FUSE

Originals and influencers from the experimental font box

Noah Nazir

Last edited March 28, 2020

Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft created FUSE in 1991, an experimental and influential typography publication that broke new ground in contemporary design. FUSE was a cardboard box containing 4 to 5 posters plus a floppy disk with as many fonts. Brody and Wozencroft gave each issue a theme and invited art-directors and type designers to create one or more experimental typeface plus corresponding poster. The result was a multi-award-winning typographic magazine that went beyond the scope of traditional typography.

Many international design stars made contributions to the quarterly FUSE: David Carson of course, Tibor Kalman, Tobias Frere-Jones and Cornel Windlin, the strong Dutch type design guild with Gerard Unger, LettError (Just van Rossum, Erik van Blokland), but also young stars like the Tomato collective, Frank Heine or Luc(as) de Groot. In the shadow of the printed magazine even a small conference series was created, with FUSE, London, FUSE Berlin and FUSE San Francisco; the Berlin event in 1995 became TYPO Berlin 1996 one year later and continued annually until 2018.

In 2013, Neville Brody published a FUSE retrospective (published by Taschen), also in a cardboard box including a dozen experimental fonts never released before.

Don Handel was a contributor to FUSE 10 (theme: Freeform).

The Handel Gothic™ typeface has been a mainstay of graphic communication for over 40 years - all the while looking as current as... Read More

Designed in 1991 for FUSE 1 (theme: Invention). According to Baines: “At college in 1983 I had drawn an alphabet based on earlier research by Brian Coe into how much (or how little) of each letter is needed for legibility. [The first version of this design] was based on this alphabet but took the idea away from the essentials and played a little more with the resultant shapes.”

FUSE Classics is a collection of some of the most interesting designs from the first years of FUSE. The designers were asked to revisit... Read More

Designed in 1991 for FUSE 1 (Invention). From the beginning, Stealth belonged to one of the most often used FUSE faces. That FUSE faces can be, in fact should be, used and modified as seen with Stealth in that it is often found as a positive version, without its black background squares.

FF Stealth is one of four fonts in the “FF FUSE Classics” package. This is a small collection of some of the most interesting designs... Read More

John Critchley was a contributor to FUSE 10 (theme: Freeform).

London designer John Critchley worked with illustrator Darren Raven to design a type family based on Darren’s spontaneous, symbolic,... Read More

The Interlace “super family” (2 weights: Single and Double) was inspired by video technology and initially designed for use on television station identities. It never quite made it there, but the Techno music generation love its weird aesthetics. Fans of FontFont and FUSE have known the Interlace designer Max Kisman for a long time. Kisman was a contributor to FUSE 2 (Runes).

Bastard is a contemporary blackletter typeface and was one of the first created using a personal computer. It was drawn by British designer Jonathan Barnbrook using primitive font design software in 1988, and refined and published two years later. Later it has been revised to feature an expanded character set. Barnbrook was a contributor to FUSE 20 (Antimatter).

In 1993, Luc(as) de Groot took some time off from the task of completing his Thesis superfamily, only to design more typefaces. Probably the most innovative and successful of these was Nebulae, where letterforms have dissolved into clouds of bubbles. The four versions can be layered in order to obtain a denser and potentially more legible structure. de Groot contributed to FUSE 11 (Pornography).