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Futura Font

Designer: Paul Renner
Publisher: Bitstream

Futura was created by Paul Renner and published by Bitstream. Futura includes 20 styles and family bundle options. p > Futura is the totally developed model of the twentieth century Geometric Sanserif.

The type is ancient, Greek capitals being engraved by the Cretans twenty-five hundred years back at the time of Pythagoras in the Gortyn Code, by the Imperial Romans, significantly in the burial place of the Scipios, by classical revival designers in eighteenth century London, which formed the basis for Caslon's very first sanserif typeface in 1817. Some elements of the Geometric sanserif made it through in the flood of Gothics that followed, especially in the work of Vincent Figgins.

In 1927, promoted by the Bauhaus experiments in geometric type and the Ludwig & & Mayer typeface Erbar, Paul Renner sketched a set of Bauhaus kinds; working from these, the expert letter style office at Bauer transformed the sanserif based on strokes of even weight, best circles and isosceles triangles and brought the Universal Alphabet and Erbar to their definitive typographic type. Futura ended up being the most popular sanserif of the middle years of the twentieth century.

Ironically, offered its generic past, Futura is the only typeface to have actually been approved registration under copyright as an original artwork, and, further paradox, offered the essential part played by the Bauer letter design workplace, the complete copyright comes from Renner and his heirs. This choice in a Frankfurt court suggests that a further small group of older typefaces may likewise be covered by copyright in Germany, particularly those created for Stempel by Hermann Zapf. This circumstance seems limited to this little group of faces in this one country, although defense of designers' rights in more recent typefaces is now possible in France and Germany through legislation originating from the 1973 Vienna Treaty for the protection of typefaces.

Mergenthaler's Spartan is a close copy of Futura; Ludlow's Tempo is less close.