And other pioneers strongly rejected the notion of style and saw their work as an attempt to expand the parameters of typographic communication, yet their work was so widely imitated, especially in design education, that it gave rise to a prevailing typographic approach in the late 1970s and 1980s. specific design ideas explored by him and his students in the late 1960s and early 1970s and adopted a decade later include letter-spaced, sans-serif type; bold, stair-step rules; ruled lines punctuating and energizing space; diagonal type; the introduction of italic type and/or weight changes within words; and type reversed from a series of bars.