A fascinating and very detailed look at one of world's favorite typefaces, least until Helvetica and Arial took over with the help of the pc. Designed by Paul Renner (and incidentally his heirs still receive royalties) ninety years ago in conjunction with the Bauer type foundry. It's the original geometric sans and its immediate success convinced the foundry to release a complete range of weights from light to extra black. Success also meant that other foundries issued their own versions and the book shows several of these: Granby; Kabel; Metro; Spartan; Tempo; Vogue.
The eight chapters poke around in the corners of Futura's history and its use today including sixteen pages of photos revealing the way the face is used on contemporary shop fronts and signage. Page fifty-seven has an intriguing 1939 ad from a printing trade journal with the headline: Boycott Nazi type! and lists German made faces and American types available to replace the most commonly used Nazi faces. NASA was a big fan of Futura, using it on a whole range of printed matter and products.
The book looks at several examples of Futura used in branding and its availability on the pc, the author makes an interesting point that despite a face being called Futura it comes in all sorts of different styles though they are all the same weight. Nike; USA Today, Volkswagon, BP, Samsung all use the type but made subtle changes to various letters to create their own corporate version. Even as a digital alphabet available to everyone there are variations, page 124 shows six versions with near impossible to spot differences, page 125 has an outline cap S from Adobe, Bitsream, URW showing variations in the curves and letter endings. The book is heavily illustrated with images printed in black, red and blue (and maybe it was a mistake to print the six point captions in red or blue).
Douglas Thomas has written about a type that most designers have used at sometime or other without realizing its interesting background.
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