Moonbase

Cornel Windlin created Moonbase Alpha in response to an invitation by FUSE, Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft’s experimental typographic publishing venture, in 1991. The theme of the issue was ‘(Dis-)information’, which Cornel applied to his own experience as a designer who found his work to be increasingly defined by the operating conditions and limitations of the information system he was using: the Apple Macintosh.

Highlighting the interdependencies of input and output in the interplay between designer and device, Cornel purposefully crashed the Adobe Type Manager, a piece of software tasked with optimising the appearance of PostScript fonts on screen. As a consequence, the cheap Apple StyleWriter printed the crudely pixelated screen rendering of a small-size font sample of Akzidenz Grotesk.

The information contained in the font file had been severely corrupted; the printouts were showing crude pixel compositions forming abstract patterns. After scanning them, Cornel redrew the square-pixel shapes, experimented with rounding the corners and soon arrived at his new typeface, which had been largely created by the (dis-)information system itself: a typeface that openly displayed its digital DNA.

Three decades later, Weichi He played the trick backwards, reducing Moonbase Alpha’s letter-shapes to the arrays of square-format pixels they once were. At the same time, he re-worked the actual typeface by making the curved corners more pronounced, resulting in fully circular shapes. Eventually, the two drawings were turned into a Variable Interpolated Product that re-tells the story of the creation of Moonbase Alpha: shifting between the crude pixel font that came out of the ill-fed printer and the rounded letter shapes which became an iconic mainstay of early 1990s techno culture.

It was none other than NASA who brought things full circle when they turned to Moonbase Alpha for the emblem of their 2021 Perseverance Mars Mission, thirty years after this experimental typeface, with a touch of retrofuturistic irony, had taken its name from a thrashy Sci-Fi TV series of the 1970s.

(*1964) co-founded Lineto with Stephan Müller. He primarily designs type for use in his own work, such as LL Alpha Headline and LL Lutz Headline (1992), LL Gravur Condensed (1996), LL supermax (1999) and many more. A recipient of the Jan Tschichold Prize (1997) and the Swiss Grand Prix for Design (2007), Cornel created visual identities for Schauspielhaus Zürich, the Vitra Home Collection and TATE ETC. He runs his design practice and directs Lineto out of Zurich.

Weichi He

(*1991) received a BA from Pontifical University of Chile/PUC in 2013 and an MA in Type Design from École Cantonale d’Art de Lausanne/ECAL in 2020. He released Max Fett at ECAL Typefaces in 2020. Joining Lineto in 2021, Weichi developed new and variable approaches to the seminal LL Moonbase and to LL Asphalt, re-released as LL Pirelli (both 2021), as well as contributing the ‘Fill’ style to the playfully modular LL Tabletten (2022). His small family of eight varsity styles, LL Champion, was released in early 2024, while his variable reinterpretation of Oswald Cooper’s outstanding Cooper Black (1922), called Photonic, is on view at Linetomorrow.

Designed by Cornel Windlin (1991) and Weichi He (2021). Originally released by FUSE as Moonbase Alpha in 1992. Font engineering and mastering by Alphabet, Berlin.