Back in 2004, I started working on an identity project for Vitra, the Swiss furniture company rooted in the mid-century modernist spirit of Eames, Nelson, Prouvé et al. For decades, their font of choice had been Futura, which made good sense, and I decided to stick with it.

By pairing the classic proportions of the Roman Capitalis with modernist principles, Paul Renner had created a typographic standard outperforming all contenders in its genre. Futura is one of only a few typefaces that comfortably hold the rare spot of being universally accepted, and has been for nearly one hundred years. Instantly recognisable and surprisingly versatile, it has no overbearing features and is devoid of the gratuitous mannerisms that litter so many of today’s fashionable choices. It is decidedly modern without being brutal, and quietly modest without being boring. Most of all, it is precisely one thing, and one thing only: Futura. Everything about it is clearly defined with sober sophistication, the result being one of a handful of uber classics in the history of type.

However, evaluating the many digital Futuras on offer, I found none to be convincing, and so we went about creating our own. In collaboration with Laurenz Brunner, we first drew a single Medium cut, aiming to project a tougher, crisper and also slightly more geometric image of this 20th century classic, a typeface so well-known and so ubiquitous that the quality of its actual drawings had become obscured by its many clichés. This proved successful, and in the three years to follow, it was developed into a small family called VFutura, covering a range of five weights.

More than ten years pass, and in 2017, Arve Båtevik joins Lineto as staff designer. Having just completed an exhaustive comparative study on the genre of the Geometric Grotesk as part of his MA at écal, Arve is perfectly poised for his challenging first project: to overhaul and harmonise the five cuts of VFutura, and to elaborate matching italics. But upon examination, he proposes to first redraw the roman weights, starting an entirely new project. Why would a type designer today still replicate the shapes of metal letters that were cut individually, for every size of every weight, nearly one hundred years ago, or bear witness to the limitations of phototypesetting, a technology long obsolete? Instead, Båtevik proposes a radical reset. No particular version of Futura would serve as a starting point; Renner’s concept rather than its interpretation would serve as a guideline; everything would be geometrically constructed from scratch. Futura as it should have been.

This required a thorough understanding of Renner’s principles of construction, his method for optical corrections, and his aesthetic preferences. After comparing original drawings with earlier drafts from 1925, and with the metal types in Light, Medium and Bold crafted by the punchcutters at Bauer in 1927, Båtevik defined the curves for individual groups of letters, fine-tuned the joins, and found distinctive solutions for the many formal problems across each weight. Working against the current tendency of interpolating entire families, each cut of LL Supreme was drawn separately and, as a consequence, has its own identity. In a last step, the historical stylistic alternates were added to the project, reminiscent of the font’s history and paying hommage to Renner’s daring spirit and his sense of elegance.

The result is a digital native Futura, aware of its rich history, shaped in the spirit of today, and ready for the technical challenges of tomorrow: a 21st Century Gothic.