For most of the 20th century decorative type was not taken seriously: Modernism with its “less is more” made it superfluous. Ornament was a crime for a long time.

But now those lettershapes are making a comeback: we see more and more display typefaces designed to be used at large sizes, mainly for titles or short sentences, and whose personality has to be apparent in just a few letters. Not created to be timeless, or with readability in mind, they catch better than others the spirit of the time.

How much contemporary type owns to the Victorian era? As part of The Herb Lubalin Study Center and Type@Cooper's Herb Lubalin Lecture Series, Marta Bernstein will go back to the origin of display typefaces and investigate the wild yet systematic experimentation that generated them. And will see if there is a lesson to be learnt.

Marta Bernstein is a designer, researcher, teacher and co-founder of the digital type foundry CAST. Type and typography are her true passions and the common threads of all her projects. She has a soft spot for 19th Century type, a topic she’s been researching for a decade. She’s given talks on various type topics at Typographics NYC, ATypI, The Letterform Archive, Typelab, Kerning Conference. She is a member of Nebiolo History Project, aiming to research archival evidence of Italy’s most renowned type foundry. She is currently Associate Creative Director at Studio Matthews in Seattle.