System Process Form

The ultimate typographic experiment – 7,762,392 typefaces from one of the world’s foremost typography studios

  • $95.00

In production now after being successfully funded on Volume. Estimated shipping date Autumn 2023.

System Process Form $95.00

Overview

Founded in 2009 by Paul McNeil and Hamish Muir, MuirMcNeil was established to explore the use of systematic methods in graphic design, typography and moving image. Their first publication, System Process Form, is a detailed survey of their Two type system, an extensive collection of geometric alphabets in which every stroke, shape, letterform and word is designed to correspond and collaborate in close harmony. Far from a mere catalogue of typefaces, this publication is a powerful demonstration of the beauty of analytical approaches to form-giving for visual communication, one that embraces both micro and macro views, and one whose end results can be as spectacular as they are unexpected.

Driven by numbers, rules, conditions and permutations as well as design decisions and collisions, the Two type system is a continuously evolving body of work both analog and digital, algorithmic and fortuitous, predefined and wildly unpredictable. The system comprises eight family groups, designed not as independent alphabets but as features of an expansive design space in which individual glyphs interact as variable components. A standard grid determines positioning for both shapes and spaces with every element aligning precisely, so that the superimposition of any pair of the system’s 198 modular fonts will result in a single unique instance from 39,204 possible combinations. Selected examples of these combined forms are displayed in System Process Form, along with many even more exuberant outputs composed from the millions of options afforded by the combinations of three layers.

System Process Form reveals how design can be liberated from the narrow confines of individual ideas, intentions or expressions, leaving the designer free to discover infinite new organisms rather than being obliged to invent them.

Author

Paul McNeil
Hamish Muir

Genre

Graphic Design
Typography

Imprint

Unit Editions

Specification

400 pages
325 × 240 mm
Printed in three neon inks and black
Clothbound hardcover
Covered with jacket in neon blue

MuirMcNeil makes typefaces that work in mysterious but mathematical ways. Using methods that are entirely contemporary, though they can seem arcane, they explore ‘parametric design systems’. And there is something about their commitment to a punchy, practical, systems-based approach that communicates far and wide.

John L Walters, Eye 94 (’Pleasure in the process’)

Aesthetics are usually considered a set of principles concerned with the nature of beauty, but for both of us, systems are aesthetically beautiful in themselves.

MuirMcNeil

Meet the authors

Hamish Muir was co-founder of the London-based graphic design studio 8vo (1985–2001), and co-editor of Octavo, journal of typography (1986–92). He was a senior lecturer in graphic design at the London College of Communication from 2002 to 2019, and has regularly delivered lectures, workshops and short courses to national and international institutions and audiences.

Paul McNeil is a graphic designer, educator and author. He has extensive experience in design teaching and was course leader of the master’s programme of Contemporary Typographic Media at the London College of Communication from 2010 to 2015. Seven years in the making, The Visual History of Type, McNeil’s definitive survey of type design and typography from 1450 to 2015, was published in 2017.