The Museum of Modern Art in New York has acquired 23 digital typefaces for their design and architecture collection. Included are five Emigre font families: Jeffery Keedy’s Keedy Sans, Jonathan Barnbrook’s Mason Serif, Barry Deck’s Template Gothic, Zuzana Licko’s Oakland (renamed Lo-Res in 2001), and P. Scott Makela’s Dead History.
This acquisition marks the beginning of MoMA’s effort to built a collection of typefaces documenting milestone designs covering the twentieth century. Working backwards they have started with the digital era.
MoMA based its selection on criteria ranging from aesthetics to historical relevancy, from functionality to social significance, from technological ingenuity to economy. “Several of the fonts we chose visually reflect very closely the time and place in which they were made,” writes Senior Curator Paola Antonelli, “they represent a specific era in the digital revolution–the early 1990s, when digital typography was coming into its own. They were chosen based upon their importance to cultural history as well as their experimental aesthetics.”
We’re proud to be a part of this exciting new museum collection, and we’re honored to find ourselves in the company of type designers we much admire such as Matthew Carter, Jonathan Hoefler, and Erik Spiekermann.
The typefaces will be on display at MoMA New York as part of the exhibit Standard Deviations which will open March 2, 2011.