From Burke’s book on Renner:

“A typeface actually called ’Renner-Grotesk’ appeared in trial type castings by Stempel typefoundry in May 1936. The Stempel Renner-Grotesk was very condensed in its regular weight, with a consequent stress on the modular squareness of the letters (figure 115 [shown below—MS]). This design seems to have been taken over by the Bauer typefoundry in 1938, and in 1939 the grotesk changed shape to some extent, becoming less modular and incorporating references to pen-made forms. The italic accompaniment to this grotesk, simply called Renner-Kursiv, was actually a true cursive, marking a decided difference between this typeface and Futura. Work on the Grotesk and Kursiv continued through the late 1930s and early 1940s. However, progress on these typefaces seems to have been very slow, perhaps due to Renner’s failing health: he had a serious heart attack in 1948 (at 70 years of age) which restricted his activity. By 1951, Renner had begun to work again, and his Grotesk began to appear in 1952 from the Bauer typefoundry under the name of Steile Futura (figure 116 [shown below—MS]). Perhaps the typeface was renamed merely in order to link it to the successful Futura family.”

Figure 115 (Renner-Grotesk)

Figure 116 (Steile Futura)

I think it’s interesting how much the earlier version looks like Eurostile. Whether there is a connection I have no idea.

Thank you Mark! Those samples are glorious. So kind of you to scan and type for me.

Still pretty mysterious. I wonder where the name “Topic” came from. Another foundry’s copy?

I was wondering the same thing. For years, I only knew it as “Bauer Topic,” the name it shows up as in the VGC library and so on. Just guessing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the name was changed when it was marketed in the US, similar to the way Akzidenz Grotesk was marketed as “Standard” in the US.

As evidence for this, I have an art directors’ type guide/manual published in 1959 which has short samples and text describing most of the metal display faces available in the US at that time (“Practical Handbook on Display Typefaces” by Kenneth B. Butler and George C. Likeness). It’s listed as Bauer Topic and the text suggests that it had only recently become available.

Renner designed Futura Display in 1932 for Bauer. It’s nothing like Futura of course, but why waste a good brand name. It’s a Black weight only face, and seems to be the precursor of Steile Futura (also nothing like Futura). No doubt Renner’s sketch books have variations on the theme, over the years. Maybe I should call all my types Fontesque-something-or-other.

The Canadian Tire logo is quite old, and uses Futura Display. (To even mention it is tempting fate for a re-brand, sorry.)
Note the minuscule forms of cap M and N, as in Steile.

Eurostile was nicely done, but a ten-years-after family extension of Microgramma, the TV screen face. Zapf called its “squared circle” shape the supercurve, and used it in Melior. Univers has some of the same feel, especially evident in Frutiger’s roughs, which were “squarer” than the way it eventually turned out. The supercurve is a different, newer shape than that of Steile Futura, which was a type in the well-known lettering genre of “block gothic”.

> why waste a good brand name.

To not dilute it?

hhp

Hmmm. It’s also classier to have types arranged in families, with no ostracized black sheep, making your type specimen like a book with chapters. The Bauer specimen I have from the ’30s is like that. Futura Black is another “brand extension”; did Renner design that also?

Indeed he did:

It doesn’t say much about it in the book, but it’s clear that it was intended as part of the original Futura family, not a brand extention.

Futura Black is one of the first typefaces I recall noticing when I was a kid, not that I knew what it was called. It was on a package of sugar wafer cookies, I think.

one of the first typefaces I recall noticing

Me too.
There was a “big business” TV series in the UK in the 1960s, called “Mogul” — about an oil company, and its logo was the M from Futura Black. Also from that golden age of plastic, a credit card company called Access (Advantage, whatever!), its logo the A from Futura Black (that’s how I remember it anyway).

(...)a “big business” TV series in the UK in the 1960s, called “Mogul” — about an oil company, and its logo was the M from Futura Black.

You’re sure it wasn’t a music company, ;^)

great to meet somebody else in love with steile futura! The contrast between the upright and italic is just gorgeous.

I have a specimen (mid 50s) of Steile Futura Fett from Bauer here, will post scans up later today or tomorrow, if time allows and somebody’s interested. There’s also quite a few faux examples of it in use included with the specimen, mainly for advertising use, all with common german brand names on them, but surely made up by the foundry, i wonder if it was an early attempt on getting that synergy-effect working with the foundry possibly getting paid by the respective companies?

i also only have the information from the Renner book by C. Burke, but alweays wanted to know more about it’s development, market success (i always thought ’you never see Steile Futura anywhere’ and since got more familiar with it it seems to be everywhere! spotted it on a graphic card packaging, cleasning agent bottle, etc. just the other over here in germany)

on the naming issue, i always suspected that topic possibly was called that way not to get in trouble with that certain company from Illinois, which offers the only “officially named” Steile Futura… if anyone could shed any light on this?

this is gonna be interesting…

See, Steile Futura gets me so excited i can’t type properly anymore… :-)

on the naming issue, i always suspected that topic possibly was called that way not to get in trouble with that certain company from Illinois, which offers the only “officially named” Steile Futura… if anyone could shed any light on this?

The company you’re talking about didn’t own the H. Berthold library until the nineties. Steile Futura was known as Bauer Topic in the US as far back as 1959, maybe earlier. Both names were used by Bauer, so it was some internal, possibly marketing, reason.

The lower case “a” in Futura Black is one of my all-time favorite glyphs.

ChrisL

You’re sure it wasn’t a music company,

Internet search not successful.
Screenonline has a page on the Mogul series, but the visual material (including a full episode which may hold the answer), is not accessible outside of the UK.

franz - Yes, I’m interested. Gimme that specimen!

me too!

Precision Type gave me the right to revise their cut of Topic a few years ago ... one of these days I’ll release it. It’s a great type.

Good man, Troop. On with it!

I see. That sounds somewhat logic, as especailly the word “Steile” might seem strange to american ears. But then again, if the typeface was named Steile Futura to capitalize on the market success of “real” Futura, why didn’t they choose this option for the US market as well - or wasn’t Futura (the “real” one :-) popular in the US at all until the 50s?

on the risk of making an idiot of myself — how do i attach pics to messages on here? made pics of the specimen and would love to post them up…

tia

Franz, you need to have the Flash Player, version 8.0 or higher installed on your computer in order to be able to post images. Once that is installed, you’ll notice a blue-green “Insert image” command appear directly underneath the “Comment:” box. To insert images, click on the command, and follow the simple instructions.

many thanks dan.

here you go:

brilliant, eh?

There’s also quite a few faux examples of it in use included with the specimen, mainly for advertising use, all with common german brand names on them, but surely made up by the foundry, i wonder if it was an early attempt on getting that synergy-effect working with the foundry possibly getting paid by the respective companies?

I can’t say if there was any cross-marketing going on with Bauer’s specimens, but the mocked-up ads is a very common trait of German typeface brochures from the early 20th century. The Ruhard’sche/Klingspor specimen book for Eckmann, which was printed sometime between 1900 and 1910, and the second half is filled with dummy-ads. I aso have some images from their late specimen book for Wallau here. Dummy ads are a good idea still, in my opinion. Sadly, when we design brochures today, some type designers don’t want that stuff in their brochure!

I’m not so sure that I see the name decision behind Steile Futura in the 1930s and brand dilution… Steile Futura shares a number of “Futura” traits, like the single storey a, the straight j, the u without the foot, etc. Plus, Renner himself was not a recognized type designer yet. Futura was a hit, and it isn’t bad to stand behind a hit, or build upon. Bringing a new “name” out, especially during a time of global depression (like the early 1930s), would have been a big business risk. What if no one paid any attention? Lots of good designs go neglected every day, sadly. Why not do what you can to avoid that? Just an idea…

The legal successor of the Bauer foundry is Wolfgang Hartmann’s Fundición Tipográfica Bauer (http://www.ftbauer.com/). They own the “Futura” trademark. Their fonts are available at http://www.myfonts.com/foundry/neufville/ , but of course there are many independent digitizations of Steile Futura and I doubt any single one could be called the “original”. If at all, it would have to come from FT Bauer.

A.

True, true. The only current FT Bauer Steile Futura weight on Myfonts.com is a single one called Futura ND dsiplay. Linotype sells a licensed version of this as well.

Font Bureau’s Tasse looks very nice.

Franz,
Fabulous stuff! Thanks for posting it. I had never seen that before. I hope they digitize the whole thing.

ChrisL

“but of course there are many independent digitizations of Steile Futura and I doubt any single one could be called the “original”. If at all, it would have to come from FT Bauer.”

I don’t quite understand what you are saying, Adam. There are two primary digitizations. The first was Font Company’s from a VGC photo master, of which the URW is an exact copy with every defect preserved. My impression is that Font Company did the work, and URW acquired the rights under typical IK licensing. This digitizations includes the two weights, medium and bold, both in regular and italic. The second primary digitization is Berthold’s, which unfortunately is only of the rather less interesting bold. It differs from the FC version in many details. The FC/URW version is almost unusable because it is so amateurishly, in fact irrationally spaced and because there are so many incorrect glyphs. Both versions take considerable although not fatal liberties with the metal cut. In the metal, there is substantial variation from size to size, making it quite difficult to decide on proportions. In addition, the spacing is rather loose by contempoary standards. But Adam, what do you mean when you say that the original ’could only come from FT Bauer’? Everyone has access to the same specimens, and FT Bauer has not shown the slightest originality in any of its digitizations or design choices. If anyone is going to produce an ’original’ Steile, I think it is very unlikely to be FT Bauer. Its Futura digitizations largely recklessly imitate, often point for point, previous translations of the fonts into photo from metal. Nowhere have we yet seen what we most need, a Futura intended for setting at text sizes, which in metal features the substantially reduced ascenders which are necessary to make the type viable at text sizes. Because we have not seen anything from ’FT Bauer’ which in the slightest degree resembles research into original drawings or any effort to come to understand what the foundry originally did, I would conclude that FT Bauer does not actually possess any original artwork or pattern drawings, and is simply relying on precisely the same sources that are available to everyone else. So Adam, what makes FT Bauer so special? Based on past performance, any Steile FTB does will be a copy of the URW version with, one hopes, improved spacing. I do not see the smallest evidence that FT Bauer has ever done anything the hard way! You know, research into originals, redrawing, throwing out the old photo masters, rethinking, reconceptualization, all that good stuff that makes good type what it is. Sure, their Futura is OK. But where is it substantially different from everyone else’s? What evidence is there of historical research? As far as I can see, that foundry is all hype, hype, hype, and lawyers, lawyers, lawyers - rather like what Berthold has become under the combined weight of the two Hunts. To speak of these cloners as ’digitizing’ anything reflects badly on what is, after all, a metier.

It is precisely because it is so difficult to digitize type from a 12 point specimen, without master drawings (and assuming that the drawings would actually be helpful in making the type, which does not follow), that I doubt ’FT Bauer’ has any material that is different from anyone else’s. They are making the same, sloppy, cost-effective decisions that everyone else does when confronted, in type, with the desirability of doing some really hard work. And this does not impress me. This is not what we need at this point in type history.

Stephen, I think you are very acute to be so obsessed with this type. It is still miles ahead of its time. I think in its original form that it is still a little too shocking to see much use. But the skill with which it was conceptualized is what most impresses me. The relationsip between the bold and medium is particularly notable. There is no artificial bolding such as we all, conceptually (and sometimes literally) do. The different weights are independently thought out, which is as it should be. In certain respects, which I cannot describe because I don’t fully understand them, I think it is the best typeface design I have ever seen, on a technical and aesthetic level that I could never aspire even to understanding, much less to rivalling. Perhaps Berlow, if he felt like it, could persuasively analyze what is going on in this remarkable typeface.

In the meantime I have a question. Jeff Level, when we first thought of redigitizing this typeface in 1993, felt strongly that the cap height should be reduced by about 10%. I can’t get away from the feeling that if Renner had thought this a viable option he would have pursued it, and that pursuing it would cause all kinds of other unintended consequences. Does anyone have an opinion?

the same, sloppy, cost-effective decisions that everyone else does when confronted, in type, with the desirability of doing some really hard work.

I don’t work that way all the time, honest! :-)

Franz - Thank you! Where did you snag that beauty?

Dan - I believe Futura Display is a completely separate typeface from Steile Futura, not part of the same family.

Bill - On the cap height: I guess we’re used to seeing ascenders rise above caps these days so it could make Steile feel a little more relevant, but I think the original is perfectly usable in today’s design. See my examples. I’ve also seen a lot of it recently as the main face in museum and gallery exhibitions.

> I do not see the smallest evidence that
> FT Bauer has ever done anything the hard way!

I do. I don’t know about Futura, but their recent Pascal revival
was certainly a result of research (including getting the original
drawings from Mendoza y Almeida), thought and hard work.

> if Renner had thought this a viable option he would have pursued it

This logic fails because Renner was not god. Everybody makes bad
decisions sometimes; not to mention that people change their mind
quite often too!

Most of all it depends how literal a revival intends to be.

hhp

>Where did you snag that beauty?

They’re around. They also did English versions, again with faux ads, for instance for Emerson. I must say the faux ads are pretty badly thought out - - indeed the whole presentation is rather bad, nowhere near the level of some of the startlingly beautiful pages that Renner (I believe) created for the original release of Futura. I used one of Renner’s original ads as the basis for a poster for a piano concert I gave a couple of years ago. What genius, so far ahead of nearly anything you see in contemporary design, still so much more modern.

Bill, any idea where to find the Emerson one?
It’s a design I’ve come to like a good deal:
http://typophile.com/node/15269

hhp

I meant Steile ads for Emerson the company. I had some good Emerson the typeface material but it is either in storage or burnt in a fire. I thought it overrated the last time I looked at it but that was quite a while ago.

Sorry to join the party so late. The Renner retrospective in:
Phillipp Luidl, Compiled and edited by Philipp Luidl with Gunter Gerhanr Lange, “Paul Renner,” Eine Jahresgabe der Typographischen Gesellschaft München Munich: Typographische Gesellschaft, 1978.
Does a good job of cataloging Renner’s type design and provides reproductions of both drawings and proofs. I have a couple of images I have tried to attach (as png, gif, & jpeg), but they don’t appear when I upload them. Advice please.

>Advice please.

See the posting by Dan Reynolds above. And make sure they are RGB.

> overrated

For that to be the case people would have to actually know it exists. :-/

hhp

I can’t get away from the feeling that if Renner had thought this a viable option he would have pursued it, and that pursuing it would cause all kinds of other unintended consequences. Does anyone have an opinion?

On pages 22 – 3 of Die Kunst der Typographie, Paul Renner writes briefly about his disatisfaction with the German Unified Standard Baseline. He felt it was too low on the type body, effectively shortening the descenders in relationship to the mean and cap heights in the font. He suggested, in these pages, that a solution would be to produce fonts that were reduced in size in the upper part of the type body and by “… these means, the image of the type would become somewhat smaller; something no one will be annoyed with, given today’s current preference for smaller types. The descenders could once again become as long as with classic fonts, and it would leave sufficient space over the capital letter for the accents and umlauts. … So that once again type would look good in unleaded settings. ” Because he envisioned the descenders becoming proportionally longer, he was, in effect, proposing a reduction in cap height on the body, and I suspect that he would have considered the extra space a reasonable trade-off.

William, thank you. The images were B&W. Here they are.

Normally I’d complain about such a huge image, but can you make it bigger? Oh that is lovely.

Whoa. This almost gots some Goudy Sans in it. Bizarre.

Heh heh, check out them traps.
What point sizes are those?

hhp

What point sizes are those?

The cap height in the image of the roman caps is 1 2/3” and the distance baseline to baseline is 2 1/3”. In the italics, the cap height (as reproduced) is .9” (23.5 mm).

thanks for posting these charles. made my day.

Those must be enlargements then, no?
Any idea what the original point sizes were?

hhp

Those must be enlargements then, no?
Any idea what the original point sizes were?

I do not have the Luidl text on hand. I made same size (100%) B&W line art scans at 600-dpi. The posted images are at 300 dpi, RGB. If you download an image and open it in PhotoShop it will appear at the same size as the original scan and you can make your best estimate of size from that. I retrieved the article from the Cooper-Hewitt Library about 6 years ago and cannot recall if the captions to the images in the article provided a point size.

For Nick

From: http://www.action-tv.org.uk/mogul/mogul/mog_series.htm

Charles, let me add passionate thanks for these marvellous illustrations, which I don’t remember seeing before. Exactly what do they represent? Are they some kind of drawing or trial cut? What is fascinating and instructive is to see how very different they are from the finished font. The ink traps are completely irrelevant, of course, as they chose not to use any in the final font. (As far as I can tell, there are no traps even in the smallest sizes which are what - 12 pt? 10 pt?) It is the radical changes in the letterforms that I find so impressive. How he started from here and got to there. Type being so collaborative, we must really wonder quite who is the auteur here? We naturally wish to think of Renner as sole auteur, sole arbiter. But what if this - what you have shown - was his final creative word? What if the rest, everything that makes the typeface the great totality we know today - came from the foundry staff?

Do we have any information on this? Are there any survivors from the process? Did anyone keep diaries? Are there any corporate records? (There must be some kind of documentation - sie waren Deutsch!) I find the contrast between the design and the pre-design most fascinating to contemplate - very moving. There must have been a huge amount of effort and thought, and perhaps much heartbreak, as the letters were transformed from here to there. Where on earth do we find, today, anyone taking lettermaking so seriously? It is all very inspiring, what you have presented.

It is utterly shocking to me that Chris Burke did not address these issues at all in his book on Renner - as far as I can remember. That is the dullest book I have ever read, though one is grateful for it even so - - How it would have been enlivened if he had thought to penetrate the questions these illustrations raise. He must have been aware of this material, no? To write 200 pages about Renner and not have a single interesting thing to say about him - - when you could be discussing this.

I look at what you have sent and I say to myself ’and you aspire to present a version of this typeface to the public? YOU? What makes you think you have a tenth of the requisite expertise?’

I’m blown away, falling not perhaps quite upwards, as Hölderlin says, but sideways to and fro.

Guys, Charles Leonard has just posted a page of Renner’s drawings which says more about the process by which a great type is made than any other piece of historical material I have ever seen.

How can you look at this unbelievable artefact that history has most unexpectedly vouchsafed us, and remain silent?

We have here the most unexpected window into the type-creation process we are ever likely to be able to look through. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?

Have any of you any sense of the huge gulf that separates Renner’s drawings from the finished type? Can you imagine the thousands of steps, the endless hours of thought, the anxious hours of discussion that must have transpired before this gap was filled?

What Charles posted is by far the most informative thing I have ever seen about Renner or any other type designer period. And not to rake up a pointless issue, but ... what does it say about a writer who must have encountered this material (if he didn’t, he had no business writing the book at all), and who doesn’t even mention it in a book that is so unremittingly and bafflingly lifeless? This was his moment to turn on the juice to say something that was actually informative, actually engaging. But no, he was probably more worried about how his type would look on the pages. Has anyone considered how very oddly self-serving it is to write a tribute to a great type designer and not use one of that type designer’s types to set it in? No, instead, one uses a completely unrelated type of one’s own. Is one writing a tribute to Renner, or an advertisement for one’s type?

In my opinion Charles’s image is the most important thing ever to be posted on Typophile or any other type blog or listserve.

I was thinking of posting some images to illustrate my uncertainties about fitting the font (I think it is too loose in metal but I have probably made it too tight in my present version) and the question of cap height, but I have been so blown away by this image that I think my past meanderings in trying to come to grips with Steile Futura are simply irrelevant.

Here are some of the basic questions that need to be answered:

What is the date of these drawings?

Are there other drawings, drawings from later stages, even from earlier stages?

Who is responsible for the final design? Did Renner effect the transformation between sketch and finished type himself, without outside intervention from the foundry? That seems unlikely, but it is possible. How can we learn more about this? What material is known to exist? Is there extant correspondence? Has any type historian read it? Is that type historian fluent in German or .... ?

What happens when we try to analyze what we have on hand - the sketch and the finished type? Can we see a logical path of development? Can we see some inevitable process taking place? Is there a demonstrable logic in the transition? Do we have a good idea of why the changes were made? If we do, we may ask ourselves if they are self-evident? Can we assume that Renner too knew they were self-evident? If that was the case, why didn’t he just design the face that way from the start? Do we know anything of Renner’s intentions with regard to these sketches? Did he mean them to survive? Was this a case analogous to the Bruckner symphony, where Bruckner’s editors insisted on hundreds of changes and simplifications which Bruckner in unutterable despair gave in to, all the while saving a manuscript of the original, marked ’for posterity’ ? Did Renner intend this sketch to show posterity what he would have done if only he had been allowed? Or was this sketch an unimportant doodle to him, something unwittingly preserved by the foundry? Was the sketch intended to represent foundational characters, or did someone ask for possible alternates and did Renner then provide this?

I have a postulate which could perhaps be tested. That Renner presented this sketch to the foundry as something he thought they could and should do. The foundry then came back to him and said, we can’t do this, this and that, for this, this and that technical reasons. It is not possible in metal type. Instead, we suggest that you do this, this and that instead, to comply with our technical limitations. (They have aesthetic objections too, perhaps, but of course they don’t mention them to Renner, as Bill was not working for Bauer at the time . . . .)

Is it possible that that is what happened? Can we illustrate it based on the material we have here? For instance, by making a little mini font of the sketches and seeing how they fit together, and respecting metal limitations? Or just by making duplicates of the characters, and pasting them into words, as used to be done routinely to ’proof’ type sketches before font software was invented?

Bill,
I can understand and appreciate everything in your last post. I agree that the material posted by Charles is really exciting and far more worthy of discussion than most anything I have seen to date.

ChrisL

DeWitt, thanks for confirming my memory!

***

Chris Burke’s “Renner” is one of my favourite books on typography. I particularly like its scope — the way Burke relates so many aspects of Renner’s life and times to his type designs, and its depth — discussing issues like National Socialism and blackletter, and Renner’s take on modernism. It is also a nicely designed book with many illustrations and specimens, superb production values, set in Burke’s own Celeste and Celeste Footnote, with thorough index, footnotes, etc.

I contacted Mr Burke on a visit to the UK a few years ago, and he was gracious enough to have lunch with me and show me round the typography department at Reading University.

Nick, to understand what a biogaphy of a person living through the Weimar, Nazi, and post-Nazi eras could and should be like, why not take a look at Gitta Sereny’s ’Albert Speer: His Struggle With Truth’ a book which quite incidentally also makes a couple of instructive though subtle typesetting points. Sereny points the way to anyone who aspires to biography of anyone in that period and will give you an idea of the kind of exciting reading experience that you have a right to expect to occur when a biogapher is really knowledgeable about and really engaged with her subject. Speaking, off-topic, of subtle typographical points, Nick, can you tell us why Celeste footnote is a bad example of optically corrected design? (I am assuming that you have outgrown your Richler period, and I have concluded that this is the only interesting question CB’s book raises.) Chris, I don’t need to write a biography of Renner - Charles Leonard has already said what most needs to be said, most elegantly, most economically, merely by posting a one-page scan.

May I say that I am extremely bored by the evidence here of intemperate worship at the altar of a minor and most unlikely god-figure called Chris Burke? The depth of high-falutin moral outrage on display here is astounding. Did you guys spend so much energy when the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas in Afghanistan? When the remaining ATF material was dispersed? When the Imprimerie Nationale was endangered - still a current concern?

So I ask: what do you want to do with your time: blather, or try to think through the issues that have been presented here, which, entirely incidentally, and quite unimportantly, do not reflect well on the Apostle of Reading. Life is very short. I would rather talk about something important. And read good books.

I am a bit amused about the question, if Renner or the foundry is to be considered the “author”. (I exaggerate a bit, but this seems the essence of your post.)

There has always been the conflict between type designer and foundry. A good foundry, past and present, deals critically with the type designer’s work. Sometimes the type designer worries about this, sometimes the typeface profits from the foundries expertise — sometimes both at the same time. :) I would be irritated if a typeface would NOT develop inbetween drawing and release! So I really don’t understand the author question.

At the time when Renner made the Futura, he obviously still was an amateur in type design, being a painter, then typographer first of all. Much of the refinement — say, thinning round elements as they approach stems — seems to come from the foundry.
But Renner learned a lot from working with Bauer, and drawings for his later typefaces show this. (And at a time he could complain that a foundry he worked with lacked the expertise he had experienced with Bauer.) My favorites are his later roman typefaces, by the way.

Personal comment:
On the one hand, Renner is known for Futura most of all. (1) Futura indeed seems to own much to Bauer. Then, it seems still unsolved whether the Futura uppercase were by Renner or an architect; I am not up to date and don’t know if this is settled now. (2) Futura was not the “new” thing as that it was advertised. Typefaces of this kind were on the marked since 1920, like a “Grotesk” by Wagner & Schmidt in Leipzig, in 1931 issued as “Rund-Grotesk” by C.E. Weber. Unless you know all the internals of foundries — which seems hard to get hold of — you cannot really say “which came first”. Also, around this time, various design schools taught lettering in the constructive style. This kind of typefaces was “in the air”.
(If Futura is interesting, then not for the “innovation” as which it was sold (I consider this to be mere marketing, one shouldn’t mistake marketing for historical fact), but for the still very “Germanic” remains in the first versions, like the long-s plus ligatures in this “moderne schrift”.)
On the other hand, Renner proved to have become a master only with his later type designs — which remain unknown. Steile Futura may be one of them; if someone showed you “Topic”, would you have thought of Renner? Not to speak of the much better roman typefaces which mostly remained in the drawer.
There is nothing more ironic than history.

Karsten

>if someone showed you “Topic”, would you have thought of Renner?

I can easily answer that honestly with a no. It is outside all norms and precedent. In type, that is. But not in German culture of the 1950s. Take for example Mann’s Krull, a contemporaneous work, which is so totally unexpected from just that hand. No doubt there are many much better comparative examples in the painting and literature of that period. That raises again the question of period. Are we to regard Steile as decisively a post-war work? Or does it represent a hidden spring running through the 1930s and 40s which never was allowed to run quite dry, thanks to the protective influence exercised by Speer, who was always trying to live up to Tessenow’s expectations?

>Not to speak of the much better roman typefaces which mostly remained in the drawer.

Exactly. The one commissioned by Speer should have been digitised and used to set the Renner book. Why doesn’t anyone do anything with it, or at least explore its ideas? Not to mention its particular interest in one of the most daunting tasks in roman typeface design, aesthetically pleasing condensation which is, or should be, very much a green issue. Karsten, has anyone seriously looked into the possibility of digitising these typefaces? Like ... have you thought of doing anything with them? ? (Incidentally, what was Renner’s opinion of Walbaum and Walbaum derivatives?)

>There is nothing more ironic than history.

Yes ... to those lucky enough to possess both an irony gene and a history gene. But there are some who don’t. One would like to know what Heidegger would have made of Steile Futura. Would he have seen in it some incarnation of the technological era he was describing? That is kind of what Dwiggins, in his skillful PR for Electra, claimed for that face, but it can’t really be taken seriously as the typeface remains too influenced by the late 18th century transitionals so admired by Updike, whose influence on Dwiggins cannot be overestimated. Renner’s Steile by contrast really does mark a decisive break with the past. One can imagine, going far out on a limb, that Walter Benjamin would have found Steile authentic, Electra not.

I am assuming that you have outgrown your Richler period,

I’ve moved on. OpenType has opened up new areas of interest. I wouldn’t say that my Richler typeface is immature, as you imply.

I wonder what kind of work you do. I assume you are involved in font production, rather than design, as your posts often play up the importance of foundry workers in the process of typeface creation.

Oh come on Nick, put your ear to the ground if you don’t know who I am. Not that it matters what any of us on Typophile ’does’. This is about Steile Futura, not about you or me.

Bill, I Googled you, didn’t find anything.
You’re dissing my work (and Burke’s) from behind a shield of anonymity, not revealing what kind of work you do, in your Typophile profile. Show some character, man.

> The ink traps are completely irrelevant, of course.

Of course. That must have been a moron moment on their part, eh?
Oh, and you don’t see the traps in any of the printing? Hmmm, I wonder why.

That said, besides your historic mental block concerning trapping,
the excitement you’re showing here and the questions you’re asking
are definitely needed. (And I won’t bother to ask you to treat people
more fairly and with an open mind.)

Another quick thing: I like Richler.

hhp

Nick, rather than googling, why don’t you call Matthew Carter, Sumner Stone, Frank Blokland, Robert Slimbach, Hermann Zapf, etc. and find out who I am and ’what I do.’

Now could we get back on-Topic, please?

Here’s how my involvement started.

Back in 1994 when Jeff Level and I were forming Adagio Type (Jeff, as you will recall, is the guy who Robert Norton in ’Types Best Remembered/Best Forgotten’ said had the best eye for type in the industry), we were very interested in Topic. Jeff (who gave Robert Slimbach his first job when he was the director of the type department at Autologic) was then working for Precision Type, and used the Font Company version for an order form that was quite a brilliant piece of design. But the spacing on the FC version (which is identical to the one URW sells today) was so bad that he had to hand kern each single word. So one of the many ideas we had was to revise Topic, which we thought only needed a quick fix.

It needed (1) a complete refitting and (2) in Jeff’s perhaps overly-Aldine-influenced opinion, less tall caps.

This was a project that over 12 years I kept on returning to. The first obstacle was fixing the digitisation, which was really rough. That took some time. The second problem was redesigning all the non-basic-set characters, like the ligs, quotes, and all the symbols, because FC had used generic, Helvetica-like characters, not the real thing. But getting into Renner’s head is not a part-time job.

This was something I did bit by bit, between other projects, whenever there was time, never giving it a solid slot of a few months to itself.

Several years ago, Phan Nguyen became interested in the project, and gave me his original brochures and other artwork, because he was convinced that there were fundamental flaws in the FC design (based on a VGC photo master) that I was not considering. I of course took that seriously, but I still thought the VGC master was good enough.

Now I look at where I am now and I am seeing some painful things.

1. I overcorrected on the fitting, which makes the font I have unusable at under 50 points or so.

2. Phan was right. There are a lot of problems in the artwork I was following. You see many weight problems amongst the individual characters. You see many problems when you compare it closely to the metal, which I have only recently begun seriously to do, and you also, at last, begin to see some faults in the metal that you would like to fix.

One problem I have going forward is that I don’t have complete character sets in sizes above 24 points or so. It would be nice to have a complete set in the largest size - was it 80? But there are so many other problems. You can see why I am reluctant to take this further on.

Here’s a sample showing FC/URW’s data in red, and mine, based on Renner, in blue, at 780 points:

Great stuff, Bill. I am not an expert in this arena, but it looks like the FC/URW cuts some corners, shows more evidence of digital/Bezier?

Do your other glyphs have the rounded/soft corners? Is this because yours is based on a master of a different size?

>it looks like the FC/URW cuts some corners, shows more evidence of digital/Bezier?

My instinct is to say the simplification must have occurred in the VGC photo conversion. My reasoning is that the FC work was done in Ikarus and the conversion to PS does not seem to me to have been radically simplified. But anything is possible.

I haven’t done enough analysis of the size variations to come to any definite conclusions. I was hoping to avoid having to round off the corners because I seem to have spent my entire adult life rounding off corners in a hundred different typefaces, and it seems like such a waste of time in the greater scheme of things. Yet when it really comes down to it, I don’t like supersharp corners in this typeface, I think it causes too much exaggeration. What do you think? I would really love to hear some persuasive arguments in favour of sharp corners. I’ve done my time on round corners.

A bit belated — I am not sure if I want to know what Heidegger or Benjamin had to say about a particular typeface. You could ask the shop assistant next door as well. Never inquire philosophers about arts.

has anyone seriously looked into the possibility of digitising these typefaces?

It would be nice to have a book which presents them. To enjoy looking at them, and to study how Renner approached certain design problems. (Like the great Schneidler book which is itself an amazing object.) But to revive them? They are period pieces. Right now I have much more sympathy for typefaces like Freight; it combines type history without being just a revival of anything particular, that is, it does not imitate individual letterforms, but addresses specific problems in a way which tells me that its designer knows something about type history.

but it looks like the FC/URW cuts some corners, shows more evidence of digital/Bezier?

Softening corners is a bezier characteristic. But FC/URW hints to Ikarus which uses circle-segments for curve description — which have their own characteristics. :)

Karsten

sorry, double posted.

It’s getting interesting again.
Did somebody already have the chance to compare the digitizings on the market, esp. URWs vs. Berthold?

Bill as you continue this project do you think you will have text and display versions? Sorry if you mentioned this elsewhere, but I didn’t read this. I really do prefer the rounded details/corners for smaller type, but when it comes to display I like to have a choice. I think the sharp corners often look wrong in text fonts. The corners disappear too soon.

First time I saw this typeface it did remind me of Renner, but only because I was already familiar with Futura Display. Maybe another thread could discuss it.

>I think the sharp corners often look wrong in text fonts. The corners disappear too soon.

That’s an interesting observation and I support it, but obsessing with the corners does seem to triple your development time. It also leads you into all kinds of dicey digitisation choices. It is also interesting and unconventional that you want a choice with display. Theoretically, you will be scanning text too quickly to notice if there are sharp corners or not (unless you are looking at it with a type designer’s eye) while in display you are much more apt to notice this kind of feature.

Whether it’s text or display, though, a sharp corner results in all kinds of flaring effects (not on the serifs obviously, but all kinds of other terminal points) that may seem garish and I think that is a particular problem with Steile.

There have always been programs that would round corners, so theoretically you could design with sharp corners to save time, and then round off automatically later, but this has never appealed to me because you are going to have to look at each character anyway to make sure the effect worked the way you wanted it to.

Yes, I would want an optical axis, even if it was pretty simple. (Ideally, all single master fonts would be MMs with a single spacing axis, which would be better than tracking, because you probably want to space out rounds proportionately more than you space out straights as you go down in point size.) There are some great tools in Robofog which can theoretically greatly simplify this kind of development, but I have yet to get them to work. However, the tools are constantly evolving and sooner or later they will.

>as you continue this project

At the rate I am presently going, I would expect someone else to come out with 20 versions first. There is so much to think about. I still haven’t really figured out where Steile and Tasse diverge, and why. A lot of intelligent thought went into that project. And there is always the hope that one day a Tasse italic based on Steile will appear. It is a little difficult to compare Steile and Tasse because there is not an exact weight/width match. However, it should be reasonably easy to interpolate one. What really happens with Tasse? What is changed, and why? One reason I am reluctant to put too much focus on Steile is that I keep on hoping that Font Bureau will ultimately release a Tasse italic. I think I remember David Berlow expressing the same wish, and saying it was up to the designer, who I guess is thinking things over. Somebody should contact him and see what is going on.

In the meantime, it would be interesting to hear more comparing Steile to Tasse and comparing Berthold Steile (bold and bold italic only) to FC/URW and to the originals. I seem only to have the low-res version of Berthold Steile, which is not much use for comparisons at the level we are talking about here.

> you will be scanning text too quickly to
> notice if there are sharp corners or not

Ah, but the relevance of any real text face is always in large
part deeper than conscious “noticing” anyway. The difference
in “mood” conveyed by the effect of sharp or round corners on
the overall texture of a setting is fully half the story (the other
half being pure readability).

> better than tracking, because you probably want to space
> out rounds proportionately more than you space out straights

Not to mention the proper handling of “boundary
conditions” such as the right side of the “r”, etc.

hhp

I would really love to hear some persuasive arguments in favour of sharp corners.

At text size sharp corners, as in your big e post, are eroded by the process of putting ink on paper.

However, one’s conception of the typeface is formed as much by inspection of display-size specimens as by reading text.

I would say that unless the sharpness is a broad theme of the face, rather than something which is occasionally an issue for terminal treatment, it’s better to take a little off the arris.

***

The beautiful finish of Renner’s drawings creates a lot of problems for typographic interpretation. A similar situation occurs with Oswald Cooper’s 1930 sans serif drawings for the “American Alphabets” book, subsequently digitized as Highlander etc. Adrian Frutiger had a different approach, I believe, cutting shapes out of paper.

> one’s conception of the typeface is formed as much by
> inspection of display-size specimens as by reading text

1) Not when the font is never seen set large.
2) Not when a layman doesn’t know it’s the same font (and he doesn’t).
3) Deliberation and immersion are different animals.
Scale changes everything when it crosses a threshold.

hhp

Of course, Hrant.
The “one” I was referring to is me/us, the typophile.

While we should be talking about not us.

hhp

But someone has to licence and specify the typeface in the first place, and that one will be aware of it in a deliberative manner.
So paradoxically, a face designed for immersive reading still has to look good at display size.
With the best of intentions, it’s difficult for typographers to assess a typeface strictly on immersive grounds. This is the general problem all producers face, vis-a-vis users, in that they are overly familiar with the product, and can’t perceive it as the user does.

> someone has to licence and specify the typeface in the first place

Yes, but the good ones do so based on the needs of their users.

> a face designed for immersive reading still has to look good at display size.

Only to please graphic designers who don’t know any better.

> it’s difficult for typographers to assess a typeface strictly on immersive grounds

Yes.

hhp

... it’s difficult for typographers to assess a typeface strictly on immersive grounds

Yes. ...

And that’s why everyone is afraid to do a great small text face, with thousands of kinks, gouges, and traps ... something designed not to look good to a graphic designer, but to use density to convey letter shapes to readers in the most effective way possible. Because it’s more than just gouges, traps, etc. Once you really start looking at what’s happening in small text, and once you start letting go of making your letters look beautiful, you can really confront what it takes to get things to work at six or seven points. I’m not saying that a small text font has to be ugly when examined at 14 points, but I am saying it is the easiest way to design it, if you can be freed from that pretty-at-14 requirement. That said, Sumner Stone’s new 5 point size of Cycles manages to be both functional and not ugly. But that’s Sumner.

What’s funny Bill is that one of the very few people who has really
tried to make an unapologetic small text face is... Chris Burke! :-)

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/fontfont/parable/

> I’m not saying that a small text font has to be ugly when examined at 14 points

I am.

hhp

everyone is afraid to do a great small text face

Small text faces are not something there’s any demand for, except maybe for agate.
Digital work flow, high resolution printing, and being able to “see” small text on a monitor, rather than have to inspect a galley — these may explain the perception that special faces aren’t required for 5 or 6 pt. type. People will use Helvetica 45 on coated stock; tends to weed out the over-40s as readers, though.

I’ve done some news text faces, Worldwide and Brown, for use around 8 pt size, with kinks, gouges and traps, that look pretty horsey (not necessarily ugly?) at 14 pt. I could probably have made them look nicer, but it would have been a lot of unnecessary work, as there are also display versions.

> Small text faces are not something there’s any demand for

But by the same logic one wouldn’t design fonts at all! :-/

A central factor in terms of what most type designers actually
spend time making seems to be what each of us enjoys making.
Some of us enjoy lo-fi design, and will explore it no matter how
feeble the demand is.

The grand master of lo-fi type is Ladislas Mandel.
His individual letterform outlines contain more
thought than some entire fonts.

hhp

It would be so great to have a thread where small type could be discussed, and shown.

Start the thread.

ChrisL

I don’t have the energy. In the meantime I have been looking at Charles Leonard’s thesis, which is linked to in another Typophile thread, http://www.typophile.com/node/18165, and thinking about the dichotomy between what Renner wants to do in his drawings and what he has to do in the finished type. His ideas are always consistently more radical than ’type’ will accept. I am surprised that Hrant and some others have not had more to say about this. We tend to be so prissy and self-censoring in type — it is a necessity, I suppose, but as a mindset it impedes creativity. Renner was fortunate to be able to work in a situation where he could do what he wanted and leave the censoring to others. However, either way, nothing radical ever gets put into widespread use.

Karsten thinks philosophers shouldn’t be connected to art or craft but I think this is rather limiting. Nietzsche spends his entire career obsessed with Wagner, and Heidegger spends most of his obsessed with Nietzsche, and large schools of their successors spend their entire careers obsessed with both. Walter Benjamin gives us the modern keys to looking at photography, reproduced art, mechanisation, appropriation and authenticity, all issues that are important to type. As regards appropriation, Edit DeAk has pointed out in an I think unpublished essay that current day appropriation can be compared to the book - you may own the book, but not what’s in it (Well, can’t you own your view of it?), and compares image appropriation to reading - if I read her correctly. You get at least some hints of these connexions in Charles’s thesis and I wonder if they couldn’t be profitably explored further? What is more hot button for type than authenticity, reproducibility, mechanisation, appropriation? A small thing I am surprised at in the Leonard thesis is the lack of attention given to Erbar, but I haven’t yet read all of it.

In the meantime I am wondering if any of the ideas (are they ideas? — or are they just glyphs?) in Renner’s Steile sketches couldn’t be incorporated into a new version. ’Version’ is an underexplored concept, isn’t it now? Now that is really interesting.

If no one ever sees my (or anyone’s) type designs, do they really exist?

ChrisL

That isn’t a Berkeleyan question because at the very least, someone did see it: you. Even if nobody else ever sees it, your experience of having seen it cannot be separated from your interactions with others and the influence you have on others. So my very simple minded vote is, it exists.

In the case of Renner’s Futura variants, which were supposed to be the main event, we have the case where a few see them and most do not. In the case of the Steile sketches, we have something that was never made into type, and that only a very few have seen.

But back to the point: it is now possible for a machine to create a hitherto unseen typeface. So, if nobody actually looks at the output, does it exist?

Karsten thinks philosophers shouldn’t be connected to art or craft but I think this is rather limiting.

Oh, I just said that you better not ask a philosopher about the design of a *particular* typeface. A philosopher is not a designer, and — in most cases — may not see more than other non-designers. There are exceptions of course, I could easily add Adorno to your list. However, I am not sure if what they wrote would help a designer answering particular design questions with comments like: “Better if you make this curve a bit smoother — see the effect?” They deal with art in a very general way (music-an-sich, photography-an-sich). What Benjamin says about reproduction does not necessarily have consequences on how photographs look like.
Philosophic minds like Danto or Luhmann (German sociologist, system theory) tell you a lot about everything related to art. (There are such nice ideas like: If you start with a work of art, you got all possibilities to make whatever decision, but as you go on designing, with every decision of yours the possibilities get less and less, and you are more and more forced to subordinate to your artwork’s structure. Not sure if this is Adorno or Luhmann who also had Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form in mind who in turn seems much “inspired” by Peirce’s earlier “entitativy graphs”.) But they don’t really tell you what makes art art. And if you look for advice on making art, the cheapest “how-to” book is the better choice.
I like both realms, and they depend on each other and influence each other. In a very remote way.

... lack of attention given to Erbar, ...

What are you appealing to? That Erbar (but other typefaces too) changed over time, and some letters were modified to look more like Futura? ;-)

Call: I’m not saying that a small text font has to be ugly when examined at 14 points

Response: I am.

A better or more nuanced way to think of this, or think this through might be to consider that what works optical-grammatically at 14 points might not work at all optical-grammatically at 7 points.

At 14 point what works well optical-grammatically at 7 might appear optical-grammatically dysfunctional (= ugly?). This has to be purely a function of the ratio of receptor (rod / cone) density relative to proximal stimulus extent, and the visual spatial frequency band used in form resolution while reading versus inspecting.

On the gestural-atmospheric (mood) axis the ’mood signature’ of a block of 7 point type in a given font will be totally incompatable with the ’mood signature’(ugly?) of the same type with all the parameters exactly proportionately scaled, for the same receptor density / frequency band reasons.

A typeface is never really seen.

—

> I am surprised that Hrant and some others
> have not had more to say about this.

Well, there’s so much to say about so many other things; and so
little time. That said, I admit to being much more interested in
Renner as a result of this thread. Thanks guys.

> you better not ask a philosopher about the design of a *particular* typeface.

On the other hand, in some cases, you better not ask
another type designer about a particular typeface! :-/

> what works optical-grammatically at 14 points might not
> work at all optical-grammatically at 7 points.

Or a little bit more firmly:
Some things that work at 7 will look ugly at 14.

hhp

> A typeface is never really seen.

Furthermore:
Any use of a typeface is a parody of it.

hhp

Off-topic: Joshua Darden’s Freight Micro was intended for small texts. I remember him showing it to me in Prague (ATypI 2004) and saying that I would use it for titles. Later W magazine apparently like it so much Joshua created a version of it specifically for their headlines. Type Designers cannot control what typographic (graphic) designers see as beautiful and/or appropriate. They can only create what they think is going to work or get a response of some sort from the world based on current trends or what is in their hearts.

... A typeface is never really seen.

Furthermore:
Any use of a typeface is a parody of it. ...

Those are good observations, but on an entirely simple level Chris’s post resonates with me since I must be a good candidate for king of the unreleased typefaces. Some of them might be worthwhile, but believe me a lot of them are not, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn a lot from them.

— you better not ask a philosopher about the design of a *particular* typeface.
— On the other hand, in some cases, you better not ask another type designer about a particular typeface! :-/

Yes! I often miss serious criticism of type — not just nice articles about the latest stuff. But then: Only type designers have an eye educated enough to SEE details for they share the experience of designing type. Yet at the same time you never know if the criticism isn’t just expression of personal amity or animosity, or of different approaches to type design (different “schools”). Who knows? Which means that a reader would need to be as critical (able to analyse) as the critic and have some information about work and personalities of both criticised and critic.

[I hope my use of “critic” and “criticism” is correct. I remember an article about differences in the use of these words in the US and in Britain. But this was written pre-1900.]

Karsten,
I think what helps is getting critiques from several different people. It helps if they are a mix of type designers and good type users. You see the differences in what they say as a way to balance what to make of it all. The other good thing is that it forces you to take a hard look at why you have done things a particular way. Sometimes you just see what a person says as correct. Sometimes you realize you were right in the first place but needed to really look hard at it to know that.
I have found the critique area here on Typophile to be valuable in that way.

ChrisL

What is the rap on Steile Futura in terms of suitability for text or display? What claims are made for it by the author of the prototype or the foundry that corrected it? What pretensions does it address.

What specifically do you love about it Stephen?
What aspects of the Renner drawings or the metal and digital realizations do you stuggle with Bill? What specific authenticity, mechanical reproduction, appropriation issues occupy you as you struggle with it’s redigitization.

I think what helps is getting critiques from several different people.

Definitely so. I take comments by non type designers serious. If they find that something is wrong, then something IS wrong, and you have to figure out what. But only type designers, by their own experience, can give comments like: “Make this curve a bit smoother, and it will look right.”
What I cannot accept however is considering philosophers as authorities regarding type, photography, painting, movies. (With respect to type, Vilem Flusser comes to mind. He had great ideas about writing and type and invented etymologies that blow you away because they seem so evident — why didn’t I see it like that before? —, but this has almost nothing to do with the reality and practice of writing or designing. It’s fancy. Beautiful, but fancy.)

Karsten

Peter, great questions.

Karsten, I think a good rule of thumb is this: the most informed an opinion is, the more it has to be “filtered” using context. For example, if I get a crit of a font from a person who I happen to know makes chirographic type, I certainly don’t ignore it outright, but I do use that context to eliminate or focus the particular opinions. So for example if that person says “the ’g’ is too dark”, great; but if he says “the bottom of the ’d’ is wrong” then I know to simply smile it into oblivion.

hhp

Karsten, Flusser sounds very interesting—what do you recommend of his? What available in English?

On the issue of ’ugliness’ of very small type, my main problem with Hrant’s characterization is that if taken seriously it would mean that you can ignore aesthetics in small type, which I don’t think is right. As Peter notes, the type might look decent from an aesthetic viewpoint at the intended size, even if wierd at larger sizes. And as Tiffany points out, some effective at small sizes at large have aesthetic interest of their own. So the better way to put this, I think, is that at small sizes changes have to be made for legibility that may look odd at larger sizes. I think that is about as far as one can go.

> you can ignore aesthetics in small type

No, never ignore. Simply give it less weight. Do you
ignore function at display sizes? No, but you can and
do push legibility harder. Same thing, just the other
way around, in text.

> may look odd

Will look odd. And “odd” is basically “ugly” here.

hhp

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

’Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.’

Tiffany, I will hope some time to put up some examples that I think place the matter beyond doubt. However, they are not really historical examples, just my own private meanderings.

’What is the rap on Steile Futura in terms of suitability for text or display?’

It’s obviously not intended for anything but short passages of text, set rather large. However, the smallest size cut was 8 points.

’What claims are made for it by the author of the prototype or the foundry that corrected it?’

None that I can find in the marketing literature beyond ’a new design by Paul Renner’. But then, what is needed beyond that?

’What pretensions does it address.’

Don’t really understand the question which may be too broad. Could you talk a little bit more about this?

’What aspects of the Renner drawings or the metal and digital realizations do you stuggle with Bill? What specific authenticity, mechanical reproduction, appropriation issues occupy you as you struggle with it’s redigitization.’

When you are redigitising, redesigning, re-producing a type face, you want to think that are inside of the typeface, inside the designer’s head, inside its time in history, and yet that you are fully present in the present. Well, at least that is what I want. How can you present a typeface if you don’t understand it deeply? Very generally, I know quite well - it is not a matter of opinion or shading - that I am not deep enough in Renner’s head, far from it.

Speaking particularly, let’s look at the problem of the left and right quotation marks in Steile. I am dissastisfied with them in the metal, and also in the Tasse re-approach, which in this respect was too literal for my taste. There is too much space, and it has something to do with the angle of the angled quotation marks, which are in any case a difficult object to deal with under the best of circumstances. It is probably easily fixed by bringing them closer to straight and tightening them. But wait: suppose I fix them and a few lines look OK to me. What other problems have I now caused? The simple word ’it’s’ looks bad to me in Steile Metal and Tasse. But if I fix that to my liking, what other problems will I have caused? What is my liking and why do I have it? To what extent am I the prisoner of the present, and is this preventing me from imagining the future? Can my study of the past help me get to the future? Did they have a better way of looking at the apostrophe in 1950, and should I consider that as we move towards 2050?

Do I need to appropriate from the past in order to plan the future, or do I need to free myself from it? This is a particular problem we have in type at just this point in history. It arises because there are so many obvious craft and aesthetic issues we have to go back to the past for. Otherwise we will be stifled by our incompetence. Our problem is how to gather from the past only what is liberating. That isn’t easy because it involves a lot of conceptual gear shifting.

Let’s take another particular small problem, the ff ligature. In metal, this has a typical Linotype form that I find jarring. A big sweep for the top of the first f, and then a tiny sweep for the second f to make it consonant with standalone f. Can anything be done to resolve this problem? Should the top of the second f of ff be extended to make it work with the first f? In that case, should the standalone f be similarly changed? But that would be quite a radical decision, wouldn’t it? Was the production version designed this way in the hope that Linotype would eventually adapt it? If so, wouldn’t it be better to un-Lino it? But what will be the consequences of that? How can I know what is the right thing to do when I don’t feel an overwhelming answer coming out of me? If I don’t have an irrational voice saying ’do this’ - and I would trust that voice if I heard it - what rational analytical tools can I use to determine the best choice?

Similarly, with the other f ligatures there are consistency problems. Each has been designed rather differently. Perhaps each is the best compromise possible, but some seem too curvy, like fi, for such an angular face How can we test that? And what about the flaring on the f of fi that is not present in any of the other f’s?

Speaking of flaring, let’s return to the e I showed. We saw that in this particular character, I de-cornered the bottom right feature to avoid flare. In this case, I was being faithful to the metal. But the analogous feature at the bottom left of the g has a much more intense flare in metal. To what extent should I respect that difference, or try to make each more consistent? How can I answer the question: why are the flares on e and g (and fi) so different? To what extent is consistency working for the face? To what extent against?

Will I address the optical scaling question? Bauer did an outstanding job in this respect, though the 8 point may seem a hair too dark to some. (I was noticing this problem in Lino Granjon recently.) Or would a variable bold axis be adequate? In that case, what do I make available to the user? Different optical sizes, or to keep things simpler, some weight variants?

So there are a lot of problems and frankly, I don’t see how they can be adequately solved outside of a co-operative foundry environment. From this point of view, it’s not surprising that the only real effort to bring Steile into the future came from Font Bureau, and it’s not surprising that nobody had the energy to take on the italic.

Stephen is right. Steile is a mystery.

Ugly is in the eye of the beholder.

...acutally, i thought the saying wen thus: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but ugly is to the bone!”

First of all, Vilem Flusser’s Die Schrift. Hat schreiben Zukunft? (“Writing. Is there future for writing?”), by a Goettingen publisher named “European Photography”, but I cannot find an English edition at Amazon. The Shape of Things and The Freedom of the Migrant I like most. But each of his books is worth reading. Beware, he may be called postmodernist.

— I think a good rule of thumb is this: the most informed an opinion is, the more it has to be “filtered” using context.

:)

— Different optical sizes, or to keep things simpler, some weight variants?

With sanserifs, especially low-contrast ones, it may be worth trying a combined solution: lighter weights at the same time serve as larger optical sizes. But this requires many finely graded weights. And details matter. E.g. your e shows rounded corners. Sharp corners are easier to handle, they look the same at whatever size. But then, your roundings are so minute that they may look ok even at larger sizes. (I tended toward rounded corners earlier, less minute than yours, so if enlarged, letters looked like sausages. I decided for sharp corners instead ...) It really depends on the effect you desire, but also practical considerations — as great as optical sizes are typographically, who uses them? or, who will ever use more than two weights of a really big family?
Whatever you do, and however faithful you’ll do it — it will be your interpretation and never a “true” Renner. So I would not bother and just try corrections and see if it would change the image of the type too much.

Bill — I will have to relocate the volume of Eine Jahresgabe Der Typographischen Gesellschaft München to see what attributions are available from the captions to the illustrations I posted. The articles in the yearbook deal primarily with remembrances of Renner and Renner’s years in Munich as head of the Meisterschule für Deutschelands Buchdrucker–the author and editor, Phillipp Luidl, has served as director of the Akademie für das Grafische Gerwerbe of Munich, which is the post-war sucessor to the school that Renner headed from 1926 – 1933. As such, I suspect that he had access to records and files known to few others.

On the one hand, Renner is known for Futura most of all. (1) Futura indeed seems to own much to Bauer. Then, it seems still unsolved whether the Futura uppercase were by Renner or an architect; I am not up to date and don’t know if this is settled now.

Not to toot my own horn too much–but a bit–I did address the Ferdinand Kramer v. Paul Renner question in my thesis “Paul Renner and Futura: The Effects of Culture, Technology, and Social Continuity On the Design of Type for Printing” available as a PDF at
http://etd.gsu.edu/theses/available/etd-07222005-152053/. Due the similarity of dimensional increments between drawings–and reproductions of drawings–known to be by Renner and the drawings tentatively attributed to Kramer by Hans Peter Willberg, I came to the conclusion that the drawings were more probably by Renner, although it is clearly possible that Kramer collaborated with Renner on the designs for the Frankfurt public signage project.

Renner’s own extensive experience as a book designer from 1907 on suggests that while he was not personally adept at the proportional subtleties seen in the font released by Bauer in 1927, he was attuned to them. A myth persists that Renner wasn’t much of a lettering artist prior to his involvement with Bauer in the production of Futura. However, as a book designer he was responsible for the design and production of as many at 250 volumes per year between 1910 and the beginning of World War I. Many of these books sport title pages that are photo engravings of lettering executed by Renner. Further, it is helpful to remember that it was Renner that Fritz Wichert, director of the Frankfurter Kunstschule recruited in 1925 to rejuvenate that school’s program of instruction in lettering and typography.

Well, I took liberties with it to make my point. I think it works both ways. What is ugly for some is beautiful to others, and what is beautiful for some is ugly to others. I think arguing over what is ugly or beautiful is asking for trouble.

What is ugly for some is beautiful to others
But there is nonetheless a great deal of consistency in reactions, and differences of taste can usually be explained by high-level cognitive response - “beliefs” - such that genuine formal disagreement seems small or rare. The automatic popping up of the idea that beauty-is-subjective gets in the way of the development of a common and detailed vocabulary for talking about the formal features of a piece of art/craft, leaving the field open to the sociopolitical-context bores.

Hello Mr Leonard, I am not yet through your theses, but am reading it.

As to Futura uppercase, now I remember: In an issue of “Buchhandelsgeschichte” of 1995 there was a convincing refututation of the theory that Kramer was designer of Futura uppercase letters. It gave some exact dates for evidence.

When he started with Futura, Renner could not be called type designer. Early Futura drawings are strictly geometric and are as “naively” formed as are the attempts by Herbert Bayer and others. Typography, lettering, type design are not the same. My remark was about Renner the type designer (in the twenties), not about Renner the book designer or Renner the lettering artist.

I really enjoy this thread with so many parallel discussions!

Karsten

Karsten, I don’t think you should deduc