Post Typographic Manifesto

Typography is dead. You have killed it.

You bombard us with empty phrases and the crass refinement of perfect lives and perfect design, enforcing the unspoken fascism of your Typocracy upon generations of our incognizant brethren. Wielding history as your whip, you corral those who would dare defy you towards a Typocratic slaughterhouse wherein we hear the death-rattle of creativity.

Your design has become an empty gesture, a reflection of the vacuous society you have helped to create and perpetuate. It has been said that the "medium is the message," but your medium is transparent and likewise, your message hollow.

Like a farmer tilling the soil, we are also unafraid to get our hands dirty to reap the fruits of our labor

Type historian and critic Beatrice Ward compared good modernist typography to a crystal goblet, a clear, unadorned vessel that does not cloud the content. Your shallow cup runneth over with lies and platitudes. If the letters used to construct your words are invisible, does not the message also go unnoticed and unheeded? We step on your crystal goblet of typography at the marriage of liberty and design.

The advent of the personal computer and desktop publishing software promised to overthrow the Typocratic regime and usher in a new age of typographic democracy and enlightenment. But the Typocracy quickly subverted these technological advances to create a new caste system composed of the Graphic Design Elite and the Desktop Publishing Proletariat. The term, desktop publishing, which had heralded the great promise of a popular design revolution quickly took on an undesirable connotation. It belittled the efforts of untrained designers and artisans, quashing the unconformist and unconventional and cutting off avenues of individualism and experimentation.

We step on your crystal goblet of typography at the marriage of liberty and design.

But even as the Desktop Publishers have been repressed by the Typocracy, they have sown the seeds for a rebellion against these tyrants. We will liberate typography from the stuffy shackles of classicism and rigid mores of modernism. We will shun too the ironic and forced eclecticism of post-modernism in favor of a valiant and noble design democracy. The delicate crystal goblet of modernism cannot contain the volume and passion of our humanity. We do not seek to create works of grace, sublimity, and legibility. We only answer to the ultimate satisfaction of our own Dionysian impulses.

Like a farmer tilling the soil, we are also unafraid to get our hands dirty to reap the fruits of our labor. We dispel the myth of the invisible designer. We each will carve our own visage from the faceless screen, and let the ink from our pens bleed onto our hands and paper. We will not hesitate to discard X-heights and baselines to achieve our Post Typographic ideals, casting off the shackles of Photoshop to return to the freedom of letters without rules.

The advent of the personal computer and desktop publishing software promised to overthrow the Typocratic regime
We are the children of the Desktop Publishers, and the siblings of the rebel youth who scratched the logo of their favorite band into the cover of their math book.

We are the 32-oz. Big Gulp of Typography!
We are the Typography of The Masses!
We are the Times New Romans!
We are the Franklin Gothics!
We make our impact with Impact!

Never forgetting the struggle of the Desktop Publishers and those who came before, we of the Post Typographic movement seek no less than the democratization of typography. We will overthrow the Typocracy, and fill its vacuum with a socially aware and vibrant typographic freedom embodied by Post Typography. Brothers and Sisters, join us in shattering the glass muzzle of Typocracy and renouncing the indentured servitude of the Typocratic regime.