Emil Ruder — Part II
A Collaboration with the Industry

By Cornel Wind­lin and Tan Wälchli — In the summer of 2022, Lineto intro­duced a new typeface called LL Ruder Plakat, billed as a ‘tool for teach­ing’, with its designer, Emil Ruder, having been Switzer­land’s most influ­en­tial figure of post-war graphic design and a dir­ector at Allge­meine Gew­erbeschule Basel (AGS). Intern­ally dubbed Ruder-Schrift, the shapes reportedly had been drawn in Ruder’s typo­graphy classes during the 1950s, as con­firmed by former stu­dents Hans-Chris­tian Pulver (who later taught at the same insti­tu­tion) and Bruno Pfäffli (who later became Adrian Fru­ti­ger’s long-term studio part­ner in Paris). Stu­dent work from the era pre­served in the excel­lent Basel Poster Col­lec­tion revealed how the Ruder-Schrift served as a ver­sat­ile and pop­u­lar tool for teach­ing typo­graphy for dec­ades to come. The wood type also gained prom­in­ence through its con­tin­ued use on posters for vari­ous cul­tural insti­tu­tions in Basel, cre­ated by both stu­dents and teach­ers, includ­ing Ruder himself.

But that was only half of the story, and half of it was wrong – as became clear in the time since the release of LL Ruder Plakat.

While Lineto’s new font gained imme­di­ate acclaim and found wide­spread use in print and on screen, Anatole Couteau con­tin­ued with the elab­or­a­tion of LL Ruder Kontur (2024), a com­pan­ion font with out­lines of vari­able thick­ness. At the same time, we gathered more evid­ence about the Ruder-Schrift’s his­tory, which had been mostly based on hearsay. With help from Weichi He and with external con­tri­bu­tions by Phil­ipp Mess­ner, Dafi Kühne, Kurt Eckert and Stephan Müller, a timeline tra­cing occur­rences, design­ers and print­ers related to the Ruder-Schrift was established.

The res­ults were sur­pris­ing. We real­ised that the Ruder-Schrift could not have been a care­fully guarded typeface exclus­ive to the AGS print work­shop, as had been pur­por­ted. On the con­trary – it had been in use at many print­ers across Switzer­land and evid­ently was a pop­u­lar choice with Swiss design­ers. As an impact­ful head­line font, it was employed to sell coffee, cars or cigar­ettes, and even Coca-Cola. We also found it on book covers, museum posters and in polit­ical cam­paigns, or announ­cing foot­ball matches and boxing fights. How was this possible?

The broad impact of the Ruder-Schrift, largely for­got­ten and recon­struc­ted here for the first time, was the result of an equally obscure public-private part­ner­ship between AGS and a local type foundry called Neue Didot AG. The foundry had star­ted oper­a­tions in 1947, with a focus on mould­ing Mono­type foundry type for the Swiss market, from their small fact­ory in Mut­tenz, out­side Basel. A con­tinu­ous work­ing rela­tion­ship between Neue Didot, Emil Ruder, and AGS can be traced from 1949 on. Ruder and his col­league Robert Büchler designed a number of elab­or­ate type spe­ci­men for the foundry, as well as strik­ing advert­ise­ments for their typefaces in Typo­grafis­che Monatsblätter, Switzer­land’s lead­ing typo­graphic pub­lic­a­tion, to which Ruder was very close.

Even­tu­ally, Neue Didot became also instru­mental for the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion of the Ruder-Schrift, which, we assume, ori­gin­ated at AGS; who ini­ti­ated the cre­ation we cannot know. Our research con­firms that the wood type came to exist in two ver­sions over time, with slight formal dif­fer­ences in a number of let­ters that are most easily iden­ti­fied by the changes in ‘a’, ‘e’ and ‘R’. The first ver­sion, ini­tially pro­duced only for 9 and 16 Cicero (ca. 4 and 8 cm), occurs on exhib­i­tion posters for Gew­er­be­mu­seum Basel begin­ning in the fall of 1951. We call this the Early Ruder-Schrift. The later ver­sion com­ple­ments the first issue fol­low­ing 1959, in a range of nine sizes from 6 to 48 Cicero (ca. 2.5 to 22 cm). This second ver­sion was com­mer­cially dis­trib­uted by Neue Didot under the name Plakats­chrift Didot, and Lineto used it to derive the LL Ruder Plakat fonts.

The Early Ruder-Schrift may be seen as merely another vari­ation on the estab­lished theme of sober con­densed head­line typefaces common in the German-speak­ing ter­rit­or­ies of the early 20th cen­tury. The rel­ev­ant poten­tial models include Ber­thold’s Akz­idenz Grotesk Con­densed (also sold as Bücher-Grotesk), Stem­pel’s Plak (a Paul Renner design), Haas’ Com­mer­cial-Grotesk (by the direct, local com­pet­itor), and Schel­ter & Giesecke’s Nat­alia, a much older con­tender by the Leipzig-based foundry. More par­tic­u­larly, the Early Ruder-Schrift shares many tell-tale design details with Nat­alia, and its early appear­ance on the Gew­er­be­mu­seum posters brings it in close con­tact with Plak, which was a pre­cursor on these posters. Under the influ­ence of Theo Ballmer, who had joined the AGS teach­ing staff coming from the Bauhaus in Dessau in 1931, Plak had been put to effi­cient use on bold, typo­graphic posters that announced the Gew­er­be­mu­seum exhib­i­tions through­out the 1930s. The 1940s brought a less pro­gram­matic use of imagery and typefaces, until Ruder and Armin Hof­mann over­saw a new series of typo­graphic Gew­er­be­mu­seum posters fol­low­ing 1951, which intro­duced the Early Ruder-Schrift as primary design tool.

Through­out the 1950s, Ruder and Hof­mann used the typeface on posters for many of their cul­tural cli­ents, mostly prin­ted at VSK or Wasser­mann in Basel. At the same time, the wood type spread across Switzer­land, first to be found on posters pro­duced at Hand­set­zerei Gloor and at Jacques Boll­mann, both in Zürich. Boll­mann fea­tured it on posters for the polit­ical and com­mer­cial sec­tors, includ­ing the designs by Max & Eugen Lenz for Swis­sair. It appeared on cul­tural posters by Gottfried Honeg­ger and Warja Lav­ater, all in the early 1950s, and later served as main visual on Celestino Piatti’s DADA book cover for German pub­lisher dtv (1963).

Some time after the public release of the Early Ruder-Schrift, an expan­sion of its range must have been con­sidered by both the AGS and Neue Didot. Ruder ini­ti­ated a pro­ject to fur­ther har­mon­ise the letter-shapes and create a total of nine sizes. The work was car­ried out by stu­dents in his course, over the span of sev­eral years in the mid-to-late 1950s. It is this part of the wood type’s gen­esis that res­on­ated within the school for dec­ades, and is still remembered today. Inter­est­ingly, the details of the typeface’s indus­trial pro­duc­tion and its dis­tri­bu­tion as com­mer­cially avail­able Plakats­chrift Didot was simply forgotten.

This second ver­sion of the typeface was much more soph­ist­ic­ated, upon exam­in­a­tion reveal­ing the depth of Ruder’s subtle but most effi­cient and com­plete reappraisal. The result of sev­eral years of col­lab­or­at­ive work, many of the let­ter­forms had been redrawn with their curve con­cep­tion changed to a less round, more boxy model, and with indi­vidual adjust­ments from size to size. The let­ter­forms gen­er­ally show less con­trast than in the Early Ruder-Schrift, and many draw­ing details had been cleaned up in mech­an­ical, nearly brutal ways.

Cre­at­ing a typeface with a more bal­anced rhythm than its pre­de­cessor, Ruder know­ingly ignored many type design con­ven­tions, in the pro­cess imbuing the typeface with an unusual stark­ness and pres­ence. A typ­ical fea­ture is the removal of over­shoots with round-shaped cap­it­als, to enable head­lines with very tight lead­ing at large sizes. And most import­antly, the already tight let­ter­spa­cing was reduced fur­ther. These com­bined efforts res­ul­ted in a much more rational-look­ing typeface, with every detail per­fectly lining up, which made its use in design pro­cesses almost auto­matic. Pro­du­cing a grip­ping, graphic look on the page, the wood type enabled design­ers to effort­lessly gen­er­ate the impact­ful ‘word-images’ that formed an essen­tial part of the AGS design philo­sophy pre­val­ent in the 1950s and 60s. More than a mere typeface, Ruder had craf­ted a design machine geared up for max­imum impact.

While Neue Didot were key to making and dis­trib­ut­ing both ver­sions of the Ruder-Schrift, their fact­ory was not equipped to actu­ally pro­duce wood type, a spe­cial­ist pro­cess requir­ing expert know-how and ded­ic­ated machinery. Only a hand­ful of com­pan­ies could pro­duce type in both wood and Plakadur, a hard plastic used for the pro­duc­tion of print­ing type at the time. One of these was the Johannes Wagner foundry, and Neue Didot’s close con­nec­tion to them, since the late 1940s, is doc­u­mented; Wagner took over Neue Didot in 1961 until its dis­sol­u­tion in 1987.
How­ever, the most likely con­tender for the pro­duc­tion of the Early Ruder-Schrift is Gebrüder Diller, a spe­cial­ist com­pany sup­ply­ing wood type to a number of foundries from their fact­ory in Bam­berg, Ger­many. The later Plakats­chrift Didot was in fact pro­duced by Alfons Zwosta, who had left Gebrüder Diller in 1959 to set up his own type pro­duc­tion work­shop, also in Bam­berg. Zwosta must have taken Neue Didot with him as a client; the typeface appears in his com­pany’s product cata­logue under the name Didot-Grotesk.

The public-private part­ner­ship between AGS and Neue Didot is par­tic­u­larly remark­able given that Ruder, argu­ably Switzer­land’s most emin­ent typo­grapher, stayed away from Haas’sche Schrift­giesserei through­out his career. Haas, Switzer­land’s oldest type foundry and highly pro­lific, was also loc­ated just out­side Basel, in Münchenstein, and would have seemed an ideal part­ner for Ruder and his many classes of emer­ging typo­graph­ers. But Ruder – an out­spoken advoc­ate of Univers (1957), con­ceived by his mentee and friend Adrian Fru­ti­ger – remained con­spicu­ously silent about Neue Haas Grotesk (also 1957, and later named Hel­vetica). He was also crit­ical of Haas’ Com­mer­ciale Com­pact (1962), remod­elled from Com­mer­cial-Grotesk to fea­ture the exact same formal traits as Ruder’s own Plakats­chrift. When Haas later re-named theirs Hel­vetica Com­pact, for obvi­ous reas­ons, Ruder can’t have been amused.

Des­pite Ruder’s prom­in­ence and his decis­ive role in the cre­ation of both ver­sions of the wood type, neither of them was ever pub­licly asso­ci­ated with his name. Mar­keted as Plakats­chrift Didot by Neue Didot, the second ver­sion was simply listed as Holztypen or Plakat­grotesk by indi­vidual type­set­ters and print­ers such as Gloor, Boll­mann and Berich­thaus in Zürich; Sauerländer in Aarau; Stämpfli in Bern; Zol­likofer in St. Gallen; Frobenius, Walz, Wasser­mann, VSK and Zbinden in Basel; and many others, also in the French-speak­ing west­ern part of Switzerland.

Yet such anonym­ous present­a­tion of design work was often chosen con­sciously at the time. Anonym­ity was charged with a spe­cial mean­ing, as it was seen as an expres­sion of Indus­trie-Design, a pro­fes­sional model propag­ated by some ‘Swiss Style’ design­ers. In his 1961 book Indus­trie-Design, Zurich-based Hans Neuburg sug­ges­ted to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the graphic artist’s indi­vidu­al­ist prom­in­ence and the graphic designer’s util­it­arian anonym­ity. While the ‘graphic artist’ would pro­duce art (or mere ‘artistic dec­or­a­tion’) based on per­sonal ‘taste’, the graphic designer was propag­ated to create func­tional work for the industry, entirely unre­lated to the cre­ator’s per­son­al­ity. This ‘anonym­ity’ was sup­posed to be expressed in the cre­at­ive pro­cess and in the rela­tion to the client, but also in the non-per­sonal des­ig­na­tion of the work which there­fore could claim a ‘neut­ral’ and ‘uni­ver­sal’ appeal.
Ruder was cer­tainly aware of such ideo­lo­gical under­pin­nings when work­ing on the typeface in the 1950s. More dis­tinctly than most of his ‘Swiss Style’ col­leagues, he seems to have very lit­er­ally embraced the role of ‘anonym­ous graphic designer’. This is espe­cially true in the case of his typeface, which indeed appears to be a quasi gen­eric and imper­sonal design – if only to the super­fi­cial viewer.

A less pro­gram­mat­ic­ally charged, more pro­fane anonym­ity of the designer was stand­ard in the emer­ging advert­ising agen­cies in the graphic design industry, fol­low­ing the 1960s. It also became quite common to adapt or alter designs that had been cre­ated by others. Ruder’s com­mer­cially suc­cess­ful wood type is no excep­tion to this rule. A series of silk-screened posters for the depart­ment store Grand Magas­ins lnnov­a­tion in Lausanne, Switzer­land, fea­tures a slightly mod­i­fied Ruder-Schrift in a mix of solid and out­line shapes, custom-made by local design­ers and unique to this par­tic­u­lar client.

Remem­ber­ing head­line typefaces with out­line vari­ants from his­tor­ical sources, spe­ci­men books and vinyl record sleeves, Lineto had con­sidered pair­ing LL Ruder Plakat with an out­line com­pan­ion font right from the pro­ject’s start in 2019. An early design study was shared with Hans-Chris­tian Pulver, who pre­ferred this idea to Lineto’s par­al­lel, more sub­stan­tial pro­ject of devel­op­ing the Ruder-Schrift into a vari­able font.

Vari­ab­il­ity, how­ever, turned out to become a cru­cial fea­ture also for the out­line font, as Couteau’s LL Ruder Kontur (2024) enables users to vari­ably adjust the out­line thick­ness to match indi­vidual set­tings at given sizes. It also adjusts the spa­cing of the font for per­fect optical bal­ance at any set­ting. And when, during the last phase of Lineto’s ongo­ing invest­ig­a­tion into the typeface’s his­tory, the Grand Magas­ins lnnov­a­tion posters turned up at the Basel Poster Col­lec­tion, the pro­cesses of his­tor­ical research and con­tem­por­ary type design sud­denly con­verged, in entirely unex­pec­ted ways.