Futura, Gotham, and Verdana

Sans Serif Text in Cultural Context


Every typeface has its own history - how it was conceived, who created it, and why it came into existence. Each is also influenced by its distinctive cultural and historical context. The sans serif fonts Futura, Gotham, and Verdana were shaped by their time - and have continued to shape cultural values and norms.

Futura
Developed by Paul Renner between 1924 and 1926, Futura is one of the most successful sans serif fonts. Futura is simple and straightforward, and has continued to maintain a modern appearance despite its 80 years. (Prepressure.com) Renner was highly influenced by the Bauhaus movement and its adherence to geometric shapes. The font contains nearly perfect circles, squares, and triangles.

Germany at the time had just emerged from an economic crisis and political instability, and was now in the "Golden Twenties," a period of cultural revival. The setting was right for Renner to celebrate this break from the past, and create a sense of modern simplicity with Futura. He made a conscious effort to create something new, functional, and straightforward, diverging from the elaborate, heavy, and highly decorative typefaces that had been popular.

Deprived of these flourishes, Futura still looks contemporary today and is often used in design because of its "stylish elegance" and "commanding visual power." (CreativePro.com) Futura also paved the way for aesthetically pleasing, modern fonts such as Gotham and for functional fonts such as Verdana, which is ubiquitous in the computer culture of the 21st century.

Gotham
The typeface Gotham, inspired by the geometric lines of Futura, was designed by Jesse Ragan and Tobias Frere-Jones in 2000 as part of a commission for GQ magazine. The creative direction was to find a masculine, new, and fresh type style that would work in the pages of a men's fashion magazine. The designers looked to the clean, crisp lines of sans serifs to represent something new and modern.

Frere-Jones also wanted to capture the culture, style, and elegance New York and preserve it - and his found his inspiration by walking through New York and looking at the buildings and signage of the 1920s. Gotham captures the zeitgeist of 1920s New York, while also expressing present-day sensibilities. It is as if the font was a reaction to the constant changes happening in America in the recent past. The designers were attempting to reduce the type to its "bare essentials, rid of undesirable, local, or ethnic elements." Gotham is to be featured on the cornerstone of the Freedom tower at the World Trade Center site. It was also the font used by the Obama presidential campaign to mark "change" and a sense of fresh air and a "break from the past" similar to the origins of Futura.

It is interesting that a font so stripped of its flourishes, serifs, curls and frills, can hold so much meaning at times of great change. Perhaps the "blank slate" of such a basic design allows people to project what they want onto the messaging. Conversely, the simple quality of a sans serif can make it seem corporate or cold - as when they've been used by giants such as Rite Aid, Banana Republic, Starbucks (Gotham) and Volkswagen, Shell, and HP (Futura).

Verdana
Verdana was art directed by Virginia Howlett, who served as Microsoft's program manager of typography during the typeface's development. She worked closely with Matthew Carter with the primary goal to design a scalable font with "maximum readability in small sizes." (dmxzone.com) Now, with so much of our lives happening on computer screens and portable devices, readability has come to the forefront of type design. This shift is a clear reflection of our digitized, facebook society, and this comes as a threat to some designers who may feel that "good type" is taking second place to "readable type."

When IKEA recently changed its logo from Futura to Verdana for increased readability and global access (idsgn.com), there was a strong reaction. One poster wrote, "The decision is not a big deal by itself, but it is representative of a larger societal issue - good design is dying - especially print design. In this over-advertised, over-populated, throw-away web society, what does anyone really care?" (idsgn.org) Regardless of the developments that interactive design will bring, fonts will continue to reemerge, evolve, and express their historical and cultural contexts.

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• Lupton, Ellen. Thinking With Type. p. 55. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004
• Mosely, James. The Nymph and the Grot: the revival of the sanserif letter" Friends of the St. Bride Printing Library. 1999
• Saltz, Ina. Typography Essentials. P. 16. Rockport, 2009.
• Werner, Paul T. "Freedom Tower Type" AIGA Journal of Design. July 16, 2004.
• http://www.idsgn.org/posts/ikea-says-goodbye-to-futura/ August 26, 2009. Retrieved November 4, 2010.
• http://www.prepressure.com/fonts/interesting/futura Interesting Typefaces. December 28, 2009. Retrieved November 4, 2010.
• Fabian, Nicolas. http://www.creativepro.com/article/the-bauhaus-designer-paul-renner. December 15, 2000.
• http://www.designer-daily.com/how-a-simple-font-change-turned-into-a-pr-disaster-3224. August 30, 2010. Retrieved December 6, 2010
• http://www.100bestenschriften.de/5_Futura.html "Die 100 Besten Schriften Aller Zeiten" January 2007. Retrieved November 4, 2010.

Image Credits

• http://missom.wordpress.com/2008/10/31/barack-obama-prefers-gotham/
• http://www.idsgn.org/posts/ikea-says-goodbye-to-futura/