October 1990, I am sitting at a Macintosh computer in the bench-lined Mac Room of Dun Laoghaire School of Art & Design. The monitors (screens) are small and low resolution – 640 x 480 pixels and even 512 x 342 pixels, barely conceivable by today’s standards – and only capable of displaying black or white. Type appears on screen as a pixellated approximation of how it might print. File size too is an obstacle – the only storage we have are 800k and 1.4Mb floppy disks, so if a single file exceeds this you can’t save it! Kevin the instructor is teaching a class, but I’m not interested – I am fixed on finding out what I need to know in my own way. I am in thrall to Emigré magazine. Published in California by Dutch and Czech emigrés, it’s not available in Ireland, and in these pre-internet days I’ve only ever set eyes on two or three issues. Emigré is perhaps the first magazine produced entirely with the Mac, and with its oversized monotone pages and thrilling layouts filled with exotic-seeming letterforms the self-proclaimed ‘magazine that ignores boundaries’ seems to me the epicentre of graphic design, precisely where I hunger to be. As a strategy to mitigate for the appearance of type on these lo-res monitors, Emigre develop a range of bitmap typefaces that appear in print as they do on screen – as lo-resolution bitmap letterforms.60 60. Initially these were sold individually as Emigre, Emperor, Oakland and Universal families, but are now synthesised into the ‘Lo-Res’family which replaces these preexisting typefaces: Available at: https://www.emigre.com/Fonts/Lo-Res [ Accessed 14 August 2024] I am immediately drawn to this brilliant inversion of the original problem, and I love the way it looks, but the cost of these fonts for a student is prohibitive. Instead, I look for workarounds putting the problems of screen resolution and file storage together. I notice that letterforms render differently at different magnifications in different Applications, producing idiosyncratic, bitmapped letterforms, and with the screenshot function I can capture how this appears on screen and convert type into bitmap images. I can then cut this up, enlarge it, and combine it with other fragments to make complex multi-part compositions. Working this way is efficient for storage and gives me a visual language, clearly inspired by Emigré but built on technical constraints it quickly becomes the locus for my own enquiry, with its own implications. I’m catching up.
Fig. 31 Misuse (Origins)