colour coding — implemented nationally between 1964 and 1966. Identifies Calvert's specific contributions, including the pictograms still in use.

Reconstructs Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda's 1972 New York subway map for Unimark International — its strict 45-degree geometry, Helvetica throughout, the decision to misrepresent Central Park's shape — and the 1979 replacement by a geographically accurate version. Treats the episode as a documented argument about what a map is for.

Describes the Unimark International standards manual commissioned by the New York Transit Authority — the grid system, Helvetica as the sole typeface, the colour-coded line identifiers — and how implementation was inconsistent enough that the system looked different at nearly every station. Uses the original 1970 manual as its document.

Documents the production of the 1896 Kelmscott Chaucer — William Morris's collaboration with Edward Burne-Jones, the Golden type cut from a Jenson model, the hand-made paper from Joseph Batchelor, the 87 woodcut illustrations — as a specific physical object whose making was itself an argument against industrial printing. Cites the Kelmscott Press colophon and the British Library copy as primary sources.

Traces Edward Young's 1935 tripartite cover grid — orange for fiction, green for crime, blue for biography — through Tschichold's 1947 refinement of the typography and Romek Marber's 1961 grid for the Penguin Crime series, showing how a system designed for print economy became a design identity. Uses named editions as specimens.

Reads Tschichold's 1928 book as a polemical document — its prohibition on serif type, centred composition, and historical ornament — and identifies which of its positions he later publicly retracted and which held. Treats the book as a printed object as well as a text, noting its own typographic choices.

Covers Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko's Émigré magazine from its 1984 launch through its role as the primary venue for postmodern typography debate in the United States — the bitmap fonts Licko designed for low-resolution printing, the essays by Jeffery Keedy and Ed Fella, the foundry that grew from the magazine.

Documents David Carson's art direction of Ray Gun magazine — the rotated columns, the typefaces set at wrong sizes, the interview printed in Dingbats — as a sustained argument that visual interest preceded readability, and places it against the grunge typography movement at the same moment. Uses named issues and dates.

Documents Susan Kare's 1983–84 work designing the Macintosh icon set — the 32×32 pixel grid, the trash can, the paint bucket, the Chicago typeface — as the first systematic attempt to make a graphical user interface readable to a general audience, and traces which metaphors she introduced that are still in operating systems today.

Covers Greiman's 1986 Design Quarterly poster — a single poster-sized Macintosh file, printed at actual scale, treating the computer's low resolution as texture rather than limitation — as the document that placed the Macintosh inside serious design discourse. Dates the commission, the software used (MacPaint, MacDrawing), and the printer.

Traces Brody's art direction of The Face (1981–86) and Arena, then his 1990 co-founding of FontShop with Erik Spiekermann, as two connected moments: the visual argument made on the printed page and its translation into a digital type distribution model that changed how designers bought faces.

Examines the shift from skeuomorphic to flat design in iOS 7 (2013) and the simultaneous move by Google's Material Design — treating it as a historical event with a traceable cause in mobile screen density rather than a pure aesthetic preference — and identifies what visual information was discarded when drop shadows and gradients were removed.