Futura Research - Typography Workshop

Futura is a geometric sans serif typeface that was originally designed by German designer Paul Renner between 1924 and 1926. Renner, prior to designing the initial letterforms that would become Futura, was a publication designer in Munich from 1908 to 1917. He was also the principal of the Printing Trade School in Munich and director of the Master School for Germany’s Printers.

Contrary to popular belief in the world of typography, Renner nor his typefaces were ever officially affiliated with the Bahaus movement of design in Germany in the 1920s. Even though he was never a part of the Bahaus school, Renner became a supporter of the movement, specifically of what was coined as the “New Typography.” This “New Typography” rejected the idea of arranging text in symmetrical columns in advertising, as had been the tradition, in favor of treating the printed page as an open field that was filled with blocks of type and illustration arranged in an asymmetrical fashion. The idea, given legs at the Bahaus school by designer Jan Tschichold in his book Die Neue Typographie (1928), became a strong element in the movement of modernist design and defined commercial print design for years to come.

In 1927, The year before Tschichold’s book was published, the Bauer Type Foundry released Futura commercially. The typeface, though preceded by other faces with varying degrees of similarity, became exceptionally popular and was a integral part in the movement toward Geometric Modernism. The forward thinking style of the typeface would prove to be timeless in the world of design.

When Renner began his sketches for Futura, he based the letters heavily on geometric forms, avoiding unnecessary embellishment in each character. This can be seen below in the initial letterforms (left), an idea that translated to an exceptionally clean and efficient typeface (right) that looks fresh even today. Futura bears the mark of a classic geometric face — a circular “O,” a simple lowercase “a,” and a relatively unified balance between character sizes.

Futura stood in contrast to other popular typefaces of the day, establishing a usable geometric style. Differences between Futura and the ever popular Helvetica (released in 1957 by the Haas Type Foundry) can be seen below. Despite its usability, Futura is generally referred to as a display face because of its low readability when set in small blocks of copy.

In addition to being a fresh new typeface and spurring modernism in print design in the late 1920s, Futura became the visual voice for a shift in the way advertising was done. 
taken from Type 101