the 1990s early 2000s: FONT CORRUPTION, DECONSTRUCTION & communicative functionality

elliot earls, dysphasia, 1995

here is a very good historical development of typeface deconstruction. 

McCoy envisioned designers increasingly taking on "roles associated with both art and literature"53 even as they ascended into a "higher level in the business hierarchy."54 Depicting the designer as someone with the power to hold readers prisoner — or to set them free — reflected the confidence of the profession after Meggs and the Macintosh. A newly consolidated understanding of historical precedents and a tightening grip on the production process lent graphic design a new sense of coherence and power. Theoretical analyses of power relations would thus largely be confined to the interpretive authority or openness that a given graphic approach ostensibly provided. The conditions of unfreedom in which most designers still worked — such as those highlighted by Mills thirty-five years earlier — received far less attention.

In 1993, Steven Heller published his terse critique "Cult of the Ugly," a broad attack on deconstruction provoked by Cranbrook designers in particular. Heller, who was by then a prolific design journalist, had gotten his start in underground newspapers like Screw in the late 1960s. Noting the element of "critical ugliness" in Futurism, Dada, and the '60s counterculture, Heller argues that the deconstructionists seem comparatively isolated from any broader social "upheaval."

here is an interesting paragraph: 

While Heller is skeptical of the new theories animating deconstructionist design, he cautions that the style will inevitably circulate independently of its intent; a nihilistic arms race of "ugliness" might then begin to undermine the hard-won continuity of the profession.