Paul Renner and Futura: The Effects of Culture, Technology, and Social Continuity On the Design of Type for Printing

[Charles Leonard]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

I have recently completed a master's thesis dealing with Paul Renner and Futura. It is available as a PDF down load from http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07222005-152053/. If that is too much to remember use etd. gsu.edu and browse by author (leonard).

I appreciate any serious commentary and input. The abstract follows:

This thesis reviews the circumstances that led to what Paul Renner called “the inflation of historicism,” places his response to that problem in the context of the Weimar Republic, details how the German attributes with which he began the project were displaced from the typeface that emerged in 1927, demonstrates that Futura belongs to a new category of serif-less roman fonts rooted in Arts and Crafts lettering, and considers why the specifically German aspects of the project have gone unrecognized for over seventy years. Renner’s writing is compared to ideas prevalent in early twentieth-century German cultural discourse, and Futura’s design process is placed in the context of Renner’s personal experience of Weimar’s social and economic crises. Objective measurements are employed to establish the relationship between drawings attributed to Renner and are used to compare features of Futura with other fonts of the period.

[canderson]

I appreciate any serious commentary and input.

Unfortunately this isn't serious commentary or input. But I have to ask, did you investigate the possibility of setting the thesis itself in Futura? Do you have another version set in Futura?

This isn't entirely crazy, because it would be nice to be able to meditate on the font intermitantly while reading your thesis. A cynical take on this might change your title to: "Paul Renner and Futura: Times New Roman Is The Only Acceptable Typeface, So Why Bother Discussing Others?"

Recently, a Typophile made some T-shirts reviving an old advertisement for Garamond consisting of the word "Helvetica" set in Garamond. Seeing page after page of information on Futura set in Times New Roman makes me feel the same way as seeing that ad.
http://www.cafepress.com/teapotthecat.44022032

Also: I don't necessarily agree with my own arguments. I truely appreciate the work of scholars like yourself who provide freely available, verifiable historical documentation. Thanks.

[Charles Leonard]

I wish I could have used Futura. As I worked on the thesis, I produced a version of Futura that used the glyphs developed by Renner and the Bauer Foundry in the period up to the Summer of 1925, and had hoped to use that for setting the thesis. However, Times Roman is the standard for GSU electronic theses.

To a certain extent the phrase "The Only Acceptable Typeface," in your pastisch on the title, expresses one of the critical points made in the concluding chapter of the thesis, e.g. fonts like Times Roman disguise their modernist premise through appropriation of authority accrued to historic models. Further, such appropriation has become such a standard feature of 20th century typefounding that its implications frequently go unnoticed. Worse, appropriation of obvious historical authority obscures the true nature of fonts that, like Futura, have their own clearly discernable historical antecedants but access them in ways not in agreement with the "official party line."

[canderson]

I appologize for my snarky comment. This is really an incredible resource; if it were a book I would have likely purchased it.

Futura's "clearly discernable historical antecedants" have had an effect on me when I've used Futura in the past. More than some other fonts, I feel like I've gotten away with something when I've used it in a document. Sometimes when I see it used by large companies like HP, I wonder if they take it's history into consideration.

[dan_reynolds]

Charles, I downloaded your thesis, printed it out, and have read about half of it.

I like it very much. It could use a little editing, but so can just about everything, even works already in print ;-)

Do you have any publishing plans for it?

I see from your text that you can read German. Can you write German as well? Perhaps more publishing opportunities would be available if you published the text in German, especially because of your writing's direction. Also, there is no book on the German market that really covers Renner well, except for his own books of course… Die Kunst der Typographie was just reissued about two years ago.

[dan_reynolds]

Regarding the typeface the text is set in, I don't think that that is an issue. Pieces of writing should be judges as texts in and of themselves. Masters' theses are just works of writing, not designed objects. Were the text to be published in a journal, or a book, then one could go in several different design directions. I personally think that it would be sort of ironic to set the whole thing in Renner Antiqua ;-)

Futura is a legible face, at least the metal version popular in the 30s was. The reissue of Die Kunst der Typographie is just a reproduction of all the old pages. The small Futura holds up well even to this sort of abuse.

[Charles Leonard]

I didn't think it "snarky" at all, and I appreciate your attention to the work.

[speter]

FWIW, Christopher Burke's work on Renner wasn't set in Futura or any of Renner's typefaces, either. It was set it the author's Celeste.

[dezcom]

Charles,
I fully understand the standards for presentation universities use for a graduate thesis--even if the typography they require is less than stellar. I would hope that you would approach a publisher who could help tidy up the editing and allow you to design the pages in keeping with the material you are presenting
I have a ways to go before I finish reading it but I have read enough to appreciate your work and your love of the subject. I have always felt that Futura was a landmark face that took on the modern world squarely as an idea. I look forward to finishing the reading.

ChrisL

[Charles Leonard]

RE: publishing plans. Yes, I am seeking a printed outlet, perhaps as an adjunct to an English edition of Der Künstler in der mechanisierten Welt. I am also pursuing submission of segments of the thesis in several typographic and design history/aesthetics journals.

Unfortunately, I am just a reader of German.

[Sebastian Nagel]

As far as I could read, this is very interesting. I'd buy it if it was published.

I think it's not that bad that this is a thesis and not a "design piece" (yet).
I've done a similar work on Syntax by Hans Eduard Meier and Rialto DF by Lui Karner and Giovanni de Faccio. You could translate it into "The Effects of Culture, Technology, and Social Continuity On the Design of Type for Printing, shown by the examples Syntax and Rialto DF".
Unfortunately, I only had 4 months to do that, and it had to be written and designed. Today, I think the content has suffered a bit from that fact, I'd like to revise some parts of it somewhen.

Designing it afterwards gives you the time to do both well, and I'd be happy to see it published somewhen (in german or in englisch, i don't carej.

[Christoph Coen]

Thanks for this interesting read, Charles. I spent more than a week ruminating over your thesis, and it has actually motivated me to register for Typophile after a year of merely listening in to discussions, so this is in fact my very first post and I apologize for posting so late.

You deal with a fascinating subject in an almost exhaustive manner - the wealth of material that has gone into your dissertation is amazing. I particularly like your approach of situating the design process of Futura in its wider social, political and economic context; I think this is very effective in this case.

There are just a few points where your thesis puzzles me, probably because I am too mired in an insular German perspective. You stress the "specifically German aspects" of Futura and the peculiarities of "German typographic practice in the first half of the twentieth century". I am not always sure what exactly you mean by this, or how it relates to the design of Futura. You sometimes sounds as if, typographically speaking, Germany and the rest of the world, or Britain and the United States at least, were on different planets in those years. I think that is to some extent contradicted by your own account how people like Johnston or Gill were hired by German publishers to do work in Germany. Of course, there was the prevalence of blackletter, which was clearly a significant as well as highly visible difference. But this was never as all-dominating as you tend to make out - I think there was more of a typographical bilingualism than you give credit for, and the acceptance of roman type developed much earlier than "in the five years between Typographie als Kunst and the issuance of Futura".

Where your thesis fails to hold water in my view, Charles, is in your claim that the "German aspects" of Futura, i.e. the connection to blackletter, were somehow toned down during the design process. While your account of that design process is admirable (my only quibble would be that the lecture on 3 July 1925 was obviously not in Munich but in Frankfurt), I do not think the characters a and g in Renner's original design would have struck any German at the time as particularly "German", any more than it would today, and in fact their replacements in the version of Futura as used today are actually closer to their Fraktur equivalents. The "ball and post" r is ambiguous: where you see Gothic, I see Bodoni. In any case, Renner's stated aim with r, as well as with m and n, was to make these characters more static, to eliminate any horizontal movement which Renner considered an obsolete remnant of writing by pen. While this worked to some extent with the t (although that character in Futura is still a bit of a show-stopper inside words), it did not work out with those other characters, so Renner grudgingly had to make them more conventional. The only thing that bugs me in this context is the h. It is clear from your account that, while Renner was experimenting with an angular m and n, the h had a rounded edge from the beginning. Maybe Renner thought that the long stem on the left made the h sufficiently static anyway. Or one might argue that Renner was thinking in blackletter, where the designs of h and n are not necessarily based on each other, which would of course be another argument in favour of your theory. Where I think you are right and where Renner may to some extent have sold out to international marketability was in the inclusion of an oblique, as an afterthought as it were. On the other hand, I don't think the fact that there was originally no plan for an italic necessarily had to do with German peculiarities - if you try to design from elementary principles of typography, as Renner did, you would not necessarily want to emulate the relationship between roman and italic, which is just an historical accident.

The spelling of your German quotations and book titles would, I'm afraid, require quite a bit of retouching, but the most grievous point is the fact that the name "Mergenthaler" is consistently misspelt "Merganthaler", even in a quotation where I suspect it might have been correct in the original. Of course, this stuff is trivial in itself but it tends to distract the reader. I confess that the occasional use of the word "Teutonic" as a synonym for "German" also grates a little on my nerves. I also stumbled over the term "Bruchschriften" for blackletter which sounds a little derogatory to me, similar to "Bruchbude" or "Bruchpilot". You've probably got it somewhere from the contemporary literature, I expect, but the more usual German term these days would be "gebrochene Schriften". "Wortbild" is not a play on "Wortbildung" but just the standard German term for word shape. Where I think you are seriously inaccurate is in some of your claims on Nazi Germany. It is an oversimplification to claim that "Futura was effectively banned from wide use in Germany" after 1933, or even that "on their accession to power in 1933, the Nazi party effectively banned roman type from German printing". It seems that Futura continued to be quite popular under the Nazis, particularly for technical applications. Only the other day, I saw one of those famous Enigma machines in a museum here in Berlin which had a printed sheet of instructions for use affixed to the inside of its wooden lid - no prizes for guessing what typeface those instructions were set in. I think other examples would be easy to find. The fact that Futura, presumably to Renner's chagrin, wasn't used much for books may have had other reasons than a boycott by the Nazis. Similarly, to talk of "the post World War II silence that surrounded anyone who remained in Nazi Germany by choice" is inaccurate. The people who had a hard time after the war generally were the emigrants who returned, not the vast majority who had stayed. Renner's book on colour, published after the war, was apparently quite popular and an English translation was published in the US - maybe his interests had to some extent shifted from typography to painting. I do not think that in Renner's case there was any serious suggestion that he was tainted by collaboration with the Nazis - quite the opposite. And to suggest that he somehow had problems after the war because he was a "handsome, blue-eyed 'Aryan' male" is simply inappropriate - I do not see how this description of Renner's physical features advances your argument.

But anyway, these are just minor quibbles with what is otherwise excellent work - so once again, well done, Charles, and I'm just looking forward to seeing your work in German!

[Charles Leonard]

Christopher
Thank you for a thorough and just critique.
My overstatement of the separation of German and Latin typographic practice derives from my own discovery that I had presumed that German typographic practice was dependant on English practice. I remain very much struck by the assignment of particular forms–roman, fraktur, schwabacher–to particular roles in German book publishing, as well as by the lack of cross-mixture of roman and italic in German books of the era. The only occurrence of the oblique version of Futura in any of Renner's books on typography occurs in the setting of his name on the title page of Die Kunst der Typographie. The most stunning example is the difference in appearance between Typografie als Kunst and Mechanisierte Grafik. I am working on a revision that does a better job of demonstrating how Renner's selection of Unger fraktur as the font for the 1922 book provides an insight on Renner's perception that Unger's integration of German form and French neo-classic style provided an example for the emergence of a new kind of script for German book publishing, one that was just over 100 years old at the time of Typografie als Kunst.
I used the word "bruchschrift" on the advice of a German epigraphic scholar, but thank you for suggesting more contemporary alternatives.
The reference to the "post WW II silence" was made in terms of Renner's isolation from the history of design as written and taught in England and the United States after world War II.
The point about Renner's appearance was more to explain why he had less trouble than he did after his contretemps with the Nazis in 1933. That comment was all that was left after an edit that removed accompanying information about his Northern-German protestant background, but I certainly apologize for any offence.
Again, thank you for the feedback and I will certainly recheck the German spellings.

[piccic]

Charles,
I have just found the link to your thesis by chance. Although it's not so easy for me to read such studies in English (I am Italian), I wished to thank you.
I have bought just now the book by Christopher Burke, and so I have the opportunity of reading both.
I think they may be quite complementary to the texts assembled by Paul Shaw and Peter Bain while doing their landmark exhibition (and catalog): Blackletter: Type and National Identity.

Christoph is right by saying we shouldn't see people working in different places in the same period being so "isolated", but I have to say also that what happened in Italy in these years was really different. This is shown practically if we consider Futura's Italian "counterpart", Semplicità which was designed around 1928-30 by Alessandro Butti. Radio Grotesca digitized by Marta Sánchez, is another example.
Sentiments accompanying Modernity were filtered very much through each counrty's sensibilities…

That comment was all that was left after an edit that removed accompanying information about his Northern-German protestant background, but I certainly apologize for any offence.
I would be interested to read additional things about Renner and how he related protestantism and his German culture, as the references in Burke's book are very insightful. Would it be possible to read the parts you left out?

Many thanks again! :=)

[Charles Leonard]

I have to say also that what happened in Italy in these years was really different.
First thanks for your comments.
Historical contingency always matters. One of modernity's agenda items was to end history and it became a historical oddity itself.
Renner said that a particular era cannot identify its own style and what is modern is how current taste differs from another period. I think that is easily enough understood when talking about, say, national or gender boundaries, but hard to grasp when the separation is temporal.
Umberto Eco in the English entitled The Mysterious Flame of Queen Lolanna makes it clear that what not only happened "in Italy in these years" is different, but what happens in anyone's life has different significance for the one who lives it.

[Bleisetzer]

Well, I think, Futura is a very german font. It was not Futura, what was banned by Nazi party, it was Paul Renner. Adolf Hitler prefered Antiqua to be used by official documents since 1941, when the usage of Fraktur was forbidden. Before, Bernard Fraktur from Lucian Bernhard alias Emil Kahn, a jewish artist, was used for the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter - what a joke.

I sometimes think that Futura is seen in a different way in Germany and in the anglo-american scene. I use it for my website www.bleisetzer.de because for me it is a typical "prussian" font.

Georg
_______________________________________________
„Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt Ihr meine Farben...“

[Chris Dean]

Tracking

[Dunwich Type]

Well, I think, Futura is a very german font.

Do you feel the same way about Gill Sans and Johnston’s Underground?

[Bleisetzer]

@ James Puckett

Mh... good question. I am not familiar enough with fonts from out of Germany... but I can say: When I got Gill (in lead) the first time in 1975 or so, we all in our company realized: its not a german font. But this had nothing to do if we liked Gill or not.

"Typical german fonts" in my opinion are of course:
All fonts out of Group X - Gebrochene Schriften:
http://www.bleisetzer.de/schriftensammlung.html

In Group VI, Sans Serif, I do not feel the same "german character" with Akdidenz-Grotesk, Berthold Grotesk or others.

Sorry, I never studied like most(?) of you guys, I am only an old german typesetter, who does his job since around 35 years in the Graphic Industry.

Futura (and here mostly Futura Buch) with its strong and very clear character, constructed and from Paul Renner (I cannot separate these two informations in my head) who - for me - was one of the absolute positive german type designers (a brave and open man like I wished all germans in the 20ies shoulf have been). "Prussian character" for me is: black or white (the flagg), truth or lie, yes or no, straight forward in honest way of doing, a positive konservativ way of life. This - for me - is german. This - for me - is Futura. And this was the reason why I choosed this font for my website and all my company documents.

And of course its very interesting for me to read what you guys think about Furura. :)

Georg
_______________________________________________
„Ich bin ein Preuße, kennt Ihr meine Farben...“

[Charles Leonard]

I sometimes think that Futura is seen in a different way in Germany and in the anglo-american scene.
Since this was the premise with which I began my research on Renner, it is wonderful to receive such a comment. And particularly from "an old German typesetter." You have made my day.

[Nick Shinn]

When I got Gill (in lead) the first time in 1975 or so, we all in our company realized: its not a german font.

Hence Monotype Series 262, in which the A, M, N, a, g, and t of Gill, and the figures, were given more "geometric" forms.
I don't think the distaste for Gill is specifically German, as Gill never caught on in many parts of the world which fell in love with Futura from the get-go, such as the USA. I have even come across geometric modifications of Gill used in the UK.

There's nothing inherently German about Futura. When it was released, no doubt the traditionalists thought its Antiqua alphabet was horribly un-German.

I would say it's the other way round. Germany became Futura-ish, as German identity came to be associated, in the metaculture of art and design around the world, with the Weimar-era modernism typified by Futura.

IMO, this is an issue of modernity, rather than Germanity. The humanist characters in Gill may are an expression of the fact that the UK, between the wars, didn't "get" modernism to the same extent that continental Europe and the US (at least in commercial culture) did--and there was probably some part played by the commercial stranglehold of Monotype in the UK, in keeping out the geometric modern typefaces.

[dan_reynolds]

>There’s nothing inherently German about Futura

Well, I don't think that is true. The c is German. In German words, c is (just about…) always followed by h or by k. The c is narrow if Futura because it isn't going to be standing alone. If Futura had been designed in France or the UK, the c would probably have had a different form.

You might also argue about the single-storey g, which is common in many German typefaces (Blackletters, sans serifs…). But I think that the c is enough. That is at least one thing that represents a design/production/sales decision that is—at its heart—inherently German.

[Nick Shinn]

Dan, Gill Sans also has a narrow c.
("Unfurled" according to Stanley Hess' terminology in The Modification of Letterforms.)

[eliason]

I see from Burke's book that Renner himself called Futura "an eminently German typeface" (in a 1940 letter to the Bauer typefoundry)! Burke implies that the context of that statement was that it was suited to particularities of German orthography (C/c's vertical terminals, shorter cap height), not that it contained the German Geist...

Other food for thought:
- Futura's name is distinctly un-German (Latinish; the German word for "future" is Zukunft).
- When D&P obtained the rights to sell the design in France, they rechristened it "Europe"

I would say it’s the other way round

Well put.

[Nick Shinn]

Perhaps there was a little too much of the Geist of ancient Rome in Futura for Jan Tschichold, i.e. the proportions of the capitals--and that was too close to the Nazi taste. (Although he did say that his disenchantment with the modernist agenda was due to its totalitarian overtones.)