How Futura Became The Most Ripped-Off Typeface In History
Companies from Best Buy to Forever 21 use Futura, but probably not the original. That’s because it has been endlessly reimagined, imitated, and blatantly ripped off.
By Douglas Thomas
You’ve never used the real Futura.
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…
