Futura Essay

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Futura

Futura is a highly popular font that is widely used across the world. It was even used out of this world – the first type to be used on the moon.

The origin of this font can be traced back to the 1920’s when a German typeface designer, Paul Renner, created it. A German professor of the Bauhaus school, Jakob Erbar created the first geometric sans-serif typeface. It was designed for pure functionality, which was based on a circle, square and triangle. After this, Renner decided to improve on the typeface and improved it to be the font we know today.

Renner was born in 1878, and grew up in Wernigerode, Germany. He was a teacher, graphic designer, type designer and author. In 1926 he was a director at Munich’s Graphic Arts College, Later in 1927 he went on to become the director of the Munich Master Printers in 1927. He then wrote a book called Typography as Art in1922, he also wrote cultural Bolshevism in 1932.The Cultural Bolshevism later caused him dismissal from his directorship, because of the National Socialist Party. In his early studies Renner went on to explore different aspects of letterform that varied from the traditional roman form.

Two debates formed in German design around this time; tradition versus modernity. “Black-letter” or “gothic” letter was used only in Germany for the first half of the 20th century. Later the debate came between Gothic and roman type, this was an important debate for Renner as well as other artists of the applied arts. The second debate was on the most important aspect of the era, technology. Technology was highly influential from everywhere around the world. At first Renner was at the conservative side of the debate, but later Renner slowly moved towards the idea of roman type, tec...

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...nd; engraved in Futura. The fact that Futura was the first font on the moon instantly made it a very highly sought after, and most used font. The reason Futura was chosen to be used for the plaque is because of its crisp, geometrically derived letterforms. “Futura speaks in a clear and calm voice of an exciting modern age”(Typewriting,[sa]).

At the end of August 2009 a Swedish company selling ready to assemble furniture and home accessories, switched from Futura to Verdana. Companies changing fonts isn’t usually a big deal, but when the company made the switch the people noticed. The changes took place in all the catalogues and in store signs, which made people quite furious, as most of the people didn’t like the new change. There were complaints posted online form various customers, it was even mentioned with rudeness in newspapers and even on BBC radio.

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