Digital Typography at Stanford

Steven McCarthy

Keywords Abstract
Typography This article investigates the short lived digital typography graduate program
Design education formed between Stanford University’s Departments of Art and Computer
Design history Science, which began in 1982 and ended in 1988. The program leveraged
Digitization the design skills of typographer Charles Bigelow with the software mastery
Stanford University of computer scientist and mathematician Donald Knuth. Besides educating
Charles Bigelow graduate students who would go on to create numerous typeface designs
for Adobe in Silicon Valley, they collaborated on an applied research project
for the American Mathematical Society with eminent typographer Hermann
Received Zapf. Bigelow’s historicist approach to type design aesthetics in the face
February 22, 2020 of cutting-edge technology and postmodern design — both in his teaching
Accepted and commercial typeface design — and the lack of interaction between the
August 12, 2020 digital typography program and Stanford’s Joint Program in Design (shared
between Mechanical Engineering and Art) may have contributed to the
demise of digital typography at Stanford University. Still, its influence was
STEVEN MCCARTHY wide ranging and impactful.
College of Design, University of Minnesota,
USA
(corresponding author)
smccarthy@umn.edu

Copyright © 2020, Tongji University and Tongji University Press.

Publishing services by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
Peer review under responsibility of Tongji University and Tongji University Press.

http://www.journals.elsevier.com/she-ji-the-journal-of-design-economics-and-innovation
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2020.08.006
 547 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

1 Steven McCarthy, Design at Stanford: A Introduction

Visual History of Thinking and Doing (San
Francisco: Blurb, 2019). When many think of design at Stanford University, they associate the in-
2 This enables students to physically
stitution with the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design — the d.school — a
understand aspects of type that are less
visible in digitized form. For example, hub for innovative design education thanks to its emphasis on applying
the term “leading” (linespace) comes design thinking across disciplines. The d.school was preceded, however,
from bars of lead inserted between
by the Joint Program in Design, a graduate program launched in 1958 that
lines of type, and “kerning” refers to the
optical adjustment of space between was shared between Stanford’s Departments of Art and Mechanical Engi-
letter pairs that must be handled man- neering.1 This program educated Stanford alumnus and Professor David
ually, sometimes by carving down metal
Kelley, founder of both Stanford’s d.school and of the global design company
or wooden type. Hand setting type is
slower and more deliberative, forcing IDEO.
micro-decisions about arrangement, Less known is Stanford’s short-lived program in digital typography, an
spacing, formatting, and so on.
innovative graduate program shared between Stanford’s Department of Art
and Department of Computer Science. Yet its faculty and graduates played
a seminal role in establishing best practices for bitmap and vector-based
typography in Silicon Valley in the early days of desktop publishing and
personal computing. The digital typography program also participated in an
important applied research project for the American Mathematical Society
involving the German master typographer and calligrapher Hermann Zapf.
The term “typography” refers to the mechanical composition of letters,
words, and lines of type into texts. It dates back to the 1440s, when German
goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg leveraged a wine press and knowledge of
metallurgy into a method of modular typesetting and printing. Letterpress
printing and cast metal type evolved incrementally over 500 years until
technological breakthroughs in photographic methods enabled graphic
designers to set type photomechanically, using equipment involving light,
optics, and film chemistry. Phototypesetting lasted about four decades until
computerized digital typography replaced it technically and commercially in
the 1980s.
“Type design” refers to the creation of letterforms’ shapes — the discrete
lines, curves and spacing attributes that provide a typeface with its distinc-
tive character. Helvetica, Times New Roman, Arial, Comic Sans, and Bask-
erville are widely known, at least by name — and by misnomer, as “font”
indicates a specific character set such as “12 point Arial Bold,” for example,
and not the entire typeface.
“Calligraphy” is hand-crafted lettering that involves highly developed
skill with ink, pens, and brushes in the rendering of flowing, curvilinear
letters and words (Figure 1). These days, it is often used for inspirational
quotes, award certificates, wedding invitations, and for the occasional word-
mark, as illustrated below.
Digital typography at Stanford was concerned with the entire spectrum
of type: using computer software to design letterforms that would be leg-
ible in emerging contexts such as on screens and with desktop printers;
and writing the code that would govern the way type behaves as readable
text, which includes lines, paragraphs, pages, and entire documents. Let-
terpress printing and calligraphy were used as teaching tools on campus,
not just for the history of type but to make typographic processes manifest
in a material way.2 That the program was shared between the disciplines
of art (which housed visual design) and computer science acknowledges
 548 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

Figure 1
Hermann Zapf’s calligraphic wordmark
iterations for The Associates of the Stanford
University Libraries, created in 1982. Image
reproduced with permission of Stanford
University Libraries Department of Special
Collections and University Archives. SC 362,
Euler Project, III Digital Typography, Box 2,
Folder 5.

3 “Charles A. Bigelow,” MacArthur Foun- typography’s expansive links to consideration of aesthetics, style, culture,
dation, last modified August 1, 1982,
history, perceptual psychology, industry, technology, communications, and
https://www.macfound.org/fellows/115/.
4 “About Us — Charles Bigelow and Kris
entrepreneurship.
Holmes,” LucidaFonts, accessed Septem- This article uses primary sources borrowed from Stanford University
ber 7, 2020, https://lucidafonts.com/
Library’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives, which
pages/about-us.
5 Charles Bigelow, “Notes on Lucida
holds original documents and correspondence related to this program. A
Designs,” Tug.org, November 2005, historical narrative is revealed through conversations, events, technologies,
https://tug.org/store/lucida/designnotes.
collaborations, and typographic evidence. It concludes with speculation as
html.
to why the program may have ended.

Charles Bigelow’s Influence

In 1982, the same year that he received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship,

type designer Charles “Chuck” Bigelow was hired into a joint professorship
at Stanford with appointments in the Departments of Art and Computer
Science. According to the MacArthur Foundation website, “Charles Bigelow
combines anthropological training with a literary sensibility and a technical
knowledge of graphic systems.”3 He also held a Master of Fine Arts degree in
film from the University of California at Los Angeles.4 At Stanford, Bigelow
put these qualities and credentials to work in a short-lived, but impactful,
graduate program in digital typography, in undergraduate and graduate
courses, and in a major creative research project. Bigelow also maintained
a commercial type design practice with Kris Holmes, a trained typographer
and also his wife, during this time.
Bigelow developed the graduate program in digital typography, which
offered a Master of Science degree through Computer Science, in associa-
tion with Donald Knuth,5 Stanford’s widely regarded professor of computer
science and mathematics. Knuth is considered an expert on algorithms.
He wrote one of the computer science discipline’s most revered texts, the
 549 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

6 CACM staff, “ACM’s Turing Award Prize multi-volume series, The Art of Computer Programming. First published in
Raised to $1 Million,” Communications of
1968, its title portends the future relationship between Stanford’s two de-
the ACM 57, no. 12 (2014): 20, DOI: http://
doi.org/10.1145/2685372.
partments. In 1974 Knuth received the Association for Computing Machines
7 Tamye Riggs, “The Adobe Originals (ACM) A. M. Turing Award, “recognized as the highest honor in computer
Silver Anniversary Story: Expanding the
science and often referred to as the field’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize.”6
Originals,” Typekit (blog), June 30, 2014,
https://blog.typekit.com/2014/06/30/
Through this program, Bigelow taught graduate students Dan Mills,
the-adobe-originals-silver-anniversa- Carol Twombly, Cleo Huggins, and David Siegel — the latter three eventually
ry-story-expanding-the-originals/.
instrumental in designing typefaces for Adobe Systems, the graphic design,
8 Nancy Stock-Allen, Carol Twombly: Her
Brief But Brilliant Career in Type Design
interactive media, and imaging software company, with Mills becoming
(New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2016), 51. Adobe’s typography department director.7 Twombly, Mills, and Huggins
9 Ferdinand P. Ulrich et al., “From Punch
had studied with Bigelow as undergraduates at the Rhode Island School
Cutters to Number Crunchers,” Eye 24, no.
94 (2017): online, http://www.eyemag-
of Design (RISD), so were likely hand-picked for graduate study.8 Besides
azine.com/feature/article/from-punch- providing his grad advisees with technological expertise, Bigelow imparted
cutters-to-number-crunchers.
a historically based aesthetic approach that may have run contrary to the
10 Ibid, online.
11 Sharon Helmer Poggenpohl, ed., Visible
progressive ideals of Silicon Valley and the Zeitgeist beyond.
Language 19, no. 1 (1985): 1–167, http:// In August of 1983, Bigelow organized a conference at Stanford called The
visiblelanguagejournal.com/issue/73.
Computer and the Hand in Type Design for the Association Typographique
12 John Dreyfus, “A Turning Point in Type
Design,” Visible Language 19, no. 1 (1985):
Internationale (ATypI). Besides talks by Chuck Bigelow, Donald Knuth, and
22, http://visiblelanguage.herokuapp. Hermann Zapf, the fifth working seminar of ATypI featured presentations
com/issue/73.
by British type designer Matthew Carter, Dutch type and graphic designer
13 Stanford University, Stanford University
Bulletin: Courses and Degrees (Stanford:
Gerard Unger, and other international typographers who were inventing and
Stanford University, 1983–84), 320, avail- implementing the successor to metal and photo types.9 “According to [Mat-
able at https://exhibits.stanford.edu/
thew] Carter, Bigelow was the first to use the term ‘digital type foundry.’ It is
stanford-pubs/catalog/fh842qn1658.
possible that the term was first used at the Stanford seminar.”10
The proceedings from the ATypI conference at Stanford were eventu-
ally published as a special edition of the journal Visible Language in 1985.11
John Dreyfus, ATypI co-founder and second president, captured the event’s
energy thusly: “I expect that this cooperation [between engineers and
designers] will continue far into the future because of two shared con-
victions — first, that computers can be used to advance type design; and
second, that the hand — not to mention the head and the heart — will con-
tinue to play a decisive part during the tremendously exciting period in our
lives that I have called ‘a turning point in type design.’”12
It was a confluence of teaching (of technological advances and histor-
ical precedent), research (informed by Silicon Valley’s contagious techno-­
optimism), and applied commercial practice (design entrepreneurism is
valued at Stanford) that defined digital typography at Stanford.
In November of 1985, Bigelow gave a lecture at Annenberg Auditorium
titled “The Literate Image: Form, Pattern, and Texture in Typeface Design.”
A co-listed Art and Computer Science course taught by Bigelow this same
year was “Writing Seminar — Introduction to the basic art of written forms.
The use of the pen and brush in scribal technology. Roman capitals, Hu-
manist minuscule, Chancery cursive, and other canonical letterforms.”13
These topics show Bigelow’s initial emphases on handcrafted lettering and
traditional designs, and on clarity and functionality within typographic
digitization.
Indeed, he named his typeface design of that era, Lucida, after “lucid,”
for clarity and brightness (Figure 2). Bigelow strove for Lucida to function
 550 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

Figure 2
Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes’ Lucida
typeface. © 1985 by Bigelow & Holmes.

Figure 3
Carol Twombly’s typefaces Trajan,
­Charlemagne, and Lithos, designed for
Adobe. © Adobe.

Figure 4
David Seigel’s typeface Tekton, designed for
Adobe. © Adobe.

14 Beatrice Warde, “The Crystal Goblet, well at small sizes and when rendered on low resolution computer screens
or Why Printing Should Be Invisible,” in
and printers, but took its visual design cues from historical serif letterforms,
Graphic Design Theory: Readings from the
Field, ed. Helen Armstrong (New York:
particularly the humanist faces of the sixteenth century. One could say that
Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), 39. Lucida was akin to type promoter Beatrice Warde’s crystal goblet concept
15 Emily McVarish, “‘The Crystal Goblet’:
from 1930: literally functional and aesthetically neutral (as would a clear
The Underpinnings of Typographic
Convention,” Design and Culture 2, no. 3
wine glass be over one of “solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite pat-
(2010): 286, DOI: https://doi.org/10.2752/ terns”14 — the clarity intended to reveal, not conceal or decorate, written
175470710X12789399279831.
content). As with her British Monotype Corporation colleagues during the
mid-twentieth century, Warde was a “new traditionalist”15 — she valued
literacy, functionality, and proven taste over novelty and Modernist ap-
proaches. The term could be equally applied to Bigelow’s aesthetics, even
though he used advanced technologies.
Bigelow’s historicist approach was also manifest in the typeface de-
signs of his former Stanford graduate students at Adobe — for example
Carol Twombly’s typefaces Trajan, Charlemagne, and Lithos (Figure 3),
and Dave Siegel’s Tekton. Twombly’s typefaces honored second century
Roman capitals, ninth century medieval lettering, and ancient Greek en-
graving respectively. Siegel’s 1989 typeface Tekton (Figure 4) “was based
 551 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

16 Adobe, “Tekton,” fonts.com (online), ac- on the hand-drawing and hand-lettering style of Francis (Frank) D.K. Ching,
cessed September 8, 2020, https://www.
aS­ eattle, Washington based architect and author,”16 who published his let-
fonts.com/font/adobe/tekton/story.
17 Francis D. K. Ching, Architectural Graphics,
tering in a 1975 book titled Architectural Graphics.17 “In offering these faces,
6th ed. (Hoboken; Wiley and Sons, 2015). the Adobe type team were attempting to cover as comprehensively as possible
18 Emily King, “New Faces (Chapter 2: The
the whole of the history of the letterform. This implies a belief that for a new
West Coast),” Typotheque (Emily King’s
doctoral thesis; online), January 23, 2005,
technology to prove its worth it must meet every possible challenge that can
https://www.typotheque.com/articles/ be thrown up by the past.”18
new_faces_chapter_two_the_west_coast.
While the mainstream commercial and technological successes of Lucida
19 Steven McCarthy, “Missing a Type of
Design: A Review of Make It New: The
and the Adobe designs are without dispute, they were largely absent from
History of Silicon Valley Design by Barry M. typography’s theoretical polemics of the 1980s and 1990s. This was when
Katz,” The Design Journal 19, no. 3 (2016):
the use of digital technology contested some notions of history and enabled
537, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1460692
5.2016.1152042.
designers to imagine a typographically progressive future. This is best exem-
20 Rudy VanderLans, Emigre No. 70: The plified by a contemporary of those associated with Stanford’s digital typog-
Look Back Issue — Selections from Emigre
raphy program, in both time and place: the celebrated type designer Zuzana
Magazine #1–#69 (Berkeley: Gingko
Press, 2009), https://www.emigre.com/
Licko. “Across the Bay in Berkeley, Zuzana Licko of Emigre (a digital foundry
BooksCds/Emigre70. and experimental magazine) used an Apple Macintosh to create bitmapped
21 Rudy VanderLans, “Suzanne Licko: Citizen
and vector-based type designs that became the vocabulary of graphic design’s
(in Berkeley),” Emigre, no. 15 (1990): 8,
http://www.emigre.com/Licko3.php.
avant garde from the mid-1980s through the 1990s.”19
22 Stanford University, Stanford University Licko’s early bitmapped typeface designs Oakland and Emperor celebrated,
Bulletin, 1983–1984, 320.
rather than compensated for, the pixelated artifacts of low resolution printing.
23 Stanford University, Stanford University
Bulletin: Courses and Degrees (Stanford:
This aesthetic soon developed a following among graphic design’s progres-
Stanford University, 1984–85), 333, sive practitioners, and was debated by academics and design professionals.20
available at https://exhibits.stanford.edu/
Licko stated: “I read Chuck Bigelow’s writings on the subject of digital type. I
stanford-pubs/catalog/jv126qc0516.
24 Stanford University, Stanford University
was fascinated and agreed with a lot of the things he was saying, but when I
Bulletin: Courses, Degrees, and Information looked at the visual results I was a bit disappointed with how traditional his
(Stanford: Stanford University, 1994–95),
type still looked. So I saw that there was something unexplored and inter-
184, available at https://exhibits.
stanford.edu/stanford-pubs/catalog/
esting there and I wanted to try my own hand at it.”21
fm462df0605. As he was in a teaching rather than a research appointment, perhaps
Bigelow was more concerned with typographic instruction than with setting
aesthetic trends. His initial course offering, from 1983, was Art 265: Problems
in Grammatology. Its description said, “Selected topics in the art and science
of writing, including digital typography, legibility, alphabetic transformation,
non-Latin letterforms.”22 A year later the course was titled “Digital Gramma-
tography,” and was now housed in the Department of Computer Science.
In 1984, and for a decade afterward, Bigelow regularly offered a course
that was titled Concepts of Text through the Department of Computer Science
(co-listed as Art 281). It purported to teach “what every literate person should
know about the basic principles of the visual organization of text. Subjects
include handwriting, typewriting, typography, and computerized documents.
Perceptual, linguistic, and semiological issues will be discussed. Coursework
will consist primarily of visual exercises. No prerequisites.”23
In 1994, this course morphed into Concepts of Text for Human-Computer
Interfaces. The description now said, “Fundamentals of typographic design for
computer-user interfaces. Topics: font aesthetics and technology; perception,
reading, and legibility; form, pattern, and texture in the typographic image;
text organization; integration of text and image; semiology and semiotics of
writings systems.”24 In this decade-long curricular evolution, Bigelow’s em-
phasis shifts from alphabets and the art of lettering to typographic and textual
 552 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

25 Donald E. Knuth, “The Concept of a concerns, with the latter being challenges best handled by machines running
Meta-Font,” Visible Language 16, no.
computer software.
1 (1982): 6, http://visiblelanguage.
herokuapp.com/issue/61.
26 Michael Downes, “TEX and LATEX 2e,”
Notices of the AMS 49, no. 11 (2002):
The Euler Project: Knuth, Zapf, and Graduate Students
1389, available at https://www.ams.org/
journals/notices/200211/comm-downes.
Returning to Bigelow’s Computer Science Department colleague, Donald
pdf. Knuth developed two seminal software programs that contributed to the
27 Siobhan Roberts, “The Yoda of
development of digital typography. Knuth created MetaFont, a vector-based
Silicon Valley,” The New York Times,
December 17, 2018, https://www.
type design description language, in 1979 and a more perfected version in
nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/don- 1984.25 TeX (pronounced “tech”), his digital type formatting system, was
ald-knuth-computers-algorithms-pro-
developed around the same time26 and “remains the gold standard for all
gramming.html.
28 Susan D’Agostino, “The Computer
forms of scientific communication and publication. Some consider [TeX]
Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories,” Dr. Knuth’s greatest contribution to the world, and the greatest contribu-
Quanta (online), April 16, 2020, https://
tion to typography since Gutenberg.”27 The Metafont software was used for
www.quantamagazine.org/computer-sci-
entist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-tell-
designing letterforms (stroke widths and ratios, letter shapes, serifs, and so
ing-stories-20200416/. on) while TeX was for setting type in page layouts (lines, columns, justifica-
29 Donald Knuth, Knuth–Zapf personal
tion, hyphenations, and more). TeX also addressed the particular spacing
correspondence dated August 30, 1979,
Stanford University Library Archives.
challenges of setting mathematical formula, of concern to Knuth, a mathe-
30 Hermann Zapf, “The Life Story of matician. Furthermore, Knuth’s philosophy of literate programming — using
Hermann Zapf: A New Start in Darm-
prosaic writing to tell stories of coding and algorithms — merited excellence
stadt,” Linotype (online), accessed
September 8, 2020, http://download.
in letterform design and typesetting.28
linotype.com/free/howtouse/ZapfBiog- Bigelow’s interest in digital letterform design and Knuth’s desire for high
raphy.pdf.
quality typography for mathematics converged in a unique project — the
31 Charles Bigelow, Bigelow–Siegel personal
correspondence dated February 18, 1984,
Euler Project. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) wanted a com-
Stanford University Library Archives. prehensive font for setting mathematical notation that was compatible with
32 David Siegel, Euler notebook, Stanford
the glyphs of typical typefaces: alpha-numeric characters, punctuation,
University Library Archives (ca. 1984).
diacritical marks, and so on. To the resources of two world-leading profes-
sors and their graduate students in the digital typography program, another
talent was added to the Euler Project: German typographer and calligrapher
Hermann Zapf.
Knuth had initially corresponded with Zapf in 1979; apparently Zapf was
interested in the potential of MetaFont software, and Knuth was a fan of
Zapf’s typography: “PS. Chancery: I love it!”29 Knuth extended an invitation
to Zapf — who had a professorship at the Rochester Institute of Technology
(RIT) in New York — to come to Stanford and learn about MetaFont and TeX.
Zapf was already an early adopter of computerized typesetting, as evidenced
by a 1964 lecture he gave on the topic to visual arts students at Harvard
University.30 Well-regarded internationally for designing the typefaces Pala-
tino (1948), Melior (1952), and Optima (1958) among others, Zapf visited
campus in February 1980.
The AMS initially approached Bigelow in early 1981 about creating a
digital version of a font that had been created for phototypesetting. “My es-
timate of the time and expense required to do this project was judged by the
AMS to be in excess of what they were willing to devote to it, and the project
was never seriously attempted.”31 A year later Bigelow had an academic
appointment at Stanford and a cohort of graduate students to engage with
the project. The Euler Project was “supported by a grant from the National
Science Foundation and paid for in part by the American Math Society.”32
 553 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

33 “About Us,” LucidaFonts, online. Bigelow had his own personal relationship with Hermann Zapf. He and
34 Kris Holmes, “ITC Zapf Chancery,” Fine
Kris Holmes, his wife and business partner, studied calligraphy with Zapf
Print 6, no. 1 (1980): 29.
35 Kris Holmes, “Remembering Hermann
at RIT during the summer of 1979.33 Just before Zapf’s visit to Stanford in
Zapf,” Bigelow & Holmes (blog), 1980, Holmes wrote a positive review of Zapf’s typeface ITC Zapf Chancery
accessed September 9, 2020, http://
(produced by the International Typeface Corporation) for the type journal
bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bige-
low-holmes/2015/06/remembering-her-
Fine Print, describing it as “vigorous, playful, and iconoclastic.”34
mann-zapf.htm. Holmes reminisced on the Bigelow & Holmes website,
36 TrueType is a proprietary, vector-based
font format developed by Apple in “In January 1986, the Apple LaserWriter Plus printer was introduced and con-
the late 1980s. It was a competitor to tained ITC Zapf Chancery in digital format so millions of people could admire
Adobe’s Type 1 format used for Post- and use it. Years later, in a memorable commencement address at Stanford,
script page definition software.
Steve Jobs said he studied chancery calligraphy at Reed College. His teacher
37 Richard Poulin, “Type Designers,” in
Typography, Referenced: A Comprehensive
was Bob Palladino, by coincidence also one of my teachers.”35
Visual Guide to the Language, History, and
Practice of Typography, ed. Allan Haley
Professor Bob Palladino had also been one of Chuck Bigelow’s teachers.
et al. (Beverly: Rockport Publishers,
2012), 83.
It is hardly a coincidence that Reed College alumni Bigelow and Holmes
38 “TDC Medal Winner — Hermann Zapf,” designed a number of typefaces for Apple, including TrueType36 versions
Type Directors’ Club, accessed September
of typefaces New York, Monaco, Geneva, and Chicago.37 This was due to
9, 2020, https://www.tdc.org/profiles/
hermann-zapf/.
the overlap between Steve Jobs’s early love of calligraphy and type, and
39 Siegel, Euler notebook, unpaginated. ­Bigelow’s and Holmes’s ability to bridge historical type design and digitiza-
40 Scott Kim, Inversions: A Catalog of
tion. Furthermore, Stanford University and Apple share a geographic loca-
Calligraphic Cartwheels (Emeryville: Key
Curriculum Press, 1996).
tion — Silicon Valley — and many design connections, such as David Kelley’s
41 Fraktur is a Germanic blackletter style design of Apple’s first computer mouse.
that was common between the twelfth
Zapf’s mastery of designing letters by hand and for machine, whether
and fifteenth centuries.
42 Donald Knuth, Knuth–Zapf correspon-
for film-based phototypesetting equipment or for computers and periph-
dence dated October 25, 1979, Stanford erals, benefitted both the computer industry and the academy. Zapf’s role in
University Library Archives; underscore
the Euler Project was primarily as letterform designer, but he also brought
in original.
qualifications in digitization. In 1976, the Rochester Institute of Technology
offered Zapf a professorship in typographic computer programming, the first
of its kind in the world.38
Bigelow and Knuth were advisors, facilitators, and technology and lo-
gistics consultants. Graduate student David Siegel is credited with program
design and execution39 and its completion was Siegel’s 1985 master’s thesis
(Figures 5a/b). His digital typography classmates Mills and Twombly con-
tributed production work.
Stanford computer science Ph.D. student Scott Kim was another partic-
ipant in the Euler Project. Kim’s work bridged calligraphy, typography, and
math, and he was an expert in creating ambigrams (words that are custom
lettered to morph into another word when read upside down, in reflection,
or in reverse, pushing the envelope of legibility).40
The AMS Euler typeface consists of Roman, Greek, and Fraktur41 alpha-
bets in medium and bold weights. Knuth provided Zapf with the mathemati-
cian’s rationale for how and why symbols and characters needed to look the
way they do:
“Mathematicians think of formulas as something they write on a blackboard
or a piece of paper, while the text is something typed. Thus, the difference
between text and math should probably be that the text is more mechanical,
the math is more calligraphic.”42
 554 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

Figures 5a and 5b Figure 6

Top, David Siegel’s Euler project notebook Bottom, Plotting the Euler typeface (Fraktur
(cover and interior page) from 1983. Repro- version) on graph paper. Reproduced with
duced with permission of Stanford Univer- permission of Stanford University Librar-
sity Libraries Department of Special Collec- ies Department of Special Collections and
tions and University Archives. SC 362, Euler University Archives. SC 362, Euler Project, III
Project, III Digital Typography, Box 2. Digital Typography, Box 2.
 555 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

Figure 7
Bitmapped versions of Euler typeface
characters. Reproduced with permission of
Stanford University Libraries Department of
Special Collections and University Archives.
SC 362, Euler Project, III Digital Typography,
Box 2, Folder 13.

43 Unknown, document in Stanford Univer- Siegel, Twombly, and Mills plotted letterform contours with numerical x
sity Library Archives (ca. 1984).
and y coordinates on finely ruled, orange-printed graph paper and sent
44 Unknown, document in Stanford Univer-
sity Library Archives (ca. 1984).
proofs to Zapf for corrections and feedback. A sticky note still clinging to one
45 David R. Siegel, The Euler Project at sheet in the archive (see Figure 6) claims that “Carol Twombly has original
Stanford (self published, 1985; Stanford
cap Y drawing (markup).”43 It is unknown, however, if Zapf saw the many
University Library Archives), 30.
46 G. F., “The Most Read Man in the
pages of MetaFont computer code behind the designs of his letters: “ddraw
World: Matthew Carter Designs What 104{w1104,w2104}.”44 Even the letters’ most elegant strokes were limited to
Everyone Reads,” Babbage: The Econo-
the resolution of output devices (Figure 7).
mist, December 2, 2010, https://www.
economist.com/babbage/2010/12/02/
In 1985 the project was finished, and the AMS had a new digital font
the-most-read-man-in-the-world. for professional-grade type setting of mathematics. For his thesis that year
47 Richard Southall, Designing New Type-
leading to an MS in Computer Science with an emphasis in digital typog-
faces with Metafont (Stanford: Stanford
University, 1985), 33, available at http://i.
raphy, Siegel published a 32-page booklet titled The Euler Project at Stanford
stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/ in an edition of 1000. Besides acknowledging the roles of Knuth, Bigelow,
tr/85/1074/CS-TR-85-1074.pdf.
and his digital typography program classmates, Siegel also credits renowned
48 Hermann Zapf, “My Collaboration with
Don Knuth and My Font Design Work,”
type designer Matthew Carter for editorial and book design consultation.45
trans. Dieter Glötzel, TUGBoat 0, no. 0 Carter was another eventual MacArthur Fellow, and has been called the
(2001): 27, available at https://tug.org/
most-read man in the world46 for the ubiquity of his type designs, particu-
TUGboat/tb22-1-2/tb70zapf.pdf.
larly for client Microsoft.
In his paper “Designing New Typefaces with Metafont,” Richard Southall,
a Stanford computer science faculty member and contributor to AMS Euler,
states, “Siegel argues that, even in spite of its unfortunate history, the Euler
project eventually achieved a productivity that was comparable with that
of conventional systems for the production of digital type.”47 It is uncertain
what the unfortunate history was. Zapf, in an essay titled “My C ­ ollaboration
with Don Knuth and My Font Design Work,” says “the Euler project … should
have been finalized for the 200th anniversary of Euler’s death … in 1783.
But it took us until 1985 to finish the type family named after him.”48 It is
not known if the unfortunate history was perhaps due to missed deadlines,
 556 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

49 “Reading Digital Symposium Speakers:

Charles Bigelow,” Rochester Institute of technology problems, craftsmanship issues or disagreements about letter-
Technology, accessed September 8, 2020, form aesthetics.
https://www.rit.edu/cias/readingdigital/
In any regard, the Euler Project might represent the pinnacle of achieve-
speakers.php#bigelow.
50 Frank Romano, “Remembering Hermann ment for Stanford’s graduate program in digital typography. Once its ini-
Zapf (Nov. 8, 1918–June 4, 2015),” tial cohort of students graduated, the program folded. Bigelow continued
Museum of Printing, accessed September
teaching at Stanford until 1995, resigning from a tenured associate professor
9, 2020, https://museumofprinting.org/
blog/remembering-hermann-zapf/. (teaching) position. He eventually became the Melbert B. Cary, Jr. Professor
51 “The Life Story of Hermann Zapf: the of Graphic Arts at the Rochester Institute of Technology49 in 2006, retiring
Zapfino Story,” Linotype, accessed Sep-
from RIT in 2012.
tember 8, 2020, https://www.linotype.
com/1494-12712/the-zapfino-story.html.
52 Ibid., online.
Zapfino’s Digital Roots

In a related story that attests to Stanford’s reputation for combining tech-

nology and entrepreneurship, David Siegel approached Hermann Zapf a
few years after the Euler Project with a proposal to digitize one of Zapf’s
calligraphic alphabets.50 Siegel’s apparent motivation was to develop a
font with multiple versions of letters, so that even when machine-set the
type would retain calligraphy’s more hand-rendered look. Work com-
menced — and abruptly stopped.
Zapf lamented,
“But just when everything was nearly done, I received a sad letter from Dave
Siegel. His girlfriend had left him. He had no interest in anything anymore.
No more types for him. It was all I could do to convince him not to take his
own life. After all, I said, there are plenty more pretty girls in California, and
elsewhere besides.”51

The typeface that Siegel had initiated but never produced would evolve into
Zapfino (Figure 8), the widely used, flowery script typeface that Zapf even-
tually completed with the German type foundry Linotype. With its swashes,
flourishes, and ornaments — “Zapfino has ladies’ hands as pointers”52 — it
was another pretty girl (to use Zapf’s term) that got away. This could be

Figure 8
Hermann Zapf’s typeface Zapfino with
­manicule (pointer), designed for Linotype.
© Monotype.
 557 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

53 Charles H. House and Raymond L. Price, interpreted as the kind of historicism favored by Bigelow and imparted to his
The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and
graduate students — using contemporary technology to create nostalgia for
Business Transformation (Palo Alto:
Stanford Business Books, 2009), 234.
the older craft of calligraphy.
54 K. Cleo R. Huggins, Egyptian Hieroglyphs To Siegel’s credit — and in spite of his personal challenges — he recog-
for Modern Printing Devices (Stanford:
nized the potential for digital typography to achieve two things crucial to
Stanford University, 1988), available at
https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/
effective calligraphy created on the computer. One, that the ability of a dig-
a326695.pdf. ital typeface to have a large catalog of varying glyphs (the discrete charac-
ters, numerals and punctuation used to set text) gives the type a semblance
of hand-rendered irregularity. Zapfino has multiple versions of each letter,
generally between four and eight glyphs per character. And two, typesetting
software has the ability to discern context — it chooses the most appropriate
glyph depending on the letters that precede and follow it. This allows certain
letter strokes and swashes to flow into or connect with succeeding letters in
a pleasing way.

Conclusion

Although courses in letterform design, typography and graphic design more

generally were offered at Stanford before and after the digital typography
program and Bigelow’s tenure on campus, the 1980s represented a time
of intense focus in this area of study and creative production. Perhaps one
reason for the dissolution of the digital typography program was the lack of
interaction between the Joint Program in Design and tracks in product and
visual design, as there was little overlap between faculty, graduate student
cohorts, or coursework.
This was a lost opportunity, as two Joint Program graphic design faculty
in particular — Department of Art professors Jan Molencamp and his suc-
cessor Greg Lynch — had interests and abilities in typography. Both taught
typography courses in Stanford’s well-equipped letterpress studio and were
early adopters of digital technology. Molencamp is credited with teaching
typography to a youthful David Kelley53 in the late 1970s, and he eventu-
ally designed digital type for Hewlett Packard. In her Master of Science in
Computer Science thesis, titled “Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Modern Printing
Devices” — funded, interestingly, by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, an arm of the U.S. Department of Defense — digital type stu-
dent Cleo Huggins thanks Charles Bigelow, Donald Knuth, and “Greg Lynch
for keeping sight of the spirit of design.”54 This hints at what could have been
a collaborative relationship between the digital typography program and the
Joint Program in Design; unfortunately, this was not fully realized.

Figure 9
Zuzana Licko’s typeface Modula, designed
for Emigre. © Emigre.
 558 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

The aforementioned disconnect between the era’s progressive typog-

raphy and Bigelow’s (and his students’) historicist approach to type design
may have been another reason Stanford’s digital type program ended.
Although the technology was cutting edge, the program’s type aesthetics
honored traditional forms over experimental ones. None of the Stanford pro-
gram’s typographers were mentioned in British design author and critic Rick
Poynor’s influential 1991 book Typography Now, which provided an over-
view of late twentieth century postmodern type design.55 Designs by Zuzana
Licko of digital type foundry Emigre were featured prominently, however,
including her digital typefaces Oakland and Modular (Figure 9), designed in
1985.56 “Modula was the first high resolution headline typeface that Licko
designed using the Macintosh. It was created during a time when much of
the industry’s digital font creation efforts were concentrated in the mechan-
ical digitization of traditional photo or lead typeface designs.”57
Figure 10 Bigelow seems to have not fully heeded the advice from his teacher and
Typeface Trajan in film poster (detail).
collaborator in this reminiscence about a summer workshop with Hermann
© 2001 by Universal City Studios LLC.
Zapf at the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1979. “Zapf told his type
classes about his work in digital type, such as [the typefaces] Marconi and
Edison, and emphasized his conviction that type artists should create new
designs for new technologies, and avoid making, as he put it, ‘warmed over’
versions of older designs.”58 Zapf himself stated this more emphatically, and
more presciently, in 1968: “Electronics will soon force its claims upon letter-
55 Rick Poynor, Typography Now: The Next
Wave (London: Booth-Clibborn Editions,
forms, and let us hope it will liberate us from the dust of the past.”59
1991). Stanford’s digital typography program graduated only five master’s
56 Ibid., 190, 196.
students before folding in the late 1980s. Adobe’s early typographic
57 “Modula,” Emigre, accessed September
8, 2020, https://www.emigre.com/Fonts/
­designs relied heavily on its graduates, so Bigelow’s ideas were propagated
Modula. throughout the industry. Program graduate Carol Twombly’s Trajan type-
58 Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes, “How
face has been so widely used for Hollywood film titles and posters that
and Why We Designed Lucida,” Bigelow &
Holmes (blog), accessed September 8, 2020,
it has entered pop culture as a visual trope for grandeur, classicism, and
https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/ epic narratives (Figure 10). Knuth’s TeX and Metafont preceded Adobe’s
bigelow-holmes/2014/10/how-and-why-
­industry-standard Postscript® page definition language, and “went around
we-designed-lucida.html.
59 Lynn Ruggles, “Letterform Design Systems”
the world installed on all larger computer systems at universities and was
(report, Stanford University, 1983), avail- the first commonly used [desktop publishing] program.”60 Bigelow’s type-
able at http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/
face Lucida Grande and Zapf’s Zapfino are included in the operating system
reports/cs/tr/83/971/CS-TR-83-971.pdf.
60 Nicole Miñoza, “Dr. Donald E. Knuth
of every new Apple Macintosh computer shipped through April 2020.61 The
to Be Honored with Third Dr. Peter typeface family AMS Euler is in its third version (3.0)62 and continues to be
Karow Award During ATypI Amsterdam,”
used for typesetting mathematics.
Adobe Typekit Blog, September 17, 2013,
https://blog.typekit.com/2013/09/17/
The fields of contemporary typography, type design, and graphic design
dr-peter-karow-award/. more generally have threads to the technological innovations and aesthetic
61 “Fonts included with macOS High Sierra,”
influences that arose from Stanford’s digital typography program. The brief
Apple, accessed September 9, 2020, https://
support.apple.com/en-us/HT207962.
history related in this article helps demonstrate that through its type de-
62 “TeX Resources: AMS Fonts,” American signs, software coding, technological advances, collaborative production,
Mathematical Society, accessed September
interdisciplinary research, and impact on industry, Stanford University’s
9, 2020, http://www.ams.org/publications/
authors/tex/amsfonts.
highly regarded63 digital typography program has a critical place in recent
63 Miñoza “Dr. Donald E. Knuth,” online. typographic history.
559 McCarthy: Digital Typography at Stanford

Declaration of Interests

There are no conflicts of interest involved in this article. For full disclosure,
the paper’s author was a graduate student in the Joint Program in Design
from 1983–85, and a designer of publications and exhibits in the Stanford
University Library from 1986–89, so this article also includes statements
based on personal observation and recollection.

References
Adobe. “Tekton.” fonts.com (online). Accessed September 8, 2020. https://www.fonts.
com/font/adobe/tekton/story.
Bigelow, Charles. “Notes on Lucida Designs.” Tug.org, November 2005. https://tug.org/
store/lucida/designnotes.html.
Bigelow, Charles, and Kris Holmes. “How and Why We Designed Lucida.” Bigelow &
Holmes (blog). Accessed September 8, 2020. https://bigelowandholmes.typepad.
com/bigelow-holmes/2014/10/how-and-why-we-designed-lucida.html.
CACM staff. “ACM’s Turing Award Prize Raised to $1 Million.” Communications of the
ACM 57, no. 12 (2014): 20. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1145/2685372.
Ching, Francis D. K. Architectural Graphics, 6th ed. Hoboken; Wiley and Sons, 2015.
D’Agostino, Susan. “The Computer Scientist Who Can’t Stop Telling Stories.”
Quanta (online), April 16, 2020. https://www.quantamagazine.org/
computer-scientist-donald-knuth-cant-stop-telling-stories-20200416/.
Downes, Michael. “TEX and LATEX 2e.” Notices of the AMS 49, no. 11 (2002): 1384–91.
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/200211/comm-downes.pdf.
Dreyfus, John. “A Turning Point in Type Design.” Visible Language 19, no. 1 (1985):
11–22. http://visiblelanguage.herokuapp.com/issue/73.
G. F. “The Most Read Man in the World: Matthew Carter Designs What Everyone
Reads.” Babbage: The Economist, December 2, 2010. https://www.economist.com/
babbage/2010/12/02/the-most-read-man-in-the-world.
Holmes, Kris. “ITC Zapf Chancery.” Fine Print 6, no. 1 (1980): 29.
Holmes, Kris. “Remembering Hermann Zapf.” Bigelow & Holmes (blog). Accessed Sep-
tember 9, 2020. http://bigelowandholmes.typepad.com/bigelow-holmes/2015/06/
remembering-hermann-zapf.htm.
House, Charles H., and Raymond L. Price. The HP Phenomenon: Innovation and Business
Transformation. Palo Alto: Stanford Business Books, 2009.
Huggins, K. Cleo R. Egyptian Hieroglyphs for Modern Printing Devices. Stanford: Stanford
University, 1988. https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a326695.pdf.
Kim, Scott. Inversions: A Catalog of Calligraphic Cartwheels. Emeryville: Key Curriculum
Press, 1996.
King, Emily. “New Faces (Chapter 2: The West Coast),” Typotheque (Emily King’s doc-
toral thesis; online), January 23, 2005, https://www.typotheque.com/articles/
new_faces_chapter_two_the_west_coast.
Knuth, Donald E. “The Concept of a Meta-Font.” Visible Language 16, no. 1 (1982): 3–27.
http://visiblelanguage.herokuapp.com/issue/61.
McCarthy, Steven. “Missing a Type of Design: A Review of Make It New: The History of
Silicon Valley Design by Barry M. Katz.” The Design Journal 19, no. 3 (2016): 535–39,
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2016.1152042.
McCarthy, Steven. Design at Stanford: A Visual History of Thinking and Doing. San Fran-
cisco: Blurb, 2019.
McVarish, Emily. “‘The Crystal Goblet’: The Underpinnings of Typographic Convention.”
Design and Culture 2, no. 3 (2010): 285–307. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2752/1754707
10X12789399279831.
560 she ji  The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation  Vol. 6, No. 4, Winter 2020

Miñoza, Nicole. “Dr. Donald E. Knuth to Be Honored with Third Dr. Peter Karow Award
During ATypI Amsterdam.” Adobe Typekit (Blog), September 17, 2013. https://blog.
typekit.com/2013/09/17/dr-peter-karow-award/.
Poggenpohl, Sharon Helmer, ed. Visible Language 19, no. 1 (1985): 1–167. http://visi-
blelanguagejournal.com/issue/73.
Poulin, Richard. “Type Designers.” In Typography, Referenced: A Comprehensive Visual
Guide to the Language, History, and Practice of Typography, edited by Allan Haley,
Richard Poulin, Jason Tselentis, Tony Seddon, Gery Leonidas, Ina Saltz, Kathryn
Henderson, and Tyler Alterman, 68–121. Beverly: Rockport Publishers, 2012.
Poynor, Rick. Typography Now: The Next Wave. London: Booth-Clibborn Editions, 1991.
Riggs, Tamye. “The Adobe Originals Silver Anniversary Story: Expanding the Orig-
inals.” Typekit (blog), June 30, 2014. https://blog.typekit.com/2014/06/30/
the-adobe-originals-silver-anniversary-story-expanding-the-originals/.
Roberts, Siobhan. “The Yoda of Silicon Valley.” The New York Times, December 17, 2018.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/17/science/donald-knuth-computers-algo-
rithms-programming.html.
Romano, Frank. “Remembering Hermann Zapf (Nov. 8, 1918–June 4, 2015).” Museum
of Printing. Accessed September 9, 2020. https://museumofprinting.org/blog/
remembering-hermann-zapf/.
Ruggles, Lynn. “Letterform Design Systems.” Report, Stanford University, 1983.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/83/971/CS-TR-83-971.pdf.
Siegel, David R. The Euler Project at Stanford. Self published, 1985; Stanford University
Library Archives.
Southall, Richard. Designing New Typefaces with Metafont. Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity, 1985. http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/cs/tr/85/1074/CS-TR-85-1074.
pdf.
Stanford University. Stanford University Bulletin: Courses and Degrees. Stanford: Stan-
ford University, 1983–84. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/stanford-pubs/catalog/
fh842qn1658.
Stanford University. Stanford University Bulletin: Courses and Degrees. Stanford: Stan-
ford University, 1984–85. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/stanford-pubs/catalog/
jv126qc0516.
Stanford University. Stanford University Bulletin: Courses, Degrees, and Informa-
tion. Stanford: Stanford University, 1994–95. https://exhibits.stanford.edu/
stanford-pubs/catalog/fm462df0605.
Stock-Allen, Nancy. Carol Twombly: Her Brief but Brilliant Career in Type Design (New
Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2016), 51.
Ulrich, Ferdinand P., Jack Stauffacher, Donald Knuth, Hermann Zapf, and John
Dreyfus. “From Punch Cutters to Number Crunchers.” Eye 24, no. 94 (2017): online.
http://www.eyemagazine.com/feature/article/from-punch-cutters-to-number-
crunchers.
VanderLans, Rudy. “Suzanne Licko: Citizen (in Berkeley).” Emigre, no. 15 (1990):
online. http://www.emigre.com/Licko3.php.
VanderLans, Rudy. Emigre No. 70: The Look Back Issue — Selections from Emigre Maga-
zine #1–#69. Berkeley: Gingko Press, 2009. https://www.emigre.com/BooksCds/
Emigre70.
Warde, Beatrice. “The Crystal Goblet, or Why Printing Should Be Invisible.” In Graphic
Design Theory: Readings from the Field, edited by Helen Armstrong, 39–43. New
York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.
Zapf, Hermann. “My Collaboration with Don Knuth and My Font Design Work,” trans-
lated by Dieter Glötzel, TUGBoat 0, no. 0 (2001): 26–30. https://tug.org/TUGboat/
tb22-1-2/tb70zapf.pdf.
Zapf, Hermann. “The Life Story of Hermann Zapf: A New Start in Darmstadt.” Linotype
(online). Accessed September 8, 2020. http://download.linotype.com/free/how-
touse/ZapfBiography.pdf.