Emil Ruder — Part I
A Tool for Teaching

By Tan Wälchli — One even­ing shortly before the mil­len­nium, a soon-to-retire teacher at Schule für Gestal­tung Basel stayed at the print shop longer than usual. He had removed the sets of a con­densed wood poster type from the cases and proofed the slightly battered 20-Cicero size (around 9 cm height). When he was done, Hans-Chris­tian Pulver (b. 1941) took the sheets home. He knew that amidst the upcom­ing re-struc­tur­ing of the school, the print shop was going to be closed to make way for the Apple Macs that had star­ted to define the cur­riculum during the 1990s. It was an obvi­ous, if belated, con­sequence of the tech­no­lo­gical tur­moil that had rattled the design and media indus­tries during the last quarter of the 20th century.

Pulver was aware of the wood type’s his­tory. Intern­ally known as Ruder-Schrift, it had been ini­ti­ated by one of the lead­ing fig­ures of what is com­monly referred to as the ‘Swiss Style’, Emil Ruder (1914–1970). The letter-shapes had been elab­or­ated with sev­eral of Ruder’s classes at Allge­meine Gew­erbeschule Basel (AGS) during the 1950s. Right when the face was finally ready in seven sizes for use in the print shop, around 1960, Pulver atten­ded Ruder’s train­ing courses for type­set­ters. A few years later, in 1964, Ruder picked him for his advanced class in Typo­graph­is­che Gestal­tung which he annu­ally offered for two stu­dents. Over time, Pulver famil­i­ar­ised him­self with the Ruder-Schrift suf­fi­ciently to stick with it after he star­ted teach­ing at Basel him­self, in 1975. He would get his stu­dents to exer­cise with the wood type well into the age of Post­Script and Laser­Writers, until he retired from teach­ing in 2003.

More than a dozen years later, Pulver star­ted to engage with font edit­ing soft­ware for the first time. By 2018, at age 77, he was suf­fi­ciently savvy in Font­Lab to trace the proof­ing sheets of the Ruder-Schrift that had been sit­ting in his drawer, without pur­pose, for years. He star­ted to redraw the con­densed letter-shapes, making them slightly more uni­form, and con­sid­er­ably expan­ded the min­imal glyph set of the ori­ginal. In the pro­cess, he found him­self attrac­ted to some dis­tinct­ive formal fea­tures which he applied to more letter-shapes. For example, he adap­ted the char­ac­ter­ist­ic­ally daring diag­on­als of Ruder’s ‘S’, ‘s’, and ‘2’ to the lower-case ‘a’, evok­ing the sig­na­ture design detail of one of Ruder’s most iconic posters (‘glas’, 1956) – which hadn’t been present in the wood type at all.

When Pulver brought his pro­ject to Lineto in 2019, Cornel Wind­lin was imme­di­ately taken. His teacher at Lucerne, Hans-Rudolf Lutz (1939–1998), had him­self been an alumni of Ruder’s year­long two-stu­dent class in Typo­graph­is­che Gestal­tung. Lutz had always held Ruder in high esteem, often speak­ing in awe of his high stand­ards and tough stance. Wind­lin was struck to find the Ruder shapes rep­res­ent­ing a ‘pre-Hel­vetica moment’, the years cul­min­at­ing in the sim­ul­tan­eous release of Hel­vetica and Univers in 1957, which became the defin­ing typefaces of the second half of the 20th cen­tury. Prior to this, many design­ers drew their own letter-shapes in often idio­syn­cratic ways, with many fol­low­ing the tem­plates in Walter Käch’s Schriften, Let­ter­ing, Écritures, pub­lished in 1949. Käch, incid­ent­ally, had also been one of Ruder’s teach­ers at Kun­st­gew­erbeschule Zürich; a later stu­dent of his was Adrian Frutiger.

Many of the sans serif typefaces from the 1950s were con­densed in the way of the Ruder-Schrift. The nar­row­ness of the let­ters, their pro­nounced x-height as well as the extra-tight spa­cing allowed to pack longer words on a single line and increased the visual impact. Some typefaces of this style were read­ily avail­able at print shops in Basel – Ber­thold’s Bücher-Grotesk and Haas’s Com­mer­cial-Grotesk (later called Hel­vetica Com­pact) may have influ­enced the Ruder-Schrift to some degree. Yet count­less sim­ilar shapes were hand-drawn for posters, head­lines, cor­por­ate logos or sig­nage in these years. They came in vary­ing pro­por­tions and often with unusual fea­tures like elong­ated des­cend­ers or con­trast­ing thin accents and punctuation.

Com­pared to the com­plex­it­ies of Hel­vetica or Univers, the Ruder typeface was a simple affair, offer­ing a single weight of upper- and lower-case let­ters, num­bers, basic accents and punc­tu­ation. ‘There was no type design in today’s sense at the Basel school, only let­ter­form design,’ says Pulver. ‘The focus was on form­ing indi­vidual words and lines of text, for which you often needed a lim­ited amount of let­ters.’ The concept behind the Ruder-Schrift reflects that: it was a cus­tom­ised tool to create form­ally stun­ning word shapes of max­imum impact, as can be wit­nessed in many posters and other work pub­lished by Ruder and his stu­dents – as well as by fellow Basel teacher Armin Hof­mann – out of the school print shop fol­low­ing 1961. Wind­lin was fas­cin­ated by this ‘self-sus­tain­ing approach to teach­ing design: first you create the tool with your stu­dents, and then you make the stu­dents use it to create new work’. Could this legacy still be rel­ev­ant today, and if so, how? How would digital native design­ers react to the poten­tial – and the lim­it­a­tions – it entails?

Wind­lin was determ­ined to bring the Ruder-Schrift from the days of the Welt­format poster to our flex­ible world of screens of any size and res­ol­u­tion – making it a tool for today. After Arve Båtevik took on Pulver’s draw­ings at Lineto and fin­ished a first draft of the digital refor­mu­la­tion in early 2020, the focus shif­ted back to the ori­ginal. As the Basel school’s wood type sets are still access­ible today at Druck­werk Basel, a local not-for-profit print shop for edu­ca­tional and artistic prac­tice, Anatole Couteau went back to scan the remain­ing sorts of the Ruder-Schrift’s majestic 48-Cicero size (ca. 22cm). These scans led to a labor­i­ous digital-to-ana­logue res­tor­a­tion of the ori­ginal set’s miss­ing sorts, per­formed by the wood type expert Dafi Kühne at his work­shop in Näfels, Switzer­land. On closer inspec­tion of the largest sets of let­ters, Couteau noticed that the shapes were sig­ni­fic­antly less optic­ally cor­rec­ted than had been pre­vi­ously assumed, and he opted out of the cor­rec­tions for the entire glyph set. In his view, ‘this made the let­ters more per­fectly aligned, more mod­u­lar, and even more graphic and impactful.’

Brows­ing through many designs from the era, Wind­lin star­ted to wonder if Ruder Plakat could be made vari­able in ways that would reflect some of the his­tor­ical sources: ‘Look­ing at the many com­pressed sans serifs from these years, you notice that pro­por­tions often vary, as the let­ters were made to fit a cer­tain space, or fol­lowed an indi­vidu­ally formed concept. So we’re seeing an early form of flex­ible type, and we hon­oured this as a par­tic­u­lar kind of vari­ab­il­ity that was inher­ent to this formal style.’ After the caps-height was made vari­able, the x-height needed to be adjustable, too, to pre­serve the visual iden­tity of the typeface and to offer aes­thetic flex­ib­il­ity. Finally, des­cend­ers were allowed to expand as well, since ‘we found very elong­ated des­cend­ers in many designs from the era’, as Wind­lin points out.

With three vari­able axes, 18 mas­ters, and one thou­sand glyphs per master, the spa­cing and kern­ing of the fonts turned out to be par­tic­u­larly chal­len­ging. Couteau: ‘My teacher at École Estienne in Paris, Franck Jalleau, liked to pro­voke people by saying that kern­ing is only neces­sary for poorly spaced fonts. But in wood type, this is entirely dif­fer­ent. Due to how the wooden blocks are cut, spa­cing is typ­ic­ally so tight that you con­stantly have to do kern­ing.’ Strips of type metal in vari­ous widths were inser­ted between each pair of let­ters on press. This was feas­ible in the days of wood type, when often only a couple of dozen let­ters were used. The digital Ruder Plakat font, how­ever, comes with a very extens­ive glyph set, and due to its formal prop­er­ties and exceed­ingly tight spa­cing, it needed kern­ing for every poten­tial pair­ing. In col­lab­or­a­tion with designer and pro­gram­mer Math­ieu Reguer, Couteau devised a custom pro­gram (intern­ally dubbed EmilKern or Tet­risKern), which in little more than half an hour ana­lyses the roughly 1,400,000 letter pairs and assigns each of them a pre-set kern­ing value of either 0, 5, 8 or 10 units.

Hans-Chris­tian Pulver had ini­tially been rather scep­tical about Lineto’s pro­ject for a vari­able Ruder-Schrift, but upon wit­ness­ing the final result on screen, he expressed ‘high sat­is­fac­tion’ with the font’s refor­mu­la­tion in ways he hadn’t thought pos­sible. Couteau states, ‘I am really no fan of the mind­lessly expand­ing vari­able font. But in this case, the vari­able pro­por­tions make per­fect sense, and facil­it­ate new res­ults in keep­ing with Ruder’s ori­ginal concept. I could very well ima­gine him get­ting excited about it today.’

The vari­able pro­ject posed a number of tricky visual prob­lems, which were solved by intro­du­cing arbit­rary lim­it­a­tions to the execut­able para­met­ers so as to achieve visu­ally coher­ent res­ults. Wind­lin and Couteau were both aware of designs from the era that were even more narrow. One poster by Hof­mann for a group show by Theo Eble, Bernhard Luginbühl and Arnold d’Altri at Kun­sthalle Basel from 1960 is a point in case. Couteau was so taken by the eleg­ance of Hof­mann’s narrow let­ter­ing, the unusu­ally shaped ‘a’, and how the dots and accents aligned at the caps line, that he trans­ferred all these par­tic­u­lar­it­ies to the Ruder let­ters for yet another, nar­rower ver­sion called LL Ruder Plakat Maxi. In Hof­mann’s poster, the slender shapes had been drawn by hand – again two hand­fuls of let­ters were suf­fi­cient. Now they are at every­one’s fin­ger­tips as a full glyph set, yet another exten­sion to the font to be used as a new tool.