Armed and dangerous
In response to the Euroface project by Eugene Bügleichenhaus, I think there are many ways in which we might disagree with the methodology used by the Euroface researchers. In their attempt to construct a once-and-for-all response to problems of legibility, the team has concentrated on purely physical and formal qualities of typography in the public realm; it has completely bypassed the socio-political context and implementation of a critical world view at large. Both are of vital importance to come to terms with a generative and positive response of graphic design to shifting social communities and emerging new markets.
It must be underlined that even the typographer of road signs is a visual author, a mediator of meaning and a cultural producer. In a neo-modernist attempt to raze the terrain of post-capitalist visual production from its political implications, the typographers of the Euroface have searched refuge in a methodology that will eventually affirm the existing status quo and will, in turn, be perverted into a political weapon.
Bringing to mind the fact that biological, chemical and nuclear arms, space war technology and their likes were all initiated by ‘clean’ scientific research, in which the notion of strategic application of technology was forgotten for science’s sake, the Euroface project’s gloomy political potential is revealed in a striking new light. Bügleichenhaus c.s. have provided the establishment with yet another dangerous tool.

dr. Rüdiger Metzker
rudi@quicksoft.de
senior lecturer, Zentrum für Visuelle Kritik und Weltgestaltung, Leipzig
author of Between Marx and Meaning, Heidelberg Press, 1991

Read other expert's responses:
David Berlow
dr. Rüdiger Metzker
prof. dr. Ernst Krefeld Hansen
Gerard Unger
Gert Dumbar