Merz vs The New Typography
メルツ / ニュー・タイポグラフィ
Merz comes from Avant-garde and The New Typography from Experimental Typography. One is style and the other layout. They are reached for with some of the same intent, which is where they get confused.
Merz
A one-man movement flying as its banner a single word clipped from a bank advertisement, building compositions out of nothing but discards such as tickets, wrapping paper and torn type. Treating rubbish as structural material, and placing typographic fragments abstractly, it settled the vocabulary of collage and magazine design.
The New Typography
.jpg)
Turned printed matter into rational information structure through asymmetry, sans-serifs, photography and functional hierarchy.
| Merz | The New Typography | |
|---|---|---|
| Era | 1919–1948 | 1920s–1930s |
| Family | Avant-garde | Experimental Typography |
| Kind | Style | Layout |
| Cues | Pasted refuse such as tickets and wrappers / Fragments of torn type and numerals / Diagonal axes of construction / The colour of aged paper | Asymmetry / Sans-serif type / Photography / Functional white space |
| Best used for | Collage-driven editorial and zine layouts built from printed ephemera · Craft-minded branding that composes real tickets, stamps and offcuts | Rebuilding letterheads and forms so they read in order without ornament · Fixing the hierarchy of headline, text and picture in a single decision |
| Type | Salvaged letterpress fragments—mismatched sizes, partial words, stray numerals | One sans in two weights, with hierarchy carried by size alone |
| Composition | Tilted constructive axes locking scraps into an abstract armature | Drop centering, set a left axis, divide areas with rules and space |
| Material | Aged tickets, wrappers, stamps and torn print, glued with visible edges | Black and red, halftone photography, plain rules, no ornament |
| Caution | Picking images of junk from a stock library erases the history the found object carries and leaves applied grunge. Fragments are not nostalgic decoration, they must hold the axes of the composition. | When asymmetry becomes the aim in itself the reading order is never settled, and the page ends up harder to read than the ornamented one it replaced. |