New Alphabet

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This is the most famous of Crouwels fonts, so there is no better place to start. Designed in 1967, it looked to embrace the Cathode Ray Tube technology. It was made to the limitations of the new technology which struggled with digitising type and did not work over the curved edges. Because of this, New Alphabet used only vertical and horizontal lines and was designed using a monospace grid with every letter the same width and height. It followed Crouwel’s systematic gridded approach to much of his work with a page of type all aligning completely along the vertical and horizontal axis.

The majority of letters are based on 9 by 5 unit grid with 45 degree slants used on certain corners. There is no difference between the uppercase and lowercase letters. In Crouwels own words the font was ‘over-the-top and never meant to be really used. It was unreadable’. Despite this, it received massive coverage and contraversy, attracting criticism from many of his peers