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Wim Crouwel. Vormgevers. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1968
“Although drawn by hand with a pen, a straight edge and a compass, the monolithic geometric shapes of the Vormgevers lettering and the poster’s imposing black and white binaries anticipated the bitmap typography of early computer displays. Letterforms are expressed as simple rectangles, softened at their joints by small arcs. Their design can be seen as part of a development process that begins with Crouwel’s New Alphabet, a speculative typeface system made in reaction to the first generation of digital typesetters, and its resolved in the typeface that designed a few years later for the Fodor Museum’s bulletins, which foreshadows dot matrix and LED type. Only appearing on the Vormgevers poster and its accompanying brochure, the alphabet was not developed any further until the Foundry, a London-based studio, completed the character set in collaboration with Wim Crouwel and released a digital version in 2003, naming it Stedelijk.”
Paul McNeil. The visual history of type. London: Laurence King, 2017 (p. 388)