Today, the name of French Renaissance punchcutter Claude Garamond (ca 1510–1561) is affixed to several dozens of digital fonts with wildly different designs. From the 16th century to the present era, this book attempts to describe and explain the sources of this “Garamond conundrum”, where the knowledge of the typeface itself seems to have been superseded by the fame of the name. It raises numerous cultural, aesthetic, economic and technical issues which will be of interest to all those for whom type and typography represent fundamental aspects of professional practice and expertise.

For more than four decades, Michael Bierut has been one of the most important graphic designers working in the United States, though his work and his writings are too little-known in France. This book gathers twelve short essays written between 1992 and 2013, most of them for the Design Observer blog which he co-founded in 2003. Together, they reveal a highly original professional ethos, where pragmatic modernism meets playful contextualism. Here, they are supplemented with a selection of Bierut’s most iconic design projects.