Fuse 1-20 : from invention to antimatter : twenty years of Fuse

From Invention to Antimatter : Twenty years of Fuse

Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft launched Fuse in 1991 as a counterblast against typographic formalism and the sterility of late-1980s commercial visual communication.

Fuse was published quarterly, each issue constructed around a theme, inviting four designers to produce a typeface and a poster. Fonts were loaded onto floppy discs and packaged in a brown cardboard box that included the posters and an insightful editorial by Wozencroft.

Most importantly, they used their ambitious, self-published journal as a means of exploring the unmapped potential of the new digital technology. The impetus behind Fuse was the democratizing power of the computer.

Brody, Wozencroft and their collaborators demonstrated that the computer was a tool of liberation. They thumbed their noses at conventional ideas of typographic and linguistic purity by inciting users to make their own fonts, to extend and adapt existing typefaces and to stretch syntactical meaning to breaking point. As Wozencroft points out in the first issue, « abuse is part of the process. »