Back to the Futura

If you’re a fonthead, you should check out the film Helvetica. Obviously Helvetica isn’t the only sans serif font, and dates from the 50’s, but in the film several interviewees discuss its ubiquitous use in sleek corporate logos (where I imagine Fraktur wouldn’t work so well). Nice post title, btw.

the Nazis weren’t shy about suing modernist touches in architecture, they were just very, very focused in how they used them: romantic back-to-the-land joy and strength holiday structures were a scaled up kind of folksy Austrian pasticcio, while industrial spaces were high modernist grain elevator-inspired (not quite Jewish) tours de force. I imagine typography might have would up with a similar instrumentalist employment: modernist where industrially necessary, Fraktur on the ideological documents. Sadly I don’t know of a single scholarly work that pays attention to the sort of commercial/industrial ephemera that Spielberg covered so brilliantly in the Indiana Jones films.

Perhaps even more interesting than the differences in typeface are the common characteristics: namely, the rules of capitalization. Each sentence is headed by a capitalized word, and followed by a linear sequence of lower-case letters, punctuated by capitalized words which represent proper names, titles and, of course, the central concept of identity (I). Headings and sub-headings are capitalized, and often are entirely capitalized.

In other words, our cognitive universe is determined by the limits of the language we employ to describe the social constructs of our environment.

I see also in the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute Wikipedia article that:

“The Fraktur typefaces reached a particularly strong use during the time of Nazism. After it had been initially publicised as being the only true German script, it was banned in a Schrifterlass (edict on script) as alleged Schwabacher Judenlettern (‘Schwabacher Jewish script’).”

Damn Nazis, no consistency…

I wonder how many Schrifterlassen there were? And could you write a history of the internal struggles of the Nazi leadership through graphic design edicts, or is this just Goebbels changing his mind?

Even today, Germany has an official Government font, decided upon after full public consultation and deliberation, an compulsory for all internal documents written by Government departments and agencies. Is there any other Government, I wonder, with an official font?

I remember reading that Fraktur was banned after the war by the occupation authorities… eh, I found my father’s copy of the Urfaust, printed in the U.S. in 1938. No vindication there.

Many companies have official fonts. It would be odd if only Germany did. The rest are likely to be victims of Microsoft and default (groan) to New Times Roman.

It’s simple – when looking at the statements of right-wingers always remember that Freudian projection is a major factor. Remember how often was the right accused Clinton of ‘black helicopter’ stuff that they eagerly accepted under Bush.

In this case, after the cults of personality that the right had for Reagan and Bush II, and the ‘anti-cult’ against Clinton, they’re going to accuse any supporter of Obama of being a cultist.

Think Karl Rove.

However, profile shots of aspiring leaders are clearly fascist. Ask the McCain campaign.

Probably the best known example of clean, simple and bold graphic design associated with the Nazis is the swastika.

The wiki entry once again is pretty interesting:

“I myself, meanwhile, after innumerable attempts, had laid down a final form; a flag with a red background, a white disk, and a black swastika in the middle. After long trials I also found a definite proportion between the size of the flag and the size of the white disk, as well as the shape and thickness of the swastika.”

Judging by the place of Nazis in popular culture, I’ve got a feeling that, in a few hundred years time, they will be the only thing remembered from the 20C. That means that, in time, every distinctive feature of the 20C will be read as ‘Nazi’, just as the whole of past centuries gets called ‘Enlightment’ or ‘Crusades’.

Thank goodness the Nazis kept all the serifs — they could have been used for comic book bullets!

Plus the impact of the Nazi choice (to insist on serifs) on mathematics, because after all, the foundation of math, or at least arithmetic, is the plus sign, ” + ” , and what is a ” + ” but a san serif swastika?

That’s all! (John H this is actually a fascinating and useful post, and I’m sharing it with others. I just couldn’t resist the jokes)

I can’t figure out any of this.

To cut a long story short: Fraktur is hundreds of years old and existed parallel with Antiqa for a long time. The Nazis didn’t like and banned it Fraktur in 1941. Yet, Fraktur is often falsely associated with Nazism, probably because it is being seen as “German” and possibly because it’s mixed up with SS runes. Fraktur was being used in print occasionally for a couple of years after the war, but has totally vanished now, except for headlines and such in some newspapers.

John, I’m not disagreeing with you, but do you think you could distinguish art that was banned by the Nazis from art that was embraced by them, by visual characteristics alone? I’m not as familiar with graphic arts as with painting, but the line seems fuzzy to me. Similarly, the question what politics should be primarily associated with Art Deco isn’t totally clear. (Though IIRC it seemed to be the academic consensus in some fields — more than ten years ago — that Art Deco was emphatically an anti-traditional and thus a left-wing movement. So it isn’t surprising that fascists disliked Art Deco styles.)

Does anyone know where I might be able to buy one of these Obama/Berlin posters?

There seems to be a confusion between Fraktur and serif. Hitler disapproved of Fraktur; he preferred serif type; and he hated sans-serif type.

Typefaces evolved as imitations of medieval handwritten scripts. Fraktur and serif were based on different scripts; sans-serif is an effort move type away from handwriting entirely.

Fraktur is a form of “blackletter” typeface. These are based on a style of late-medieval calligraphy which utilized a broad pen-nib. Its thick sections are very thick and its thin lines are very thin, it has many flourishes or “curliques,” and it is cursive (that is, it uses curves in place of some of the straight lines in letters like H and W). Imperial Germany favored favored Fraktur, and it was associated with German aggression during the First World War period. Hitler disapproved of it. He preferred serif type.

Serif is the usual sort of type that books and newspapers are printed in. It originated as an imitation of a medieval script that was written with a much thinner pen-nib. Its lines vary only slightly in thickness, there are no flourishes, and the letters have ‘serifs’- little ornamental details at the ends of lines, which are stylized imitations of the marks left when a writer using a quill or a nibbed pen lifts the pen and then places it back on the paper. Serifs are the most common typefaces used today. This blog is written in a serif typeface.

Obama’s poster is written in a sans-serif typeface. Sans-serif eliminates the little details, divorcing print from its origin in penmanship entirely and concentrating only on the aspects of the forms that distinguish one letter from the next. It’s designed to look “clean,” almost machine-made. It’s rarely used for text and is common in signs, labels and posters. The Nazis banned sans-serif type.

Of the two typefaces that Novakant tells us are acceptable for official German government use today, Neue Demos is a serif typeface and Neue Praxis is sans-serif.

Gaudí stuff? It seems even more elitist/apolitical.

What font do readers suggest for John McCain? A tattoo font?

I don’t think I would necessarily characterize any of it as ‘left’. All of modernism is anti-traditional, but some styles, like futurism, are more revolutionary (left or right, doesn’t matter) and some I perceive as very middle-class (Dali, for example). A lot of it is, of course, purely conceptual; it may be revolutionary, but not in any political sense.

I mean, if you define ‘right’ as ‘conservative’, then I agree, but fascism, for example, is a revolutionary movement too, requires radical, shocking expression as well.

From Jeremy Aynsley, Graphic Design in Germany 1890-1945:

“Arguments which had once been applied by Functionalists to reform design in favor of Roman typefaces and asymmetric setting were now [in 1933] mobilized by traditionalists suggesting that, in fact, Fraktur letterforms were more economical because of their condensed structure and easier to read because of their expressiveness.” p. 184

He makes no mention of an outright ban on Futura, but says that a shift towards traditional typefaces was the result of a gleichschaltung in the profession. “In the early years of the Reich there was a rash of new blackletter type designs for foundries. There are many signs, however, that it was a matter of what suited the occasion more than a systematically applied and strictly adhered-to policy.” p. 189

It should also be noted that Fraktur can be more or less traditional or “serif-y.” See this great poster for a more modern example.

Bad Jim – our print alphabet is virtually two separate alphabets – in many cases the relationship between the capitals and the lower case letters is arbitrary (A – a, D – d, E – e, G -g) and in others the relationship is distant (B -b, F -f, L – l, M -m). This is because our caps come (as you say) from Roman stonecut letters, which indeed did use serifs to dress up the end of a chiseled line – because the stonecutter’s alphabet was an imitiation of a pen-and-ink script! So the serifs on our upper-case letters went from pen and ink to stone to print. As for lower-case letters, the Romans had none. They came to printing through the Carolingian script, a medieval script widely used across Europe. Those serifs went directly from pen to print.

Jared- that’s a fascinating poster. It’s advertising the Volksempfanger, an inexpensive radio set that the Nazis distributed so that everyone could listen to propaganda programs, and, being an ad for a radio (the height of modern technology) the poster is self-consciously modern. It dates to 1936 – the Nazis decided to disallow Fraktur in 1941. There can’t be many other examples of a sans-serif blackletter script, which is to my eye both beautiful and very peculiar.

Robin – without disagreeing with you at all on the modern look of the poster, I would say that it owes a lot to constructivism. The way the photo is integrated with the text through the use of color; the angled text, positioned to imply that Obama is saying the words, and the image of him from below, the way an audience views a speaker on a podium – the poster communicates urgency and immediacy, as if simply by seeing it you are already at the rally. It reminds me a little bit of the work of El Lissitsky, who made the great poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.

Bianca, a conservative revolution will have avant-garde. I googled “iranian revolution” and “art” and the first link has this:
http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/iran/imageposters/index.html

But of course soon after things settle down, neither conservatives, nor nationalists, nor socialists, nor capitalists want any agitation, they want peace and quiet, stability. So, demand for the avant-garde drops; till the next upheaval.

Damn spam filter.

Bianca, a conservative revolution will have avant-garde. I googled “iranian revolution” and “art” and the first link has this:
http://www.nyu.edu/greyart/exhibits/iran/imageposters/index.html

But soon after things settle down, neither conservatives, nor nationalists, nor soci@1ists, nor capitalists want any agitation, they want peace and quiet, stability. So, the demand for the avant-garde drops; good bye, till the next upheaval.

For more on typography as a means of cultural stereotyping, see Goscinny, R. and A. Uderzo, passim.

I saw this hysterical sounding link on a rightwing blog: Will the media report concert before Obama’s Berlin speech? Oh dear god, what on earth happened that was so shameful the Librul Media are … hushing it up?…
…Well…

Apparently, some rock musicians, and some reggae!!!!! musicians… performed.

That’s it.

I’m still a little bemused.

Helen 07.28.08 at 5:09 am:

I think the thrust of that article was that the crowd size reflected the band’s popularity, not Obama’s. Probably not true, but don’t make more of it than it was.

It doesn’t look fascist – didn’t all parties back in the 30s use similar imagery?