Michael Harvey, UK
When Paul Renner designed Futura back in the 1920s it was intended to be a typeface for the modern age, a sans serif of almost geometrical purity that would fit virtually every occasion in the brave new world. It is still a popular face today, in a world no longer new or brave.
Similarly, Eric Gill’s sans serif from the same era was seen as a letter for the age, foolproof Gill claimed rather sternly, its simple construction not too taxing for makers of signs and other non-type items. And Gill Sans is also, like Futura, back in fashion, as everything Gill has been since Fiona McCarthy’s eye-opening rev- elations about the man. Over time these faces had extra weights added, making them comprehensive typeface families. Both were later eclipsed by other sans serifs with attitude, Helvetica and Univers, the latter the first fully-worked out typeface family to be launched with a complete range of weights and proportions.
The world moves on, and now, when we see Futura amongst us again, it brings echoes of the time when Bauhaus ideals of how design should fit the machine age were dominant, and Gill Sans now seems so, well, Gill-ish, full of his trademark details. As Ian Hamilton Finlay has rightly observed: whatever you say in Gill Sans you always say Gill Sans. So today we can no longer use these faces, especially Gill’s, for the everyday work their designers intended, for their character is too strongly redolent of their time or maker.
There are more recent, bread-and-butter type families. One thinks of Robert Slimbach’s Myriad and Minion, sans serif and roman respectively, and of Sumner Stone’s Stone Sans and Stone Serif. Will these, for us quiet, useful, flexible, designs fall out of fashion, returning one day as mannered, typical products of our age?
Then, what are we to make of the phenomenal success of one of the most recent type families, Rotis, the result of many year’s work by the late Otl Aicher? This comes complete with mannered, let’s not beat about the bush, quirky characters that one would have thought a disadvantage in a design intended for the widest use. An unhappy blend of pure sans serif forms with occasionally jarring calligraphic touches (look at lowercase c and e; compare them with those in Gill Sans), oddly narrow round forms in the capitals and some unconvincing semi-serifed characters. There is no formal logic running through the four fonts that comprise this family, but this has not hindered its success.
Is Rotis seen everywhere today because so few typographers now study letterforms at college, and fonts are available so readily in office and home for non-professionals to use? It can’t be through high-powered marketing, for specimen sheets no longer appear from the big manufacturers — and how one misses Adobe’s elegant little booklets — and the brief glimpses of new types in various publications or on the web hardly count as serious marketing. Does Rotis simply strike a chord with an undiscriminating public, is it the true letterform for our age, or am I missing something?
Answers please!
“Loche” worked as an AD for magazines and newspapers in Buenos Aires before graduating with honors from the MA in Typeface Design, Reading University, UK, and from the ANRT, Atelier National de Recherche Typographique in Nancy, France. In 2001 Loche founded PampaType, the first type foundry in Argentina, one of the pioneer foundries in the region. Loche’s type designs have received multiple awards from ATypI, Type Directors Club, Morisawa, Creative Review, Typographica, Hii, Typographica, Bienal Iberoamericana de Diseño de Madrid, and Tipos Latinos. With more than 20 years of experience in the industry, PampaType’s international team is passionate about designing bespoke fonts for branding and identity projects, as well as creating catalogue fonts, available on TypeNetwork and Adobe, and on its own website. Loche has taught and lectured extensively on type, lettering and the history of letterforms in various locations in the Americas and Europe. He has also written for magazines and blogs on information design, infographics, editorial design, typography, type design, type history.