The democratic spirit of lower case script, free from hierarchical trappings, had an obvious appeal to the avant-garde, which adopted it as an emblem. As Bayer observed, modern life was too fast and too exciting to waste valuable time on stuffy formalities, such as differentiating between different categories of letters. Some businesses subsequently incorporated lowercase names in corporate identities, like the American designer Paul Rand’s 1962 circular logo for ABC Television, and his Italian counterpart Giulio Cittato’s 1971 motif for the Coin retail group, but mostly they were associated with cultural initiatives like Documenta.

In the 1990s, however, lower case script suddenly proliferated. The trigger was the Internet, which, as the decade went on, became synonymous with progress and ingenuity. Regardless of how tech-savvy — or otherwise — a company was, it could, at least, look as if it was destined for a dazzling future in the digital era by sporting a logo in the lowercase lettering used in Web site and e-mail addresses. No wonder that when the giant British oil group BP adopted a brightly colored sunflower logo designed by Landor Associates in 2001 to try to persuade the world to forget about all of the television news footage of dead birds trapped in devastating oil spills, and to think of it as a responsible, empathic company, it plumped for lower case initials. Other businesses did the same, often for similar reasons.

No longer dashingly radical, lower case lettering swiftly became a corporate cliché, which is one reason Documenta decided to do something different in its latest visual identity. Leftloft’s solution was to define a set of rules for the logo of the new edition, which would allow it to appear in any font, including hand-written ones, as long as it was printed in black and the name began with a lowercase “d” followed by capitals and the number “13” in parentheses.

As a result, every manifestation of dOCUMENTA (13) can be given its own emblem, whether it is a Web site, a book, the principal exhibition in the Fridericianum museum in Kassel, or one of the smaller satellite projects in Kabul and Cairo. And each of those symbols will be instantly recognizable as belonging to dOCUMENTA (13), unless, of course, the same typographic ploy suddenly appears in lots of other places too.