Spanning three widths and five weights, the resulting typeface maintains unexpected quirks and delights and is capable of a wide range of expressions. While the name may be French for “apothecary,” Alejandro Paul and his team found inspiration in an antique German design dating back to the late 19th century. (And hey: If you forgot to buy a little something for the designer in your life this holiday season, it’s worth mentioning that fonts are a fantastic gift, and require no shipping …) ApothicaireĪrgentinian foundry Sudtipos routinely turns out top-notch type-and their latest release, Apothicaire, is indeed just the medicine we need for the winter blues.

Herewith: 25 of our favorites new typefaces from 2020. (Speaking of subjectivity: As for PRINT’s own awesome typeface, Role-we’d have featured it, had it not been released in 2019.) We saw a lot of type that we loved in 2020-and throughout the year, as always, we catalogued it, notably in our Type Tuesday column.Īs we head into 2021, we’ve rounded up 25 of our favorite faces-a highly subjective list, as all such lists are, given structure by alphabetical order. Their version, called Futura Today, aims to be more efficient in terms of space used and more legible.Practical. For their redesign of USA Today, for example, Wolff Olins worked with independent type foundry Bold Monday to create a custom version of Futura. It’s also been used in countless logos, including well-known brands like Crayola, Best Buy and Gillette.įutura has been a perennial favorite with print designers, despite its quirks. A testament to the power of its simple shape is that it continues to be used widely both in print and (famously) in Stanley Kubrik and Wes Anderson films. Its influence can be seen in more recent fonts like Avenir, Brandon Grotesque, and Century Gothic. The enormous commercial success enjoyed by Futura led to the creation of many more geometric sans-serif typefaces in the years after its release. (MOMA has a great online gallery of typographic work that came out of the New Typography movement.) Influence of Futura

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The movement proposed an approach to graphic design that: Renner is more closely associated with influential designer Jan Tschichold and The New Typography, a movement that predated and was contemporary with the Bauhaus. They applied this same aesthetic to type-letterforms should be clean, simple shapes, devoid of all embellishments. In the Bauhaus ideology, a form should be pared down to its essence, stripped of all unnecessary and distracting decoration. Organized around the simple geometric forms of circle, square and triangle, Renner’s original sketches for Futura reflect some of the ideas that had captivated those involved in the movement. While not involved in the Bauhaus, he was influenced by it and by the same cultural and artistic ideas that gave rise to the Bauhaus. Futura and the Bauhaus?īoth Paul Renner and Futura are often associated with the Bauhaus movement, but there is some debate about the interplay between them. In the process of bringing Renner’s initial drawings to metal type, the Bauer designers made adjustments that brought his original concepts for Futura closer in line with traditional typographic letterforms. It is extremely effective as a display font, but can also be pleasant to read in longer form as a text face.

One of Paul Renner’s original drawings for the typeface that would become Futuraĭesigned by Paul Renner between 19, Futura was released commercially in 1927 by the Bauer Type Foundry in Frankfurt, Germany.

Futura typeface design