As a matter of fact, the popularity of Futura has made its mark on history as it was the first typeface to ever be on the moon. It catalyzed the creation of a wide range of new and similar geometric sans-serif typefaces, like Century Gothic. This typeface’s rise to popularity and fameįutura quickly became one of the most successful and used types of the 20th century. This striking balance between modernity and classic made the Futura font an immediate success. Such characteristics demonstrate that despite its clean and modern appearance, it possessed some of the defining characteristics of classic serif typefaces. Its lowercase letters have beautiful tall ascenders rising above the cap line and uppercase letters similarly proportional to classic Roman capitals. Additionally, its elimination of nonessential elements yet calculated deviations from pure geometric design produces a seemingly balance aesthetic. Whereas its newest manifestation,įutura New, now comes with seven weights and matching italics.įutura font has a great appearance of efficiency and forwardness with its basis of the sleek geometric forms of near-perfect circles, triangles, and squares with strokes of nearly even weight and low in contrast. The original family featured Light, Medium, Bold, and Bold Oblique with Light Oblique, Medium Oblique, Demibold, and Demibold Oblique released shortly after. With many weights and widths, the typeface has been expanded to fit the needs and visions of many designers and creative minds alike. A firm believer in modern typefaces expressing modern models, rather than trying to simply compete and rival previous designs, Renner’s Futura did just that. Paul Renner created the iconic geometric sans serif typeface family, Futura. Their version, called Futura Today, aims to be more efficient in terms of space used and more legible.Between 19, the renowned German type designer For their redesign of USA Today, for example, Wolff Olins worked with independent type foundry Bold Monday to create a custom version of Futura.
It’s also been used in countless logos, including well-known brands like Crayola, Best Buy and Gillette.įutura has been a perennial favorite with print designers, despite its quirks. A testament to the power of its simple shape is that it continues to be used widely both in print and (famously) in Stanley Kubrik and Wes Anderson films. Its influence can be seen in more recent fonts like Avenir, Brandon Grotesque, and Century Gothic. The enormous commercial success enjoyed by Futura led to the creation of many more geometric sans-serif typefaces in the years after its release. (MOMA has a great online gallery of typographic work that came out of the New Typography movement.) Influence of Futura
Renner is more closely associated with influential designer Jan Tschichold and The New Typography, a movement that predated and was contemporary with the Bauhaus. They applied this same aesthetic to type-letterforms should be clean, simple shapes, devoid of all embellishments. In the Bauhaus ideology, a form should be pared down to its essence, stripped of all unnecessary and distracting decoration. Organized around the simple geometric forms of circle, square and triangle, Renner’s original sketches for Futura reflect some of the ideas that had captivated those involved in the movement. While not involved in the Bauhaus, he was influenced by it and by the same cultural and artistic ideas that gave rise to the Bauhaus. Futura and the Bauhaus?īoth Paul Renner and Futura are often associated with the Bauhaus movement, but there is some debate about the interplay between them. In the process of bringing Renner’s initial drawings to metal type, the Bauer designers made adjustments that brought his original concepts for Futura closer in line with traditional typographic letterforms. It is extremely effective as a display font, but can also be pleasant to read in longer form as a text face. One of Paul Renner’s original drawings for the typeface that would become Futuraĭesigned by Paul Renner between 19, Futura was released commercially in 1927 by the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt, Germany.