Color will be the new Italic. Color will be the new Bold.

Some time ago we asked ourselves the question: ‘Why do type designers traditionally think in black and white?’

Why indeed? The world is colorful, the web is colorful, Hollywood does not produce any black-and-white movies anymore… Only type designers continue to think in these restrictive terms. Typographers today are living in the Golden Age of design. Software for designing a book or a typeface has never been so simple, and it is also easy accessible to almost everybody. Examples of archetypal typefaces or books are visible online. Modern printing techniques and software techniques allow us to experiment with a wide range of possibilities. From paper to a computer screen or from a two-dimensional model to a three-dimensional prototype. The results of these experiments can be shared via all kinds of social media with anyone anywhere in the world. We are intrigued and fascinated by all these new possibilities and we would also like to share our experiments with the rest of the world.

Are typographers and type designers really black-and-white thinkers? Are they really so conservative as to think that text in books, periodicals, newspapers and other print, including the text on your laptop, tablet or mobile phone, should always be black? There’s plenty of color in the print media, at least in illustrations, and occasionally we come across a color headline. Traditionally, texts in manuscripts were written in black, or nearly black, ink. Gutenberg’s invention did not make it easy, technically, to print a second color. So from 1450 up to now, text has mostly been presented to us in a single color: black.
But this is going to change.

(Preface by Gerard Unger in Novo Typo Color Book, text and design by Mark van Wageningen)

We invite you to join the discussion and share thoughts with us. Follow the project via https://www.facebook.com/novotypo/ or via http://www.novotypo.nl/