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my homage to the european typographers of the 1920s & 30s, especially those of the bauhaus. in particular the idealist herbert bayer and the politically naïve paul renner. i would like to mention the photo montage work of John Heartfield as an additional source of inspiration. it would be innaccurate to describe the hertiage of this typeface to be purely german, as many posters produced within europe of that period, employ similar crude (by type purists standards today) hand drawn sans serif faces. in the creation of this typeface i was interested in the more creative ways that the “umlaut” has been typeset in the past. something that is seldom experimented with today. hence the title of the face. to my knowledge, this particular style of geometric sans predates futura. it could also therefore be accredited to giving Mr Fruitiger and Max Miedinger something to improve upon… which doesn't mean to ignore the contributions of the southern german type designers who began slicing serifs in the mid to late 1800s. akzidenz grotesk being an exceptional example. … and yet we still have designers and schools (who should know better) continuing to extoll the virtues of the sans serif as the epitome of the modern… ignoring that the heritage is nearing 150 years of history… not modern at all. bad habits die hard. there well may be other typefaces out there that are similar in style to this historical revival, but i’ve had great difficulty sourcing it. so i cut my own version… © 2008 Tristam Sparks · Graphic & Experience Design · About · Contact · Sitemap