Futura is Female
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Futura is female. This statement might sound shocking since the typeface that populated the 50’s advertising industry arose from the set square of a German male who disliked most forms of modern culture.
Dancing, jazz, cinema, and basically anything without a stoic structure would make Paul Renner frown. However, despite Renner’s wishes for Futura to remain the clean, elegant, and efficient German engineer that he originally envisioned, Futura is female. And the girl went wild.
Even the evolution of Renner’s “g” design foreshadows this transformation: the sharp angular loop of his original drawings morphed into a “softly seductive curve” (COLES, Stephen: 2012) when it was finally released in 1927.
To some extent, “Futura is the Forrest Gump of all typefaces” (Glitten, Ariela: 2017), an accidental witness to the highs and lows that shaped humanity in the 20th century. As a teenage rebel, she waltzed with her father’s enemy when she displayed the Nazi labour permit of 1943.
Similarly, she spent some more time on the wrong side of history when she appeared in the military order that initiated the internment of Japanese-American citizens during World War II. But, just like Forrest Gump, Futura will continue to run unnoticed from place to place and inspiring witty slogans for more than 90 years.
Futura sprung up everywhere from the “Mad Men” of New York to the Moon. To some degree, she had satisfied his father’s most imaginative desires when, after travelling 363,104 kilometres at an average speed of 39,897 km/h, Futura became the one typeface to land on the moon. Beside Neil Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind”, a plaque, written in uppercase Futura Medium, spelt: “We came in peace for all mankind.”
There is no evidence to suggest that Paul Renner had thought of “lunar plaque layouts” when envisioning the many purposes of the multifunctional typeface that the Bauer Type Foundry had released in Light, Medium, Bold, and Bold Oblique weights by 1927. Nevertheless, speed, progress and geometry where at the core of type design when Futura was born, and landing on the moon was the holy grail of modernism.
Surely, 1969 was a golden year for Paul Renner. Before Futura’s galactic odyssey in the Apollo 11, the aerospace industry had honoured his futuristic view by setting the autopilot controls of the Boeing 747 with his typeface. Renner believed that the feel and look of modernism augured a long life for his newborn and, although he was right, times change, kids grow, and the typeface saw her future in bolder weights.
By the late 1980s and early ‘90s a design school maxim became popular: “Never Use Futura”. Absolut Vodka, Nike, Volkswagen, Louis Vuitton, Vogue, Richard Nixon, Fox News...
Futura was the mother tongue of advertising in the peak of Capitalism and scholars all around the globe were determined to fight the norm. There was even a movement called “Art Directors Against Futura Extra Bold Condensed”.
Hating Futura became the new norm but, luckily, some artists don’t follow trends and there are even others who dare to think for themselves. The punishment didn’t last long and Futura landed with her true gang: Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and the Guerrilla Girls.
These artists had higher goals than originality, and wanted to challenge the male social structure that consumerism enhanced “by turning typographic messages back on advertisers”. (THOMAS, Douglas: 2017).
With this idea in mind, the Guerilla Girls have been fighting sexism in Futura Black Extended since 1989. The artist Jenny Holzer has projected Futura’s almost perfectly round “O” onto different architectural structures, and Barbara Kruger has challenged the male gaze with simple geometries, round dots, and “p´s” and “b’s” that gently thin as they merge with the verticals.
According to Douglas Thomas in an interview with Ariela Glitten, Kruger’s use of language is “sharp and astute”, but it wouldn’t be the same if she had used Times New Roman or Comic Sans. “Her work would still be witty, but it wouldn’t have that same punch. It wouldn’t immediately tie back to the original advertisements by using the typeface of so many mass consumer brands. By using Futura, she makes that connection clearer and the criticism all the more pointed.”
There is no way to know if Renner turned in his grave after his newborn started hanging with the bad girls. No one can know what he felt after his beloved posed lusciously in the biggest New York billboards. But Futura was designed with spiky “m’s,” “w’s,” and “a’s.” Futura was meant to serve progress. If he wanted a clean German gentleman he shouldn’t have named her FuturA.