The Last Font explores the development of the Egyptian (also known as Slab-serif) typefaces in the context of cultural, economic and technical changes through the 19th and 20th centuries.

Before photography, complex layouts and more subtle advertising techniques, these letterforms were developed, decorated and ornamented to the extreme in order to give commercial messages greater impact following the rapid growth of advertising that came with the industrialisation. Soon overtaken by a range of new communication tools, these were the last fonts where the shapes of the letters were allowed such a great part in the process of communication.

This paper examines the development of Egyptians through the media theories of Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy) and Friedrich Kittler (Gramophone, Film, Typewriter), rhetoric theories of Richard A. Lanham (The Economics of Attention) and visual information analysis by Charles Kostelnick and Michael Hassett (Shaping Information–the Rhetoric of Visual Conventions), in order to open up the discourse and unveil a range of new questions related to visual communication.

The work does offer not rules for the use of Egyptian typefaces, but through a broad range of theoretical reference wishes to provide new approaches to the design discourse, for practitioners from the typographic field as well as from related design and communication fields.

Closely linked to my writing is the development of Mido, my own Egyptian typeface. My discoveries while developing the typeface will contextualise the arguments, while the theoretical explorations give new insight to the construction of these letterforms.