Types of Their Time

Early traces of the geometric sans in Germany

Typefaces are an expression of their time. FF Mark is a new typeface and yet it clearly draws on historical examples from the past. Precisely, the mid-1920s, a period in German history with exceptional innovation in engineering, in the arts and in design. In particular, the years between 1925 and 1930 produced several ideas that were new to the world — among them a new concept in type design: the geometric sans serif.

In Berlin 1926, the Funkturm — a transmitting tower with an observation platform, first opened to the public enabling new perspectives on the metropolis. The same year Mart Stam designed a cubic chair construction made from tubes (possibly the first without back legs), while Ludwig Mies van der Rohe filed a patent application for his version of this so-called Freischwinger (cantilever chair). It was designed in semicircles instead and thus supported the ability to swing. The architect Bruno Taut and his colleagues began major housing estate projects in Berlin: Onkel Toms Hütte (named after the famous novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin) in 1926 and the Hufeisensiedlung (literally horseshoe estate) a year earlier. Both are long and round building complexes equipped with many little square windows of different sizes — milestones in social housing. At the same time the students of the Bauhaus moved into their new school building in Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius. Not only is the building’s transparent “curtain wall” iconic, but so too the letters B-A-U-H-A-U-S running down the façade — geometric letters constructed from a simple grid. The basic shapes circle, square and triangle were omnipresent in the fields of industrial design, architecture, certainly in graphic design, as well as in lettering and type design.

In a special edition of the journal Typographische Mitteilungen titled Elementare Typographie it was Jan Tschichold who expressed his views on a new typographic style. Tschichold claimed it followed purpose and function; it rejected ornaments and instead used lines and basic shapes as graphic elements. In the fourth commandment of his manifesto it reads: “The elementary form of type shall be sans serif [Groteskschrift] in all its variants”. 1 Many foundries at the time were in search of a typeface that would not only serve these needs, but one that visually reflected the zeitgeist and thus letterforms originating from basic shapes.

In 1927 the Bauer type foundry released Futura, a geometric sans serif designed by Paul Renner. Not only did its name hold great demands, but even more so the Bauer advertising: “Die Schrift unserer Zeit” (the type of our time), which was initially an idea by the editor Jakob Hegener. 2 The claim that Futura was the type of its time, however, is excessive: type design at the time was as diverse as product design and architecture and there are numerous examples of geometric typefaces that represent similar thoughts and ideas.

The short intervals of designs released in the late 1920s and early 1930s suggest that there were instead many “types of their time”. The following introduces a precious few.