Learning about Type & Hierarchy: Explorations with a Futura Poster
In my next project for Communication Design Fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon University, I explore the typographical and historical significance of Futura, and design a type specimen poster that highlights these characteristics.
Final Product | Design Process | Research
Typography is one of the strongest tools that a designer can use. Apart from conveying meaning from the words and phrases that individual characters make up, the design of each type and its overall composition in a piece of art can vastly affect its visual effects, emotions and its impression on the viewer.
As part of my next project for Communication Design Fundamentals at Carnegie Mellon University, we used our lessons learnt from the exercises in typography we did earlier and applied them towards creating a typography specimen poster that demonstrated these characteristics and properties of the particular type.
My assigned type was Futura, “The Typeface of the Future”
I was quite glad to have been assigned Futura, as it is a type that I am rather familiar with in its modern applications. As Futura is also a geometric type, and I found that the inherent “structure” of the type made gave me some sort of framework to ideate my work upon. (See the Research section for more backstory on Futura.)
Futura: Storied Past of the ‘Typeface of Tomorrow’
10"x16" Poster, Print/Illustration
2019
Individual Project
Chew, Rong Kang
Design Process
After doing my initial research, I found that although Futura was marketed as the typeface of the future by the Bauer Type Foundry and was created recently in 1927, it has since developed a storied past that grounded itself firmly in our popular culture.
I knew that for my poster, I wanted to showcase both the uniform geometric forms of Futura, but also bring up this rich history that it has. It would be challenging to focus on both of these aspects at once, so I decided to focus on the latter, and utilize the structure of the poster to subtly hint at the geometry instead.
I started sketching out ideas for this structure, thinking about certain design elements like spaceflight and IKEA catalogs that recall Futura and its geometry as well:
I found that some of my sketches that emphasized the geometry a little too heavily, like when overlapping, didn’t lend well as a base to showcase its history. I ended up with a slightly simpler design, that placed the title upfront and large on an 45 °angle, and stretched out its Us to highlight the parallel lines. The letter G also had the same angle on its end cap, and I intended to incorporate this as well.
This designed translated well into the digital form, which I then started to incorporate some of the history upon. I decided the best way to layout the poster was in the form of an IKEA Catalog page, with each of the historical elements dispersed around the poster, with the classic IKEA product price tag next to them. This starts with Paul Renner designing Futura in 1927, and you can see the year incorporated into the tag in the bottom left.
The most immediate historical concept that I wanted to bring up was the use of Futura in the plaque that followed Apollo 11 to the Moon. I decided that I could incorporate this into the letter A, which would represent the rocket, and designed a moon with the Ö German Umlaut, which I later decided to scale back to just a simple O and some markings to represent craters.
I had received feedback that the large A was a little confusing and didn’t really register as a rocket, so I tried another concept that changed up how it looked like, with smoke trails. I also brought in another element of history, which was Barbara Kruger’s use of Futura Heavy Oblique in her work (and subsequent inspiration for the Supreme streetwear brand), and incorporated it into the poster’s tagline. Some flavortext describing Futura was also added.
From this point, I decided that the poster was ready for a splash of color. First, I enforced that the poster would have its colors flipped across the 45° dividing line. I then found a swatch on Adobe Color CC that would work great for my poster, and applied it darker side up to represent the night sky. (The moon is also made of green cheese, yes?)
During our class critique, some of my peers provided excellent feedback from which to improve my work from. First, they felt that the flavortext and the IKEA labels were too similar or too close, which led to some confusion. I shifted this to within the parallel lines of the U to make separate it out. The text being perpedicular to the U also accentuates the straight lines of the type.
Next, the design of the rocket and moon didn’t sit well with some people. First, the smoke trails were a little too distracting from the main Futura title, so I decreased its emphasis with transparency. Second, the moon felt a little out of place with the clean lines of the poster. I decided to invert its color scheme, and use a suggestion from another student to add a second layer of color underneath to represent depth in the craters.
In the end, I was quite happy with the result of the poster, and felt that I stayed true to the original mission of highlighting the history of Futura while mentioning its geometric form as well. I actually had forgotten about the IKEA Catalog concept for a moment during my iterations, and realized again at the end that hey, it really look like a page out of their magazine. I liken it to a little treasure hunt of facts of Futura, and the poster rewards the audience when they figure out each fact about the typeface (including that IKEA actually abandoned this beloved font in 2010 for Verdana).
Whether or not Futura is overused is still up for debate, but I find that I really enjoyed using this typeface and appreciated all its geometric details. The fact that I received a package in the mail that used Futura as its typeface for the mailing address speaks to its pervasiveness, and this project helped me to realize how to make the fullest use of typography in context.
Research
Futura is a very popular typeface that we probably have encountered in multiple mediums and formats. It is a geometric, sans-serif typeface that was created by Paul Renner in 1927 that followed the spirit of Bauhaus design. It incorporated principles of efficiency and forward-looking, with simple geometric forms.
These characteristics could be seen in its near perfect circles, triangles and squares, with mono-weight strokes and low contrast within characters. Terminals are clean-cut and angled at 90 degrees to the stroke or parallel to the baseline, and sharp apexes mark its angles. The clean uniformity of Futura is its signature, and is extremely evident in its omitted descender.
The typeface was marketed by Bauer as the “typeface of today and tomorrow” and actually was developed in an effort to move away from the Fraktur calligraphic blackletter typeface that was still being used in Germany. Renner actually faced pressure from German Nazis because his font was seen as a opposition to Frakturs used in the Nazi propaganda. Nevertheless, Futura was eminently German and characteristic of clean-cut engineering.
Usage of Futura
The use of Futura went international because of its wide availability (in terms of physical types), but more importantly of utilitarian use because of its high readability from a distance and at small sizes. It became commonplace on instrument panels, engineering diagrams, and technical documents. It has been used extensively by Mercedes-Benz, Boeing and NASA, and has been sent to the moon with the Apollo 11 program.
The typeface has also seen appearances in multiple mediums of popular culture and branding. Barbara Kruger is known for her black-and-white photographs with overlaid white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique captions. This was later stolen/adapted by Supreme for their clothing line.
Futura has appeared in more than a handful of title cards and captions for TV shows and movies, like V for Vendetta where it is used practically everywhere. The typeface is also the favorite of Stanley Kubrik and Wes Anderson, and has appeared in a number of their films.
Finally, we should be all familiar with the extensive use of Futura by Volkswagon and IKEA, the latter of which had the font (or rather a similar variant IKEA Sans) in all its logo, branding, signage and the ever-present IKEA catalog. The company caused a great controversy in 2010 when it decided to switch from Futura to Verdana in an effort to have unified branding across its web and physical properties.
The wide usage of Futura across engineering, media and branding shows its appeal from clean and thoughtful design. There is much love from designers and audiences, so much so that it is slightly overused and maybe cliche to be used by new companies for branding. Nevertheless, any work made with Futura stands to gain from its uncanny, unique German roots.
