The centerpiece of the student-produced show was an interactive typographical timeline enabling viewers to create a customizable program. Photo by Nik Hafermaas

The passageway leading into the South Campus gallery is swimming in an alphabet soup of letters and familiar icons and signage, hawking everything from the latest blockbuster to cheap, fast cash loans. It’s an immersive experience in the nuanced codes and messages contained within the various fonts and typefaces that punctuate our modern landscape. This visceral typographic encounter acts as an introduction to the student-produced temporary show, 85_15 TYPOGRAPHY: PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE, which is the first exhibition to be presented by the new Hoffmitz Milken Center for Typography (HMCT), due to make its official debut on November 7 with the Symposium and Center opening celebration in its permanent space on the ground floor of ArtCenter’s 950 South Raymond building.

Students in Graphic Design’s Summer 2015 Information Design class worked with Professor Simon Johnston, who also serves as the HMCT’s Creative Director, to create a series of installations that convey the ways in which typography informs every aspect of the way we communicate and navigate our society, and vice versa. “Vernacular typography is the visual dialect of ordinary people in a specific culture,” reads the text on a panel referring to the opening tunnel of type. “Communication is achieved through language as well as the form of that language.”

Students scurry about, putting the finishing touches on their work as Johnston and HMCT Executive Director and Professor Gloria Kondrup guide visitors, including HMCT named benefactor, Lowell Milken, through the show’s various elements, which ranges from a series of displays surveying typographical technologies—digital (under construction), photo typesetting tools, analogue systems (typewriters), DIY (stencils) and letterpress— to a wall featuring all registered fonts from 1930 through the present to the heart of the exhibition which is an interactive installation illustrating the evolution of eighty years of typographic history on hole-punched paper fliers that can be compiled and bound into a fully customizable program that reflects the individual viewer’s interests.

Milken has arrived to catch an early glimpse of the soft-launch of the groundbreaking typography center, inspired by and named for his late wife, Leah Toby Hoffmitz Milken, a typographic expert and beloved professor in ArtCenter’s Graphic Design department. He’s also on hand to present two $5,000 Excellence in Typography awards to current Graphic Design students Benjamin Schwartz and Caitlin Conlen.

Lowell Milken and Professors Gloria Kondrup and Simon Johnston join student award winners Benjamin Schwartz and Caitlin Conlen

ArtCenter Graphic Design Chair Nik Hafermaas grins wildly as he congratulates his winning students. “You have no idea how proud I am of you,” enthuses Hafermaas, who is currently preparing to expand his departmental offerings to include an MFA in Graphic Design (due to launch in Fall 2016) and sees the center as a pivotal resource to his undergraduate and graduate programs. “The energy you’ve created around typography is just incredible and I can’t wait for the center to open.”

As Hafermaas steps away from the font wall, HMCT’s creative director offers up a quip that could well describe the nascent state of the HMCT itself: “The paint is still wet,” Johnston deadpans. “But enjoy.” Hafermaas quickly checks his back and lets loose a belly laugh.