Williams’ Keywords project is seen as a call to vigilance of language’s usage as an ideological weapon. Widely influential, the project has been continued in several clear and notable forms such as:  Keywords, an online collaboration from University of Pittsburg and Cambridge University,[1] and Matthew Eagleton-Pierce's book Neoliberalism: The Key Concepts. Words emerge from historical circumstances and become weaponized in social struggle, and therefore become focus points for whole fields of domination, notably through economics. It is our aim to continue this research through a different lens.

Utopian typography, dystopian applications

International design style, also known as Swiss style (Univers, Frutiger, Avenir, Helvetica, etc) and proto-modern commercial “grotesque” typefaces (Akzidenz Grotesque, etc) are ubiquitous in public, private, and commercial space from airport, highway, and museum signage to product design, digital operating systems, and of course art. Modern typefaces were digitized, thus optimizing them further for highly efficient contemporary workflows, pervasive in communicating power. The utopian premises overflowing in avant-guard modernism have been wildly successful in techno-utopian capitalism, utilized as highly systematic tools for distinction, authority, and oppression.

20^th century Swiss designer Josef Muller-Brockmann said about typography in modern design principals “…an architectonic typography that confined itself to essentials and found a contemporary expression for universal values.”[2] One of these problematic, so-called “universal values” may be private property. The Hoover Institution, Stanford University’s conservative think tank, uses a variant of the Avenir typeface while promoting “economic opportunity and prosperity” via “private enterprise”[3] The Hoover Institution proudly publishes articles with headlines such as “Socialism Has Failed. Period.”[4] San Francisco, the typeface designed by Apple Computer for their OS interfaces and overall branding, is a blend of Helvetica and DIN. SF, as it is also known, is restricted by Apple for use only for iOS developers: “…solely for creating mock-ups of user interfaces to be used in software products running on Apple’s iOS...”[5] Neoliberalism (and its end state monopoly) has been called a political economic system of “total design,”[6] and we are seeing how design ideals such as “efficiency” and market “rationality” have become governing principals, even if they are inconsistently applied.

[1] https://keywords.pitt.edu/

[2] Eye no. 19 vol. 5, 1995

[3] Hoover Institution – Mission Statement https://www.hoover.org/about/missionhistory

[4] David R. Henderson, Socialism Has Failed. Period. August 7 2019 https://www.hoover.org/research/socialism-has-failed-period

[5] APPLE INC. LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR THE APPLE SAN FRANCISCO FONT

[6] College Art Association 2018 Conference Design and Neoliberalism: The Economics and Politics of ‘Total Design’ across the Disciplines