This book is an examination of one of the most popular typefaces ever created, Futura, designed by Paul Renner and released by Bauer in 1927.

Originally developed as a a catalog, a reference source to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz, the book was edited by the museum’s director, Dr. Annette Ludwig, and two professors of the Mainz University of Applied Sciences, Dr. Isabel Naegele and Dr. Petra Eisele. It was published in November 2016 in German as Futura: Die Schrift by Hermann Schmidt Mainz and in October 2017 in an English translation (by Phyllis Elago) as Futura: The Typeface by Laurence King Publishers. This post shows images from both editions.

The design of the 520-pages tome in light mint green is by Stephanie Kaplan and Isabel Naegele. It won prestigious international awards: Gold at the European Design Awards as well as an Award for Typographic Excellence at the 63rd Type Directors Club Contest in New York.

The digital fonts used in the book are from the Futura ND typeface family, part of the Neufville Digital and Bauer Types typeface collection. As the owner of the Bauer foundry assets, Neufville has the most accurate digital reproduction of the original Futura drawings. Futura ND is supported by Architype Renner by The Foundry Types (not visible in the images shown here). The numerous illustrations include drawings, processs material, specimens, and in-use samples of Futura with Futura Condensed as well as of other members of the greater Futura series, including Futura licht, Futura Black, Futura Display, and Steile Futura.

Freistil 7 – Das Buch der Illustration (English: The Book of Illustration) is the 2021 edition of the long-running series of books promoting illustrators edited by Raban Ruddigkeit. It showcases more than 150 illustrators while also featuring essays and interviews with leading illustrators. The book was designed by Raban Ruddigkeit; the catalogue part was designed by Jonas Rose.

The main typeface Ehrenfeld Sans by Fabian Wilczek is used on the cover and throughout the book. It’s the first use of this slightly narrow typeface design that references anonymous 19th century grotesques from Germany. Ehrenfeld Sans is available upon request. Raban Ruddigkeit and Jonas Rose made use of several weights to differentiate layers of information. Additional texts are set in Libre Baskerville by Pablo Impallari and Rodrigo Fuenzalida.

The book Der erste Eindruck zählt! (“The first impression counts!”) by Sabrina Öttl is a practical guide for those who want to learn the art of typography in all its details.

Translated from the website of publisher Hermann Schmidt:

Sabrina Öttl introduces you to the effects of typography and how to use it in a competent and practical manner. It conveys know-how on legibility and readability, guides you through the jungle of typefaces, sensitizes you to fine differences and gives you selection criteria at hand.

Der erste Eindruck zählt! Das Handwerk der Typografie verstehen und anwenden
Pages: 160
Size: 17.2×24.5 cm

vonfreyhold:

By now, this is the fourth edition of the color swatch calendar and like every year, it contains over 365 new and carefully selected cmyk colors. the calendar comes in a box, which provides enough space to collect all colors during the year.

How does it work?
Each day, a color stripe can be torn off and new color combinations come up. Printed on coated and uncoated paper, the stripes can be collected to create color matching fans with the use of bookbinding screws, which are included in the box. The exact cmyk data are printed on every stripe.

The calendar contains 371 unique color stripes, printed on 210 g/m² two sided chromo cardboard from fedrigoni. The date is printed in black and white, alternating by week. The cover type is processed with a tactile relief embossing. It is published by verlag hermann schmidt.

Suisse Int’l is available as part of the Suisse collection from Swiss Typefaces.

Postcard advertising the book

In 2011, a French edition was published by Pyramyd, titled Psychologie Pour Les Créatifs / Survivre Au Travail. It uses the same basic design.

The encounter with this work might progress somewhat like this: curiosity. About the delicately arranged graphics and charts in homogeneous tones, the organised, clear, animating typography and the consistency of the stylistic means. Tasteful cover, pleasant colours, interaction of all materials. An informative and decorative numerical act.

Then: suspicion. One is overcome by the feeling that the sacred significance of the contents merely serve a graphic virtuoso as a platform for his skills. One is almost tempted to angrily put the book aside, because it is only an ornamental end in itself, a trivial succession of mindless, albeit prettily arranged, graphic claptrap.

But now: magnetisation! The attempt of visualising abstract information, the decoding efforts of the author-designer pay off, if the reader appreciates this work, takes it on himself to decipher the codes and finally ends with admiration and gratitude towards those who have created our constitutional law.

And: this visually didactic commentary also inspires the question whether there is such a thing as the beauty of law.

The German book Die DNA der Stadt. Ein Atlas urbaner Strukturen in Deutschland —The DNA of the City. An Atlas of Urban Structures in Germany, published by Verlag Hermann Schmidt Mainz — shows figure-ground diagrams, a sort of x-ray of cities. Architects Inga Mueller-Haagen, Jörn Simonsen and Lothar Többen analysed one hundred German cities by standardising their scale and portrayal. The figure-ground diagrams become a readable way to discover the genetic make-up of the cities.

Book designer Tom Mrazauskas used Soleil, the geometric sans designed by Wolfgang Homola, to set texts and diagrams within the book: “the so-called figure-ground diagrams are created through reduction — maps show just buildings in black. Reduction is the strategy behind geometric typefaces as well, so Soleil matched instantly the black geometric shapes of the maps.”

This fascinating book was set in Soleil Book and Extrabold, and matching italics, using proportional and lining figures, and the stylistic alternate for the capital M.
Copies of the book can be ordered from the publisher.

In his first book designer and author Erik Spiekermann introduces the so-called First Spiekermann Dictum in a chapter about line spacing: “Where two consecutive lines are closely spaced, and where there is but one descender and one ascender in each line, then in 99 per cent of cases the descender and the ascender will meet and overlap.” While many designer may in fact have encountered this challenge and have therefore seen the dictum to be true, the author further states: “There is a rule saying: descender and ascenders must never touch. There is an exeption to this rule: touching is allowed if it looks better.” These centered lines are set in Berthold’s Lo-Type, resurrected by Spiekermann for photocomposition in 1980. A little label, stamped in the corner, is left for remarks – the small type in it is set in Berliner Grotesk, another revival by Spiekermann (1979).

Ursache & Wirkung: ein typografischer Roman was Erik Spiekermann’s debut as a book author. First published in 1982 by the Context GmbH, it was recognized as one of Germany’s finest books by the Stiftung Buchkunst that year. Furthermore it received a gold price at the Internationaler Druckschriften-Wettbewerb and another award by the Designers & Art Directors in 1983. In 1986 a second edition was issued by H. Berthold AG and only a year later – with the same publisher – Rhyme & reason: a typographic novel hit the British and American bookshelves.

Until today it is regarded as core literature in typography. This is not only attributed to its informative content, equipped with several good examples of typographic issues and details, but mainly because of Erik Spiekermann’s humorous narration that we are used to from his other books and from his talks and lectures. It turns specialist literature into an amusing read:

You will probably be able to tell that this was all written in springtime. And it would give me great pleasure, dear reader, to imagine you reaching for this book with equal pleasure – not simply because it sums up what matters in typography, but also for its meanderings in other areas of our experience. It’ll soon become clear that even in the crowded life of a typomaniac there are passions besides letters. Rarely, though…
Now if you’ve already noticed the spring in my step – good! Take my arm, let me be your guide, and together we’ll take an April stroll along the typographic boulevard.

The pages are designed in a very classic layout with a large bottom margin and the folio centered below outside the type area. The text is set in 9-point Walbaum – available from Berthold at the time – in an 8 mm wide column. Captions are set in Walbaum italics, smaller text in Berliner Grotesk, while many of the typographic examples are set in large Walbaum, Block or Spiekermann’s revival Lo-Type – and of course many other typefaces are displayed.

After Spiekermann’s books Studentenfutter (1989), Type & Typographers (1991) and the very successful Stop Stealing Sheep (1993), the demand for Rhyme & Reason must have increased and consequently it was published once more in 1994 – this time with Hermann Schmidt Mainz – as a facsimile reproduction of the original first edition. An additional chapter on digital type and desktop publishing was added, set in Quark Xpress 3.2 on an Apple Power Mac 7100. In spite of some deterioration in quality (for example the rasterized italic captions) the book looks very much like the original.

However, instead of a slip case the new edition came with four dusk jackets, “one uglier than the other”, Spiekermann admits in the epilogue. In contrast to the clean layout in the book, the new covers are loaded with different typeface mixes and break several rules that the author had expressed. Visually the dusk jackets are full of kitsch, quoting from the hideous look of familiar late 80s, early 90s paperback editions. The designs come from Erik Spiekermann’s former MetaDesign colleagues Pia Betton, Richard Buhl, Brigitte Hartwig, Christian van Kamptz, Anke Martini and Harald Welt. While the irony might be very clear for typographers, perhaps someone didn’t think it was obvious enough and ultimately a sticker suggested: “Watch out for irony!”.

Rhyme & Reason is not only out of print, it has become quite hard to get in both German and English and seems to be almost unavailable. The chances of discovering a copy in an antique bookstore for a reasonable price are not too bad, however. Even tough the dusk jackets of the 1994 edition are not a pretty sight, they are in a way amusing and their collector’s value may have increased just as much as the book itself.

This version visually quotes from Bastei-Verlag who have published a series of books with a castle-like masthead silhouette. The title is set in the frightening Creeper typeface. However, it is by far not as frightening as the tortured (horizontally compressed and vertically stretched) Glypha 75, in the subtitle and letterspaced on the spine. The dusk jacket is rounded off with Kaufmann script on the back cover.

What seems to contradict each other is applied to this version: the author’s name set in Helvetica. The mix of Helvetica with Kabel Ultra is quite brave as well.

This cover quotes from the space theme, which might be rather typical for the 1990s – with gradient coloring and several effects applied to the illustration. A short comic tells of the mother ship Helvetica making its way through the typovers. While Cooper Black dominates this jacket, the author’s name and the title are lettering jobs.

Visually taking on the 80s design of romance novels, this version reveals a mix of Arnold Boecklin with ITC Franklin Gothic and Adobe Caslon and graphic elements requiring getting used to.

Rhyme & Reason is hard cover bound in red cloth. The front cover simply bears the Writing Hand from Zapf Dingbats. In contrast the dusk jackets are colorful and equipped with several different typefaces: Cooper Black, ITC Kabel, Adobe Caslon, Arnold Boecklin, ITC Franklin Gothic and Kaufmann – from left to right/top to bottom – only to emphasize a few. Finally a sticker set in Spiekermann’s FF Meta makes sure these cover concepts are not being taken too serious.