Unfinished Business 144: Veronika Burian: Futura 100

So tell me about the Futura one

then.

Obviously the 100 is 100 years of Futura.

I thought Futura was a monotype owned thing, or is that not the case?

Not really, no.

Partially.

So the thing is that the original Futura by Paul Renner was firstly issued by Bauer in Frankfurt in 1927 with a development time of three or four years beforehand.

And so the rights, publishing rights, were with Bauer.

Of course, the design rights, they will be next year then completely open.

But that's the design, the actual trademark and the digital files.

owned barbara type that are based in barcelona which is at first glance a bit strange but that has to do with the fact that during the second world war they basically moved opened or started a collaboration with a barcelona-based foundry or company to be able to sell futuran to continue selling futuran because there was embargoes on german products of course And he liked it so much that he can remain.

No wonder.

He did not want to go back to Frankfurt.

I would neither.

And that's how it ended up there.

It remained a kind of a family company.

So Vivian Hartmann, she is the granddaughter of dear Regina Hartmann, who worked with Renner on Futura and made it actually into a functional type.

And yeah, so we, because I'm here in Barcelona, we have this kind of Spanish connection.

We knew Vivian and had been working with her to some extent beforehand.

And then this idea came up, okay, Futurist Becoming 100, they want to do this.

some celebration and we had this idea separately that it would be interesting to expand Futura to other scripts because that's one of our, one of the kind of main focus points that type together is multi-script design.

It's really, we started 15 years ago.

So pretty early on realizing that let's say the non-Latin market or the market beyond Latin will become interesting, important and is much bigger.

So we started focusing, we started developing our team in that direction and so that we have internal experts who can deal with a whole bunch of scripts.

And we have a big network of external designers and consultants.

So tell me about the Futura one

then.

Obviously the 100 is 100 years of Futura.

I thought Futura was a monotype owned thing, or is that not the case?

Not really, no.

Partially.

So the thing is that the original Futura by Paul Renner was firstly issued by Bauer in Frankfurt in 1927 with a development time of three or four years beforehand.

And so the rights, publishing rights, were with Bauer.

Of course, the design rights, they will be next year then completely open.

But that's the design, the actual trademark and the digital files.

owned barbara type that are based in barcelona which is at first glance a bit strange but that has to do with the fact that during the second world war they basically moved opened or started a collaboration with a barcelona-based foundry or company to be able to sell futuran to continue selling futuran because there was embargoes on german products of course And he liked it so much that he can remain.

No wonder.

He did not want to go back to Frankfurt.

I would neither.

And that's how it ended up there.

It remained a kind of a family company.

So Vivian Hartmann, she is the granddaughter of dear Regina Hartmann, who worked with Renner on Futura and made it actually into a functional type.

And yeah, so we, because I'm here in Barcelona, we have this kind of Spanish connection.

We knew Vivian and had been working with her to some extent beforehand.

And then this idea came up, okay, Futurist Becoming 100, they want to do this.

some celebration and we had this idea separately that it would be interesting to expand Futura to other scripts because that's one of our, one of the kind of main focus points that type together is multi-script design.

It's really, we started 15 years ago.

So pretty early on realizing that let's say the non-Latin market or the market beyond Latin will become interesting, important and is much bigger.

So we started focusing, we started developing our team in that direction and so that we have internal experts who can deal with a whole bunch of scripts.

And we have a big network of external designers and consultants.