#AKZIDENZ GROTESK TYPEFACE SERIES#
Before that time, the physical masters for each new font had to be cut as a series of steel punches or softer-metal patrices, depending on the exact point size. As a manufacturer, Berthold did not even introduce pantographic punchcutting and matrix-engraving machines into its main Berlin factory until 1910. and Berthold’s punchcutters, and probably not by draughtspersons who worked on paper. The work of interpreting the exact forms each type size would take was performed by Bauer & Co. I have not found any evidence that Berthold had a type drawing office during the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries, and no information about the internal workings of Bauer & Co. In retrospect, it turned out to have been one of the most important decisions ever made at either firm. Unfortunately we do not know the Bauer & Co. Clip the drop shadow off of Schattierte Grotesk’s letters and you get the base style of Akzidenz-Grotesk. Like Akzidenz-Grotesk itself, ¹⁴ this was a generic name, which just meant shaded sans. had still been an independent typefoundry, it published a nine-sized, single-weight, drop-shadowed display face called Schattierte Grotesk. in 1898, the genesis of the design was slightly older. Berthold AG in Berlin and its then-recently acquired Stuttgart subsidiary Bauer & Co. While Univers was the work of Frutiger and his assistants in Deberny et Peignot’s design studio, Akzidenz-Grotesk’s various styles were produced by anonymous employees at several typefoundries in different historical times.Īlthough the base style of Akzidenz-Grotesk - its regular weight - was published in fifteen sizes by H. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that a collection of related fonts was even envisioned when its première style was published. Its members were not all conceived of at a single point. Akzidenz-Grotesk, on the other hand, is not as harmonious a family. Today, a term like systems design could be applied to the project. All the fonts matched each other stylistically. Twenty-one styles were part of Univers’s initial release, and each was designed according to the same letterform scheme. The story of the young Adrian Frutiger’s development of Univers at Deberny et Peignot has often been told: from the beginning, he conceived of Univers as a family of typefaces, with multiple weights and widths. No other designs better illustrate the changes in the ways typefaces were developed between the 1890s and the 1950s, or even between the 1890s and today. In addition to the above-mentioned Neue Haas-Grotesk/Helvetica, that wave of new designs included Folio, ¹¹ Univers, ¹² and Record Gothic ¹³ as well as many others.Īkzidenz-Grotesk and Helvetica are often compared with each other, but Univers represents a far more interesting counterpoint for Akzidenz-Grotesk. Although Akzidenz-Grotesk seems to have inspired similar designs beforehand, such as Venus ⁷ and Ideal-Grotesk ⁸ - themselves the basis for Monotype Grotesque Series 215 and 216 ⁹ - and perhaps even Titania and Urania, ¹⁰ something is fascinating about the number of neo-grotesques produced in the 1950s and ’60s. in Stuttgart and Berthold in Berlin published its very first weight together in 1898, ⁶ but it was only in the 1950s that the typeface’s use began to take off. As a family of typefaces, Akzidenz-Grotesk was a work-in-progress. While Helvetica was not simply a reworking of Akzidenz-Grotesk, ⁵ its initial development as Neue Haas-Grotesk in Switzerland reflected, in part, the popularity that Akzidenz-Grotesk had begun to enjoy in Western European graphic design during the immediate postwar years. No earlier typeface had ever experienced that kind of hold on the market, at least not in Germany. Helvetica’s popularity eventually became so widespread that - as Gary Hustwit presented in his 2007 documentary film Helvetica - its use represented a cultural milestone. ³ Typographically, it took a long time to get to something like the ubiquity that Helvetica ⁴ enjoyed among Western European and North American graphic designers in the 1960s. Those designers were just as likely to specify new geometric-style sans serifs like Futura ² as they were older typefaces, like Schelter & Giesecke’s late-nineteenth-century Breite magere Grotesk. Still outré for whole books, German typographers were by then finally beginning to regularly consider sans serifs for long texts, or publications intended for immersive reading. When Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie appeared 28 years later, it was also composed entirely with sans serifs. This was the Feste des Lebens und der Kunst: eine Betrachtung des Theaters als höchsten Kultursymbols, ¹ written and designed by Peter Behrens. The first book composed entirely in upper- and lowercase sans serif types was only published in 1900.