Instead, you’ve used either a copy—one of Futura’s many contemporary competitors created shortly after its release in 1927—or a copy of a copy, one of the dozens of digital Futuras now on the market. Many more knockoffs are just simple reproductions adapted to new formats; many of these even inhabit the name Futura, despite their genealogical or stylistic differences from the original designed by Paul Renner for the Bauer Type Foundry. Only experts and wonks can, or want to, tell the difference between the original, the blatant rip-offs, and all the contemporary digital copies. To most viewers, the copies—and even some of the modern hybrids—are Futura.

Futura was never in a class totally of its own. The fact that it persisted and became the modern model of the geometric sans serif–visible everywhere from Best Buy to Wes Anderson films–is remarkable in itself.

Bauer Type Foundry’s Futura was only one of many geometric sans serifs to be designed in Germany during the 1920s and ’30s. Practically every German company had its own, and all of their typefaces have slightly different proportions, interesting backstories, and unique features to commend them. So how did Futura beat out all its competitors, imitators, and copies to become known as the quintessential geometric sans? In part, good timing.

The aftermath of World War I was a tumultuous time for European economies. In Germany, between 1918 and 1924, the value of the Reichsmark plummeted, with devastating effects for business and industry. In 1924 the U.S. State Department helped arrange an influx of 800 million marks into the German economy in an attempt to stabilize postwar European finance, known informally as the Dawes Plan. The loans put a temporary end to Germany’s devastating hyperinflation, and helped prime the pump for German war reparation payments to France, Great Britain, and, by extension, the United States. In 1925 a consortium of European type foundries capitalized on this infusion of investment and joined the Continental Type Founders Association. They opened an office in New York, giving them the advantage of marketing type directly in the United States. Rather than join the association, Bauer opened its own independent New York office in 1927. Almost immediately, Bauer began marketing and selling a new typeface it hoped would be a harbinger of success to come: Futura.

Only three German geometric sans serifs, including Futura, were released in the United States during what would become a short window of economic prosperity in the aftermath of World War I. Little did these companies know that there would only be a few short years of stability before the market crash of 1929, and that in 1930 American tariffs would impose barriers to entry for German types not already in the United States. Had Futura been sold a few years before or after, it may never have found a place in the U.S. market. The European geometric sans serifs that were released after Futura barely had a chance.

Yet Futura’s success was not just due to good timing. The evidence that Futura was the most popular of its cohort is that it was the most widely imitated.