Unpopular Opinions & the Nazis?!
Hola! Hope you've had a good week. I'm on vacation 🏖 in Singapore this week, so you might be receiving this newsletter slightly later than usual.
So, let's get started, shall we?
Today in Unpopular Opinion
THE VALUE OF A MULTI-TYPEFACE DESIGN. One of the women I look upto and whose work I really admire is Bethany Heck, Head of Design at Medium and generally bomb.com designer. Bethany writes in this insightful article about the value of using more than just a couple of typefaces in your designs.
Every Type 101 and font-pairing guide will tell you this— "Use fewer families in any given design, less is more." and as a rule of thumb, so will I. But Bethany presents a counter argument and speaks to the value of eclectic type systems, and how you can structure your projects in ways that will allow you to use more typefaces together effectively.
🖋 Face of the Week 🖋
BLUU SUUPERSTAR. Bluu Suuperstar is a brutalist serif typeface by Black Foundry. It features very prominent triangular-wedges for serifs and terminals. In certain places, strokes have been “broken,” but any oddities within the design are still firmly within the canon of serif typography. The family’s lighter fonts are optimised to support long passages of text in applications intended to encourage immersive reading, while the heavier styles are best used in large display sizes.
And if you're also wondering where this piece of excellent poetry comes from, I'm a rapper/lyricist/poetic genius now. But check this out. And that's a bonus tip!
😵 The font that escaped the Nazis! 😵
FUTURA. The Futura typeface 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 its problem with the Nazis.
The newly powerful Nazis favoured the ornate Fraktur type style to modern Futura, and so excluded both the type and its creator. But somehow Futura had established itself as the international typeface of the future, its legacy was secured forever by somehow escaping association with the Nazis and Nazi Germany.
How you ask? Cheggit!
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See you next Sunday!
🌈 Sneha.