Amid the commotion surrounding the exhibition Talk To Me, at MoMA, there’s a quiet corner on the same floor with a selection of 23 digital typefaces from the museum’s design collection, on view for the first time - and it's a must for anyone engaged in communications today.

The name of the show is Standard Deviations: Types and Families in Contemporary Design, which refers to the departure from one of the most important tenets of Modernism – that of standardization as the foundation of industrial production. In the past it was a designer’s job to create a model that could be converted into a working prototype for objects that would then be manufactured according to exacting rules and conditions. Today manufacturing is more fluid and digital technology has made the dream of creating families of objects with common traits and distinct behaviors a reality.

Left to right: Poster design for Walker Art Center; Émigré Vol. 19; Retina Micro, E10, designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.

One of the most prevalent examples of family in design is typography; think of Neue Helvetica, with its many different weights and variations. The typefaces on view here are digital fonts, or were designed with the idea of a forthcoming digital revolution in mind. Each one responds to the technological and cultural advancements of the times and several are elegant responses to the issues of specific media. Bell Centennial, Mercury, Miller, and Retina, for example, are designed to hold up when printed on newsprint, in small sizes. Some, such as OCR-A, Oakland, Verdana, and Beowolf were created to be highly readable on CTRs and monitors rather than in print.

Others were commissioned for specific publications and institutions, including ITC Galliard, created for Harper's Bazaar under the creative direction of Fabian Baron, and Walker, created by Matthew Carter for the Walker Art Center in 1994. Typography is a design universe in itself, following - and often anticipating - social developments and, like other branches of design, finding inspiration in postmodernism, Punk, Grunge, and popular culture. Digital Age examples include Oakland, designed by Zuzana Licko of Émigré, in 1985, and Blur, mastered by Neville Brody, in 1991.

One of the nice things about this show, which is an extremely compact part of the overall exhibition, is the many examples of applications of the fonts, from pages in Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, zines, and the classifieds. Reading through the examples, I was reminded that type design has a special relationship to the social landscape - and also of the stainless steel Haberule I inherited a long time ago, whose imprinted mantra is: Nothing Speaks Louder Than Type.  The 23 fonts on view at MoMA express not only typography’s importance to cultural history but also the incredible experimentation that has taken place in this rarified field of design.

Standard Deviation: Types and Families in Contemporary Design continues through January 30, 2012 at MoMA. 11 West 53^rd Street, NY, NY. Visit the website for information about upcoming public programs.

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