Futura, built from circles and triangles, was sold as 'the typeface of our time'.
In 1927 the German designer Paul Renner released a typeface made from near-perfect circles, triangles and squares. It was marketed as the face of the future, copied by rival foundries, and still turns up from Wes Anderson films to Barbara Kruger's art. Stanley Kubrick's favourite font was a version of it.
Paul Renner began sketching Futura in 1924, and the Bauer type foundry released it in 1927. Renner wasn't part of the Bauhaus but shared much of its outlook: a modern typeface should express its own era, not revive old letterforms. Where earlier sans serifs grew out of sign painting and 19th-century types, Futura starts from geometry, with an almost circular o, a single-storey a and g, strokes of nearly even weight and tall ascenders that rise above the capitals.
The geometry is less pure than it looks. The o is very slightly oval, and round strokes thin subtly where they meet the stems, so the letters look balanced rather than mechanical. Futura also has a fairly low x-height, which makes it calmer and more suitable for body text. Renner originally planned a far stranger set of lowercase letters built from circles and triangles, but most were dropped.
Bauer marketed it as 'die Schrift unserer Zeit', the typeface of our time, and in English as 'the typeface of today and tomorrow'. It was an immediate success, and competitors rushed out geometric look-alikes. In Germany it was caught up in politics: the Nazis promoted blackletter as authentically German and rejected modern styles like Futura, though it still appeared on some Nazi material, and in 1941 the party abruptly reversed course and made Roman type the standard.
Its long life shows in its range of users. The artist Barbara Kruger built much of her work on white Futura Bold Oblique over red; Wes Anderson used it in his early films; Futura Extra Bold, from 1952, was Kubrick's favourite typeface. Adrian Frutiger cited it as an inspiration for Avenir, and IKEA's corporate typeface is based on it.
Source: Wikipedia — Futura (typeface) · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
