Paul Renner

Paul Renner (August 9 1878 – April 25 1956) was a typeface designer, most notably of Futura. He was born in Wernigerode, Germany and died in Hödingen.

He was born in Prussia and had a strict Protestant upbringing, being educated in 19th century Gymnasium. He was brought up to have a very German sense of leadership, of duty and responsibility. He was suspicious of abstract art and disliked many forms of modern culture, such as jazz, cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism. Thus, Renner can be seen as a bridge between the traditional (19th century) and the modern (20th century). He attempted to fuse the Gothic and the roman typefaces.

Renner was a prominent member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation). Two of his major texts are Typografie als Kunst (Typography as Art) and Die Kunst der Typographie (The Art of Typography). He created a new set of guidelines for good book design and invented the popular Futura, a geometric sans-serif font used by many typographers throughout the 20th century and up till the present. The typeface Renner Archetype is based upon Renner's early experimental exploration of geometric letterforms for the Futura typeface, most of which were deleted from the face's character set before it was issued.

Renner was a friend of the eminent German typographer Jan Tschichold and a key participant in the heated ideological and artistic debates of that time.

Even before 1932, Renner made his opposition to the Nazis very clear, notably in his pamphlet “Kulturbolschewismus” (Cultural Bolshevism). He was arrested and dismissed from his post in Munich in 1933, and subsequently went into a period of internal exile.

Reference

Paul Renner, The Art of Typography, by Christopher Burke. Hyphen Press/Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. ISBN 1-56898-158-9