DIGITAL AGE SPAWNS NEW TYPEFACES.

Byline: Caitlin Liu The New York Times

It had to be sulky and sultry, just like Marlene Dietrich.

With those sparse instructions from the client, a style magazine, David A. Berlow, a font designer, created Belucian, a curvaceous, low-hanging typeface that sashays across the page just as the husky-voiced ice queen herself might traverse a movie set.

Berlow, who is also the president of the Font Bureau Inc. in Boston, is part of a new generation of designers of typefaces, or fonts, that has emerged since the birth of the Apple Macintosh and desktop publishing in 1984.

But the digital technology that made designing type simpler has made the profession more difficult. More designers means more competition and lower prices. And the technology that makes type easier to design has also made it easier to steal.

There are about 500 designers worldwide these days who ponder the curves of an S or try to create a more beautiful or shocking letter B, and half of those are in the United States, according to Frank Romano, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and a historian of type design. That compares with about 20 in the days of metal type, which lasted through the 1960s, and about 50 during the subsequent reign of phototype.

The profession was exclusive because designing type was both expensive and time consuming. Only a handful of foundries owned the machines needed to produce new fonts in metal type or phototype. Today, anyone armed with a personal computer and software like Fontographer or Ikarus can design fonts.

``The secret is out,'' said Edward Benguiat (pronounced Ben-GAT), one of the giants in typeface design who has created more than 600 fonts. ``Type has been liberated.''

The great emancipator, of course, is digital technology. From the 15th century days of Johann Gutenberg, who is credited with inventing movable type, to the time of William Caslon of Britain in the 18th century through the lifetime of the American Frederic W. Goudy early this century, it took years to develop a font, Romano said.

Nowadays, with the right software, it can take just 45 seconds to produce a font, Berlow said.

Today more than 100 small foundries and independent designers are moving into territory once occupied by a few large companies, like Monotype Typography Inc. and the Linotype-Hell Co.

In addition to Monotype and Linotype, large companies with more than 1,000 fonts to their credit include Adobe Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.; the Agfa EPS Division of the Bayer Group of Germany; and the International Typeface Corp. of New York. But also elbowing their way into the market are smaller font houses like Emigre Inc. in Sacramento, Calif., and Garagefonts in Del Mar, Calif. People in the industry estimate that 50,000 to 60,000 fonts are now in use.

Some of the older companies have adjusted. Some have not. Monotype, founded in 1897 as a hot metal type company, began to focus on the computer font market in 1990, said Steve Kuhlman, vice president for sales and marketing. But the American Type Founders Co. in Elizabeth, N.J., once the largest type foundry in this country, went out of business in 1993.

Many designers say that the boom in the font trade does not improve the product. For some, the painstaking design process has not changed much since the days of Gutenberg.

For example, it took Berlow three months to research, conceptualize and refine all the characters of Belucian, which, intended for headlines, had to be easy to read but was also obliged to whisper subliminal messages of ``va-va voom.''

``It's like a harmonica,'' said the 70-year-old Benguiat, whose clients have included the AT&T Corp. and the Barcelona Olympics. ``You can blow on it and make a lot of noise, but it won't be anything. You can't just give a person a computer and have that person design a typeface.''

A good typeface, Benguiat said, ``has a rhythm - it flows.''

In essence, the new technology has made good designers better, but having an expensive Macintosh filled with software does not make someone a designer.

Erfert Norton, author of ``The Macintosh Font Book'' sees a divergence in the popular font styles. There are grunge fonts and bizarre designs with illegible letters, but at the same time, there is a revival of fonts that ``hit a classical chord.'' Caslon, named after the 18th century designer, remains a favorite.

The typeface business, after all, is a fashion business. The hottest fonts right now are ``retro,'' Benguiat said, ``like platform shoes.''

While the number of people who design fonts seriously is believed to be in the hundreds, thousands dabble in the craft.

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Photo: (Color) Edward Benguiat, one of the giants of typefa ce design, displays some of his 600 fonts.

The New York Times