The Museum of Modern Art in New York announced January 24 that it acquired 23 digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design Collection. The types exemplify the exclusive, the vernacular, and all points in between. The collection is a virtual anthology of technical innovation in 20th-century printing and graphic-design. Highlights include the FF Meta, a versatile classic from Erik Spiekermann; the lovably blunt OCR-A we see daily on barcodes; and Template Gothic, marked by the assertively comfortable imperfection of its genesis, a neighborhood laundromat sign.

Although the museum has a rich collection of elegant, innovative printed typographic works, its only typeface until now was the 36-point Helvetica Bold lead type, designed by Max Miedinger in 1956. The newly acquired fonts are all digital or designed with the digital revolution in mind.

From MoMA.org:

Helped by a panel of expert advisors that included graphic design critics, designers, and historians, we based our decisions on the same criteria — ranging from aesthetics to historical relevancy, from functionality to social significance, from technological ingenuity to economy — that we use when evaluating objects. We paid particular attention to the synthesis of goals, means, and elegance that we always seek in modern design.