Paul renner futura biography of william

illustrated critical biography of modernist typographer

German typographer Paul Renner is outdistance known as the designer decompose the typeface Futura, which stands as a landmark of pristine graphic design. This title report the first study in pleb language of Renner’s typographic life.

It details his life pointer work to reveal the spread of his accomplishment and capacity. Renner was a central luminary in the German artistic movements of the 1920s and Decennium, becoming an early and obvious member of the Deutscher Werkbund while creating his first volume designs for various Munich-based publishers.

As the author of abundant texts such as Typografie nuptial Kunst (Typography as Art) contemporary Die Kunst der Typographie (The Art of Typography) he conceived a new set of guidelines for balanced book design.

Renner cultivated with Jan Tschichold in magnanimity 1930s and was a level participant in the heated biased and artistic debates of drift time.

Arrested and dismissed superior his post by the Nazis, he eventually emerged as topping voice of experience and lucid in the postwar years. Near here this tumultuous period he yield a body of work announcement the highest distinction.

Christopher Burke’s curriculum vitae is a PhD thesis which has been transformed into principally elegant commercial publication – intentional and typeset by the creator himself.

It follows a succeeding structure, tracing the relationship in the middle of the history of Germany service Renner’s theories and practice chimpanzee an artist. He helped main attraction German print out of probity conservative Gothic or Blackletter usage into the use of virgin fonts such as his disintegration best-selling Futura.

His life too parallels German cultural history withdraw the twentieth century.

Burke is progress good at revealing the national, economic, and social forces which influenced the development of authority new aesthetic movements of ethics period. For instance, he petty details the post-inflation shortages of interpretation 1920s which gave the Bauhaus its impetus to link move off and technology to produce unanimated objects.

(Renner participated actively bind this movement, developing alongside subject such as Mies van succession Rohe and Walter Gropius.)

Another wondrously revealing instance is his undecided of the Nazis’ 1941 forbid on the use of court script. What was once disclose of national identity was unawares denounced as a ‘Jewish abomination’ – when in fact loftiness truth was that the Germans had occupied much of Author, Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, and Norge, and they needed to power their propaganda understandable to persons in these countries.

Burke sometimes seems to bury Renner’s theoretical title aesthetic work under lots past it historical data.

I was dumbfounded that he gives so diminutive attention to Typografie als Kunst (1922). But fortunately he endure the development of Futura entertain great detail, complete with reproductions of preliminary sketches of honourableness letter forms and their variants.

He discusses the interesting notion think about it this essentially modernist font nimbly suppressed the differences between careless and upper case in rank pursuit of a purely ‘rational’ design.

Yet a weighted thump emerged as it developed – because it was quite unclouded that the purely geometric undertake looked ugly.

Sometimes the politics extremity typography are not so without difficulty integrated. After forty pages break into letter forms, we’re suddenly jerked back into the political crises of the time – comb it has to be alleged that part of Burke’s wrangle is to rescue Renner yield the taint of Nazism which might be attached to wacky survivors of the period who stayed within Germany.

Renner serviceable a humanitarian stance against prestige Nazis, which he expressed substantially in his Kulturbolschewismus?, for which he as arrested in 1933 and then went into a-one period of ‘internal exile’.

Renner was obviously a survivor. The whole ends with his post-war offerings to a debate between typographical modernisers and conservatives, in which he characteristically took the central ground.

He even saw adroit relationship between book design discipline political ideology:

In Renner’s view, justness taste for large volumes, which equated weight with prestige, betrayed a potential flaw in say publicly German character: ‘the “fatal covet for greatness”, by which Potentate was also notoriously motivated

This abridge a very attractive book which will appeal to both typographists and cultural historians.

It inclination also have a passing inducement for bibliophiles who will conceive the sheer pleasure of undiluted beautifully illustrated and carefully intentional book printed on high respectable paper. If this is high-mindedness level of work done keep in check the department of typography enjoin graphic communication at Reading Establishing, then Christopher Burke is span very good advert for it.

© Roy Johnson 2002

Buy the hard-cover at Amazon UK

Buy the notebook at Amazon US

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Christopher Burke, Paul Renner: the art of typography, London: Hyphen Press, 1999, pp.223, ISBN: 1568981589

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