International typography is a name coined by American graphic designers for a typographic style whose greatest impact has been in publication design, publicity, and promotional graphics. Its origins are the several artistic revolutions against decadence and stagnation in the fine and applied arts, such as the Dada or Bauhaus movements that began shortly after the turn of the century in Europe. The two major contributions of the typographical revolution were the popularization of the sans serif type style and the development of the grid system of designing asymmetric layouts. Some other characteristics of the contemporary style were rotated copy, the use of object photography, symbols and trademarks used as design elements, exclusion of ornamentation, sparing use of color applied for emphasis rather than decoration, minimum number of type sizes in a design, no letterspaced words except for corrective purposes, figures scaled to the lowercase letter size, ragged right or unjustified composition, and the use of only lowercase letters. Though America did have some pioneers who grasped the principles of this European style, it was not until the beginning of the 1970s that the rhetoric and application of European typography was assimilated by American design texts and trade periodicals. (HOD)