In 1929 Chauncey Griffith at Mergenthaler commissioned W.A. Dwiggins to design a warmer and less mechanical Geometric Sanserif to compete with Futura. Dwiggins’ best efforts proved that human warmth had little to do with cool geometry; for twelve years, until the introduction of Spartan, Mergenthaler lost ground to Intertype’s licensed version of Futura.

Twentieth Century was Lanston Monotypes answer to Futura. In fact Saul Hess's redrawing of Futura is so close that this new digital revival includes alternates of the long lost original letterforms originally designed by Paul Renner for Futura, but were left out of the released version that has become so popular. 20th Century is a modern sans serif with apparent geometry yet still a certain warmth in its design. The OpenType version of LTC Twentieth Century incorporates the alternate Renner glyphs with two sets of alternate lowercase characters. The font also includes oldstyle numerals and a full Western and Central European character set.

Futuramano was the kind of typeface we scribbled in those old days, when I was an art-director in advertising agencies. We used it to simulate the headlines and the subheads, so the client could read what the copywriters had in mind. As Futura was the font of choice in those days (as it still is), our scribbled typeface looked much like Futura. The second half of the name “mano” means hand, so that is what it is, kind of a handwritten Futura. Futuramano is very practical if you want to have that unfinished touch! Yours very nostalgic Gert Wiescher

In the early years of the twentieth century a number of romans with a soft and slightly script like quality were evolved. Although they did not represent the future in terms of the major design influences that were to appear after the First World War, they were a break with the past, and were developed further in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Monotype Bernard Condensed is closely associated with this period, a condensed roman evoking an easy charm. The Monotype Bernard Condensed font offers many display applications where warmth and friendliness is required.

Harpsichord (as I have named it) is from the late 1940s and was designed at Lucian Bernhard Studios in New York for Bernhard's Magnetype Collection. It was originally published as 'Community Low' along with 'Community Condensed'. Many of his Magnetype Fonts have been dormant which I hope to revive in the near future.

Display Board JNL is based on Futura Display, which was designed in 1932 by Paul Renner as an extension of his original (1927) Futura family of typefaces. According to Wikipedia, the font was developed as a typeface by the Bauer Type Foundry, in competition with Ludwig & Mayer's seminal Erbar typeface of 1926 Display Board JNL is available in both regular and oblique versions.

A simple, modern sans serif; clean and elegant, just like its inspiration. The name is a play on Futura.

In the Dynamic Seventies, "prismatic" typefaces were all the rage, and few were more popular than variants of Paul Renner's Futura and the Herbert Bayer-inspired Bauhaus. This family of fonts features Futura-like forms in the uppercase and Bauhaus-like forms in the lowercase, so you can mix or match to create just the perfect headline. As always, all versions contain the complete Latin 1252, Central European 1250 and Turkish 1254 character sets.