hey merryn, do you have access to brody's books "the graphic language of neville brody"? there are two of them. they may have more specific info about that family.

I wouldn't call Blur contemporary.
The Blur typeface was released in the early days of digital type, pre-internet. What, 15 years ago? Type culture was hugely different then.

Blur derives from photographic processes NB used for making type in the early 1980s, in Face magazine. Remember, he was traditionally educated/trained at the London College of Prining. I could be wrong, but I believe the technique involved making a negative-film-to-positive-paper contact print -- but with a layer of clear acetate between -- which will throw the image out of focus. Interestingly, Photoshop filters can produce a similar effect. But I don't know what technique he used to make the digital outlines of the FontFonts.

A snip can be found on this page at Apple.
Google Books which mention the book "The Graphic Language of Neville Brody".
Google Books which mention "Neville Brody Typeface Blur".

hi Tyler,
we have The graphic language of Neville Brody book 1 in our college library but we dont have the second book..and since Blur was released in '91-92 it doesnt say anything about it. Would there be an online version of the second book available?
cheers
Merryn

hi Tiffany
the apple page was helpful...the other two links dint yield much...thanks a lot :)
cheers
Merryn

Hi Nick,
I dunno how different this clip of info is from what you said above but im pasting it.. "Brody’s first digital typeface, Blur, is one of the first examples of a new language emerging from the Mac. An analog-digital collision, Blur is inherently soft-edged; at the time, other faces with soft edges were created by shooting traditional typeface deliberately out of focus." ...I read that Blur is usually categorised as "amorphous typeface" ...could you explain how contemporary and amorphous typefaces differ?
cheers
Merryn

Playing with effects on the PMT and copy cameras was encouraged at LCP, another effect that might have been used is to put tracing over the original to get a glow, photographed onto lith film.

Tim

one of the first examples of a new language emerging from the Mac.

That's rubbish. The "language" was already there. Check out The Face from 1983/4/5.
Note that another definitive face of early DTP era was Industria -- originally created with pen. ink, and ruler.

However, digitization did allow an outsider to get into the game, and NB was one of the founders of FontShop, which published Blur. (Although Industria came out early from Monotype I believe.)

could you explain how contemporary and amorphous typefaces differ?

Contemporary means either "at the same time as", or "at the same time as ... the present day."

There is no such thing as an amorphous typeface, as long as the alphabet is decipherable.

Hi, Merryn,

Blur indeed appears and is mentioned in the second Brody monograph, so that would be a good starting point for your research. And yes, in the book it is called an "analogue-digital collision". :-)

Nick, I believe that by "amorphous" they are referring to the difficulty of categorizing a typeface such as Blur... not to its being readable or not. The FontShop catalog has a whole section called Amorphous, for fonts with wacky shapes that defy traditional categories like Serif or Sans Serif.

Ah yes, the quirky FontFont catalogue scheme.
Historic -- Amorphous -- Handwritten -- Ironic -- Typographic.
I wouldn't take that too seriously Merryn; as a typological system it's somewhat amorphous, not to mention ironic. But very contemporary :-)

Hi Nick
thanks again...as for the typographical system..yes i know wot u mean...and it isnt helping me get a proper grasp of things either...any idea where i can get a detailed analysis on the classification of type as such? coz im still a lil confused about where Blur would fit in...or whether it does at all...

-Cheers
Merryn

Hi Ricardo
thanks for the info..but now the problem is getting hold of Brody's second book...dont have access to that one...and another query..since amorphous generally refers to fonts that cant be classified in terms of traditional categories, would studying one font belonging to that "category" and applying its characterists to that particular category help? especially since they dont seem to follow any set rules...does this also come under the 'grunge' set of typefaces...sorry if im getting the technical terms wrong...im still learning...

-Cheers
Merryn

First of all I'd say that Blur is a display typeface. Display typefaces tend to follow trends and fashion and may be contemporary in their time but grow old fast.
Brody initiated the Fuse series of experimental typefaces around the same time as Blur came out. That would be the other category I'd think of. Fuse was a platform for type designers to question the relation between form and funcion of type and to experiment with what type could communicate other than the text it displayed.

Hi Jan...
i did read that Blur was primarily developed as a display typeface...are there many logos or display panels that use Blur? cz the google serach tunred nothing solid..or may be my search criteria was wrong, but id really appreciate the help...

-Cheers
Merryn

Blur was published in 1994 and EVERYBODY used it to look up to date like with the earlier typefaces Brody did. It wore out pretty fast. I can't remember anything remarkable using that typeface other than Brody's posters. Any logo with a wordmark set in Blur would have said "Blur" instead of what it was supposed to say. I consider Blur more to be an idea published as a typeface than a typeface being designed to serve a certain purpose. This would probably describe Brody's philosophy as well. Look at amazon for "The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2". The title uses Blur.

hey Jan
thanks a lot...while lookin for the d book in amazon came across another site that featured both the books page by page :) ...and since i dint have access to book 2, it helped a lot. And on another note why exactly were the destressed fonts developed??? the ones that usually went with a lil tweaking of 'normal' typefaces?? Any idea???

-Cheers
Merryn

Like Blur being a blurred Helvetica (or similar)?
Why?
Well, we are talking experimental typography here.
Experiments are done to see what happens (if I do this or that) and to come to unexpected results. It's about breaking rules and overcoming tradition.
In the case of Blur Brody wanted the look of the typeface to show the process of its technical production (like woodcut type does). The typeface was supposed to have a human touch this way. It says all this in the book. As I said, there's an idea behind the whole thing. There has been a lot of experimenting with type back then - like combining Futura and Bodoni in a font called Fudoni for example. It's tweaking known typefaces but with a different idea.

hey Jan...
yeah, ive heard of the Fudoni :)
Coming back to the experimental typefaces, is there like a certain specific area that they feature in, like say display or text (i doubt)...i mean considering compromising wid a bit of legibility and breaking away from the norm, ultimately, where do these typefaces get used? I mite be screaming aloud my ignorance here, but i gotta start somewhere :)

-Cheers
Merryn

You have to get your hands dirty if you want to understand this more deeply.
One way would be to take the typeface for a spin and see what it can do.
Another would be to go digging for original documents. Sure, NB is (much to his chagrin) a well-documented celebrity and examples of Blur in use can be found in design literature, but one should be wary of second-hand information. To whet your appetite, here's part of a page from The Face, Oct. 1983.

You really want to find that drawer that you can stick the Blur into, don't you?

Considering the fact that something like Blur is hard to read at small sizes it's gonna be used for headlines (display).

The designers chooses a typeface depending on the project (client's briefing, content, context) and/or his personal taste. Period.

I think my favourite example for choice of typeface is David Carson setting an article about Brian Ferry in Zapf Dingbats (in Raygun that was) resulting in columns and lines full of ...eh... triangles, squares and circles.

Blur spawned at least one imitator, which was used in 1997-98 for advertising by ABC, a television network in the U.S.

http://remogeneralstore.com/presentation/presentation.cfm?ss_uid=067B4E3...

Here's a link to some articles on "contemporary" type. One of them is about Industria which also mentions Blur.

http://www.shinntype.com/Assets/Depts/Essays/Contents.html

@ Nick - yup...ready to get my hands n knees dirty..been playing around with Blur... as for original documents and design journals, dont have access to many, except for may be the eye magazine and how mag..and couple of other ones.. thanks a lot for the image from The Face...also came across some of your articles on Typographica and Shinntype ..thanks again..

@ Jan - yes! i really am hoping to find the drawer to stick Blur and probably all the other typefaces into... atleast, for a beginner like me, it makes it easier to get the hand of it... like i said my interest and exposure to typography is newfound and i guess classifying things is one of the ways im trying to get a grasp of things...been hunting for images and more info... thanks a lot.. :)

@ Marcox - thanks for the link to the abc network ... speaking of 'imitations' i did come across some very similar looking types... mistook it for Blur, but looked like it was extended or something..

@ Chuck - Thanks for the link...was really helpful... the article on industria and the 21st century typefaces was helpful...

-Cheers
Merryn

I expect it is difficult to find original artefacts such as 25-year old copies of The Face in Gujarat, (it's probably easier to pick them up in an antique/flea-market in the UK) but thanks to the internet:
http://books.search.ebay.co.uk/the-face_Entertainment_W0QQloglZ0QQsacatZ...

@ Nick - You are seriously turning out to be a life saver :). Thanks..and playing around with the typeface turned out to be useful, because stage 2 of the project is to create a wallpaper (the desktop variety) using the typeface as an image and the research data found on the type as text...so trying hard not to get influenced by the stuff done by Brody himself...

-Cheers
Merryn

Hey Nick! You just saved my life too with your ebay link, because my 25-year-old copies of The Face went missing in class; some student nicked 'em (and the NB interview in The Guardian at the time of the V&A retrospective of his work...) so now I can replace said missing mags.

It sounds like a good project Merryn.