Doyald Young, a logotype designer and teacher whose three monographs on letterforms and alphabets, including the provocatively titled “Dangerous Curves,” reintroduced classical design principles to designers at a time when inelegant lettering was in vogue, died on Feb. 28 in Sherman Oaks, Calif. He was 84.

The cause was complications of heart surgery, said the designer Petrula Vrontikis, a colleague.

Type designers are usually invisible to the public, even when the typefaces they create are given their own name (as three of Mr. Young’s were). But Mr. Young, who was known in design circles for his elegant curvilinear faces rooted in 16th- and 17th-century verities, built a solid reputation during his 30 years of teaching at Art Center College of Design (formerly the Art Center School) in Pasadena, Calif., as a mentor of typographers and graphic designers.

When digital programs like Fontographer made it easy for anyone with a computer to create typefaces, many of them purposefully inelegant, he advocated a high level of craftsmanship that he believed had been lost. In so doing, Mr. Young challenged a new generation to reject so-called grunge design in favor of precision.