Letters & Spirit. New Typography

A book by Katarzyna Nestorowicz

Letters & Spirit is an artistic research book exploring how typography transforms in the age of interfaces, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

The publication draws conceptual inspiration from The New Typography by Jan Tschichold. Nearly a century after its publication, this project proposes a renewed reflection on what “new typography” might mean today. If Tschichold responded to the industrial modernity of the 1920s, Letters & Spirit responds to platform capitalism, algorithmic systems, and generative AI. The question returns with urgency: how should form respond to its technological moment?

The book begins with a simple premise: what happens to meaning when design decisions are increasingly delegated to systems? If every form is a decision, and every decision is a form of power, typography becomes more than visual arrangement — it becomes a political, cognitive, and ethical field.

Moving between essay, case study, visual experiment, and manifesto, the publication combines theoretical research with typographic exploration, treating the page as both argument and interface. Letters are not neutral carriers of content; they are active agents within a broader cultural metabolism.

Expanding beyond its initial concept, Letters & Spirit includes invited contributions from designers and thinkers reflecting on their relationship to contemporary tools and post-AI aesthetics. It integrates archival references and research notes, making the thinking process visible rather than concealed.

Formally, the book experiments with structure, hierarchy, and reading time, questioning inherited conventions of layout and authorship. Typography here is not illustration — it is method.

Developed through international lectures, workshops, and research visits, the project operates both as a publication and as a platform for dialogue. It does not nostalgically return to modernism, nor does it uncritically embrace acceleration. Instead, it proposes a contemporary re-reading of typographic responsibility in an age of automated form production.

Project Letters and Spirit. New Typography realized as part of a scholarship from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland.