Roaring Typography

1 9 2 0 saw a dramatic change within typography. The Constructivist movement took hold with the goal of creating a new technological society. The movement promoted a scientific language of design with power and speed quickly becoming the themes of the newly found machine age. Shapes were streamlined and simplified curved letter forms were replaced with angular, sleek ones.

Typographic designers eschewed serifs and created new type-faces which according to

Herbert Bayer,

“reflected the notion of beauty in utility.”

These new fonts were highly legible and especially served the commercial world.

Ernst Keller. das neue heim (the new home) - 1928

Empire Type Foundry Catalog #18 - 1923

It’s amazing that the simple idea of dropping serifs at the ends of strokes didn't occur to many of the great typographers who experimented with their shapes and sizes so much.

In part, it is due to the inertia of scribes' tradition who, with their quills, simply could not produce a reasonably clean cut of a stroke. Undoubtedly, old typographers also knew the fact that was later confirmed by experiments..

Serifs help the eye stick to the line and thus facilitate reading.

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When the first examples of sans serif fonts finally appeared, they seemed so controversial that the first name given to them was "grotesque," and they were very rarely used except in advertising.

“Grotesque”

Grotesque, or Grotesk in German, is a style of sans-serif typeface from the 19th century. The name was coined by William Thorowgood, the first person to produce a sans-serif type with lower case, in 1832. Capital-only faces of this style were first available from 1816, made by William Caslon IV of the Caslon foundry under the name 2 Line English Egyptian.

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Architype Aubette

is based on Theo van Doesburg’s 1928 signage lettering for the Café Aubette in Strasbourg. A collaborative project with Jean and Sophie Arp, the design and decoration of the entire restaurant and leisure complex was one of the largest projects to exemplify 1920’s avant-garde, and the theories of Dutch De Stijl.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q RS T U V W X Y Z a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q rs t u v w x y z

F E D C B A M L K J I H G R Q P O NW V U T S Z Y Xf e d c b a m l k j i h g r q p o nw v u t s z y x

GILL SANS

is the Helvetica of England; ubiquitous, utilitarian and yet also quite specific in its ability to point to our notions of time and place. As a graphic designer’s in-joke once put it..

As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin.

Q. How do you do British post-war design?

A. Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’.

Kabel.Kabel is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by German typeface designer Rudolf Koch, and released by the Klingspor foundry in 1927.

Kabel.

Nobel offers personal variations on strict Bauhaus geometry. In 1929, three years after the Futura release, Sjoerd Henrik de Roos at Amsterdam explored alternative character sets to enliven basic Futura forms. The Nobel series was designed for Font Bureau by Tobias Frere-Jones, who fondly views Nobel as ‘Futura cooked in dirty pots & pans.’

The GreatTypography

Brandon Grotesque is a sans-serif typeface designed by Hannes von Döhren of HVD Fonts during 2009 and 2010. Spacing and kerning was done by Igino Marini of iKern.

The typeface can be classified as a geometric sans-serif, heavily inspired by the typefaces of same classification during the 1920s and 1930s. Brandon Grotesque was also designed to fit several purposes, not being singled out as only fitted for display text but also body text.

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