Futura is familiar. But its journey from avant-garde German type to hipster favorite is unusual — and it includes Nazis and the moon. Vox's Phil Edwards explains in this episode of Vox Almanac. Subscribe to our channel! goo.gl/0bsAjO Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what's really driving the events in the headlines. Check out www.vox.com to get up to speed on everything from Kurdistan to the Kim Kardashian app. Check out our full video catalog: goo.gl/IZONyE Follow Vox on Twitter: goo.gl/XFrZ5H Or on Facebook: goo.gl/U2g06o The Futura font (really typeface, but let's drop the pedantry for the sake of clarity) is famous. Futura was created by Paul Renner in 1920s Germany, just as the Bauhaus movement was picking up steam. Though Renner wasn't Bauhaus, Futura had that flavor, which was part of the problem. The newly powerful Nazis favored the ornate Fraktur type style to modern Futura, so they excluded both the type and its creator. Of course, Nazis are not just evil, but also often insane and inefficient — so Futura returned to Germany, as did Renner. But by that time, Futura had established itself as the international typeface of the future, and the font's legacy was secured. That's even more clear when you learn about the lunar plaque that went up on Apollo 11. Futura was the font selected for that great task — making Futura the font that escaped the Nazis and landed on the moon.

Be the first to comment