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Adobe is Reviving the Stunning Lost Fonts of the Bauhaus (fastcodesign.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Even if you're not a designer, you've probably heard the phrase "form follows function." That's how influential the school that espoused it, the Bauhaus, has become since its heyday in 1920s and '30s Germany. Now, some of the movement's most compelling -- but largely unknown -- lettering has been recreated from archival material, like original typography sketches and letter fragments, and transformed into contemporary digital typefaces.

The project is part of an Adobe initiative called Hidden Treasures that resurfaces design gems from the past in Adobe products -- previously, the company recreated the paintbrushes used by painter Edvard Munch for use in Photoshop. For the second iteration of the initiative, Adobe worked with the Bauhaus archives in Berlin, Germany, to bring in five design students to create five distinct typefaces, all under the guidance of expert typeface designer Erik Spiekermann. While each of the typefaces will eventually be available to all users of Adobe Typekit, two are now available online: one inspired by Joost Schmidt, a teacher at the Bauhaus who also created the famed poster for the 1923 Bauhaus Exhibition, and the other inspired by Xanti Schawinsky, who taught classes in set design at the school.

83 comments

  1. For free? by Fly+Swatter · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Or copyrighted up the ass?

    1. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It’s Adobe. Take a guess.

    2. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      For free with your $82/mo Creative Cloud subscription!

    3. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Their subscription model is genius. It's a great way to keep the initial anger and frustration of being over-charged for something constantly burning.

    4. Re:For free? by Impy+the+Impiuos+Imp · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You should just take it, the fruits of their hard labor, without paying for it, since you weren't gonna pay for it anyway.

      --
      (-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
    5. Re:For free? by grep+-v+'.*'+* · · Score: 3, Funny

      For free? Or copyrighted up the ass?

      I didn't realize that fonts could specify brown as a mandatory color. Learn something new every day.

      Now if Adobe successfully brings Smell-O-Vision to fonts like the movie theaters tried to do with movies decades ago, I'm never using printers again. And here I thought that printer ink costs a lot -- just wait, you can soon actually include the smell of success or failure in your documents.

      Wonder how that would work with facsimiles? And even Clippy: "It looks like you're quitting your job. Would you like smell some extra failure with that?"

      --
      If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
    6. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Of course, since it's less than 75 years from the life of the original designer, they will be paying full royalties to their families... /s

    7. Re:For free? by rworne · · Score: 1

      Smell-O-Vision?

      I prefer Feel-Around

      --
      I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
    8. Re:For free? by DRJlaw · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Or copyrighted up the ass?

      Depending upon your jurisdiction, both. In the U.S., you're free to copy the visible design of the font, but the computer program that produces that design -- the "font file" -- is copyrighted.

      Surely you were more interested in the former than the latter...

    9. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      All copyrights from the Nazi era and Weimar Republic were voided after WWII. You can't claim copyright on anything German if it dates from before 1945.

    10. Re:For free? by Strider- · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Technically, you can't copyright a font.

      What you can do is copyright the program that produces said font, and PostScript fonts are a program.

      That said, there's nothing stopping you from taking a printed version of said font and clean rooming your own rendition of it, other than your lack of skill.

      --
      ...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
    11. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What a charming response. And how amazing that from just three words, you were able to infer so much about my attitude to copyright and paying people for their efforts. Truly there is a new Sherlock Holmes among us.
      PS: Go to hell.

    12. Re: For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      "Mooooom! Someone unfairly judged my character on the internet!! Waaaaa!"

    13. Re: For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interesting! Do you have any references?

    14. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Adobe takes an actual original work of art and then does some work on it that is at best not creative at all. Point at the part that copyright is supposed to encourage and then to the part that it actually encourages.

    15. Re: For free? by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Fonts can't be copyrighted. But the individual font specification files can be.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    16. Re:For free? by jabuzz · · Score: 2

      A Type 3 font might be a program. A Type1 font which is what most people actually use is not a program at all, just a series of curves and straight lines, with a list of options for hinting and kerneling the font.

      TrueType fonts on the other hand have an embedded program in the form of a bytecode that can morph the shape of the font so that it better fits on a specific "pixel" grid aka hit it. Actually it can arbitrarily modify the font.

      Interestingly Windows has an API (at least in Win16 not sure if it made it to later variants) that can let you recover the curves and lines of an arbitrary character of a given font. It would be realitvely trivial to write a Windows program to get the outlines of a TrueType font, convert the quadratic to cubic splines and spit out a Type1 font that in the USA would be copyright free. You would be down the hinting and kerneling, but you could probably recover the kerneling by getting windows to render all the different two letter combinations and looking at the size difference over the individual letters. That just leaves you down the hinting, which if you have a HiDPI display is somewhat mute.

    17. Re:For free? by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      Please stop making shit up.

      This is easy to prove: For example, the copyright on Mein Kampf only expired in 2016, 70 years after the death of the author.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    18. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Free and non-free typefaces or fonts have been defined as such for a reason. I think in the US they use "design patents" to protect the shapes similarly to what would be something like "model protection", trademark or a registered and protected appearance elsewhere. Typefaces would fall under such protection.

    19. Re:For free? by religionofpeas · · Score: 1

      The font file consists of 2 parts. One is a mathematical description of the curves (typically using quadratic or cubic splines), and the other is a piece of program that helps to map the curves to raster pixel coordinates ("hinting") so that the fonts look nice on low resolution screens. Only the hinting program is subject to copyright.

      For some applications (high resolution and/or advanced rasterizers) you could even leave out the hinting program.

    20. Re: For free? by DRJlaw · · Score: 1

      Adobe Systems v. Southern Software explicitly found that the selection of control points and curves was copyrighted expression. The copyright is not limited to the hinting, even assuming that someone would attempt to remove the hinting from the font file in order to use it.

    21. Re:For free? by pegr · · Score: 1

      Bela Legosi's dead...

    22. Re:For free? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's not what hinting is.

    23. Re:For free? by HiThere · · Score: 1

      If it's from Adobe, I don't trust it.
      Back when fonts were just bit maps, I wouldn't have needed to trust them, and this wouldn't be important. These days though... Postscript was a Turing-complete computer language. I don't know about the languages used to program fonts today, but I'm going to assume that if it's from Adobe it can't be trusted. If I'm wrong, little is lost.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  2. Boring fonts by omfglearntoplay · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Written language was beautiful centuries ago. Now everything is so simple and boring as can be. The fonts I see in that Bauhaus video look about as appealing to me as a perfectly square hotrod.

    1. Re: Boring fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Musk's next task, after flamethrowers!

    2. Re:Boring fonts by Megane · · Score: 1

      These fonts were rather uninspired. The one that looks a bit like Bodoni isn't too bad, and the Joschmi looks like a geometric stencil with a black letter feel, but the others are basically My First Geometric fonts, with weirdnesses imposed by trying too hard to keep to the geometry. That one where all the curves were arcs of a circle had trouble with e, C, and G that I noticed right away.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    3. Re:Boring fonts by JaredOfEuropa · · Score: 1

      Handwriting was already a lost art before we did our writing on computers. The cursive writing we learn in school is suitable for learning how to write, but painfully inadequate for developing good handwriting that is personal and reasonably fast, beautiful, yet legible at the same time.

      --
      If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
    4. Re:Boring fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      It's bauhaus. You know, the movement that inspired boring concrete buildings and all that. Of course its boring as ear wax.

    5. Re:Boring fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's really ignorant comment. Bauhaus isn't boring, it's very clean, harmonic and functional, that's all. If you're looking for boring, look at all the soviet style "architecture", or just look at the - frequently highly impractical - modern glass and concrete creations which usually sticks out like a sore thumb.

      Saying something "inspired" something awful and therefore is just as bad is just stupid. It just shows that you, much like the people who claims to have been "inspired" by it, are a dolt who haven't grasped the concepts at all.

    6. Re:Boring fonts by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 1

      Centuries ago, books were set using movable type and usually consisted solely of words (this is also true today.) So any aesthetics needed to be conveyed by the font. Now things are on a screen, if you want pretty here's tons of realistic images and videos. Just get the information across.

      Also, apparently pretty fonts are easier to read on paper, but harder to read on a computer screen.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
    7. Re:Boring fonts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Boring, indeed. That's why the video is 1 1/2 minutes of suspense rather than actually showing the fonts.

      Bauhaus was connected with socialist idealism. Decoration is suspect from that point of view. It hints at monarchism. The good socialist should settle for equality in all things and should define aesthetic quality itself as that which eliminates aesthetic values.

    8. Re:Boring fonts by jdschulteis · · Score: 1

      Boring, indeed. That's why the video is 1 1/2 minutes of suspense rather than actually showing the fonts.

      actually showing the fonts

  3. I saw an article about this somewhere... by TiggertheMad · · Score: 4, Funny

    Apparently, while working on this project, they discovered why the Nazis shut down Bauhaus. One of the 'lost fonts' that was under development was Comic Sans.

    --

    HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
    1. Re:I saw an article about this somewhere... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Only because they had been instructed to create one called Juden Sans

    2. Re: I saw an article about this somewhere... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You realize that the Republicans are the ones who like cutting taxes, right?

  4. Revival? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    The letters, which have the look of blocky stencils, were created from just six lowercase letters by Schmidt from 1930 that Brazilian designer Flavia Zimbardi found in the Bauhaus archives.

    More like inspiration.

    1. Re:Revival? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      More like inspiration.

      Can you copyright a copy?

  5. OCR-A, OCR-B by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Good enough for my father, good enough for me.

  6. Comic Sans by reboot246 · · Score: 2

    If it's good enough for me, it's good enough for everybody!

    Seriously though, I don't use Comic Sans. I generally choose fonts that are easy for *me* to read. Right now I like Arial and Verdana. Sans serif fonts are easier for me to read than serif fonts. Don't even get me started about script fonts.

    1. Re:Comic Sans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I use comic sans for my IDE. It's the one thing that makes paired programming fun. Watching other devs recoil in terror is totally worth the pain to my self.

    2. Re:Comic Sans by ortholattice · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Personally I dislike Arial because it doesn't distinguish l and I, which more than once has caused me confusion. (Verdana does distinguish them.) Most of the Bauhaus fonts also don't distinguish them. I don't understand why font designers think it is a good idea to make a font less legible by using the same shape to represent two different letters.

    3. Re:Comic Sans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's hip.

    4. Re:Comic Sans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      fucking architects, that's why

    5. Re:Comic Sans by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 2

      it doesn't distinguish l and I ... the same shape to represent two different letters.

      "One" is a number, not a letter.

      --
      Your ad here. Ask me how!
    6. Re:Comic Sans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Did you need it spelled out?

      lower case el ("L" -> "l")
      upper case i ("i" -> "I")

      some fonts also have issues with one ("1"), but that doesn't exclude the two letters mentioned above. I guess not only are you "Actually, I do RTFA" but also suffer from the grammar nazi wannabe disease (though the grammar correctors incorrectly "correcting" already correct grammar seems to have died off).

    7. Re:Comic Sans by Thelasko · · Score: 1

      Personally I dislike Arial because it doesn't distinguish l and I, which more than once has caused me confusion.

      OMFG! I have a software supplier that likes to name data structures with different combinations of L and I. There is only one approved interface for their software and it uses Arial font only. (this is an embedded system, so I don't get to use anything I want to interface with the software) Calling a data structure is a nightmare! You can't get it right the first time.

      --
      One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
    8. Re:Comic Sans by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      it doesn't distinguish l and I ... the same shape to represent two different letters.

      "One" is a number, not a letter.

      You do make a very good point. The upper post should be corrected to say:
      "by using the same shape to represent THREE different SYMBOLS"

      Upper case i, Lower case L, and the number one - three different symbols yet all use the same shape.

      Some fonts go further and use the same shape for the symbol "vertical bar", or what most programmers call the "pipe" even though the pipe symbol is a different thing in the exceptionally rare times it's in the font at all, yet even then the two vertical lines are still confusing as it is in essence just two vertical bars next to each other in the same symbol space.

      Yet other fonts go even further yet to make things a mess in an attempt to correct the above problems in a completely incorrect way.

      One example is to make the vertical bar symbol the same basic shape but longer. While this lets you differentiate it from the letter and number symbols when right next to each other, it doesn't show differentiated enough shown on its own.

      Another example is using the shape for a "broken bar" to represent the "vertical bar" character, in which case you can differentiate it from all of the previously mentioned symbol shapes, but then requires the font to exclude an actual "broken bar" symbol!

      Both of those symbols are also still very commonly misnamed as a pipe symbol, although to be fair that's the fault of people and not the fonts.

    9. Re:Comic Sans by cellocgw · · Score: 1

      it doesn't distinguish l and I ... the same shape to represent two different letters.

      "One" is a number, not a letter.

      Duuuude.... the first is a capital "i" and the second is a lower-case "L" . 'mkay?
      Also, "One' is a word describing the ordinal number. Nyah.

      --
      https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
  7. News for nerds... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    News for nerds, stuff that's locked behind five licenses.

  8. Re:Oh, goody by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No. You will see this font above the door to the gas chamber right before you are herded in.

  9. comak sanse lollllll by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    comak sanse lollllll

  10. Don't work for...what now? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Do you think Adobe know what the text on the printing blocks in the 'Behind the project' image says?

    https://adobehiddentreasures.c...

  11. Re:Oh, goody by PPH · · Score: 3, Funny

    Adobe macht frei.

    --
    Have gnu, will travel.
  12. Form follows function? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Upon typing a test phrase into the Joschmi sample box, it appears someone got very confused as to the goals. The team must have been led by a dyslexic who misread the goal as "Function follows form".

  13. I'm waiting for the next two fonts... by Blaede · · Score: 1

    ...in the series: Love...and Rockets. Word is that these fonts are so alive.

    1. Re:I'm waiting for the next two fonts... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Where is the Murphy font?

  14. Futura. by TigerPlish · · Score: 1

    That is all. There is none better for signage.

    --
    The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
  15. A special kind by chispito · · Score: 1

    You have to be a special kind of design nut to be "stunned" by any font.

    --
    The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
    1. Re: A special kind by phantomfive · · Score: 1

      Yeap, and font people have their own specialties in the design world.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:A special kind by Instantlemming · · Score: 1

      Well, those 2 fonts do a pretty good job of stunning anyone trying to read them

      They hurt worse than Comic Sans.

  16. Bela L'adobe's Dead by razorh · · Score: 4, Funny

    Undead undead undead

    1. Re: Bela L'adobe's Dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So, white on white translucent black caps?

    2. Re: Bela L'adobe's Dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yes!!!

  17. hmm. by supernova87a · · Score: 2

    Apologies if this comes off as shitting on a project's announcement of something that could've been really interesting -- but for the amount of drama conveyed in that intro video, the 2 fonts they offer for sharing are... pretty lame.

    1. Re:hmm. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Its typical designer hubris. The fonts are "stunning" to her because they're different. If people start using them, they'll become boring. Its why UI's are constantly in flux. Designers have a mental disorder that rejects the current or accepted.

    2. Re:hmm. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I also felt slightly robbed of my time for checking this out. I want to see the damn fonts!

  18. Nope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They're not reviving anything if you have to pay $2,000 to use a font on a poster that has more than 10K replications. It's just "selling" the lost fonts of.... whoever

  19. aaaaaand... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They just look like a bunch of letters.

  20. Re: Oh, goody by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That made me giggle.

  21. Pointless - nearly unreadable fonts, illegible. by fish_sauce · · Score: 1

    Those two fonts that are currently available is hard to read. I would not use them for anything.

  22. Form Follows Function by jbengt · · Score: 1

    OK, it has nothing to do with fonts, but Louis Sullivan, the Chicago architect, coined the phrase "form follows function" in the late 1800s, well before the Bauhaus school in the 1920s and 30s.

    1. Re: Form Follows Function by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      1896 to be precise.

  23. Fucking millsters and hipennials by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Even if you're not a designer, you've probably heard the phrase "form follows function."

    You're more likely to have heard it if you're not a designer.

    If you said it to the Gnome group they'd all be like "Uh ... what's function?"

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  24. ugly fonts by jgrimard · · Score: 1

    Those are some ugly fonts. a c f and g all have dots in them. Like the kind of dot you would find in a lower case i or j... Ugly as sin..

  25. iFont for Android by emil · · Score: 1

    The iFont app in Google Play offers a font named "Armani."

    I was able to use iFont to create an APK file of this font, which I pulled onto a Red Hat desktop. After running unzip on the APK, I found an "Armani.ttf" True Type font file.

    The font viewer reports this to be Bauhaus ITC regular.

    This is my favorite font, and I copied it over the Android default /system/fonts/Roboto-Regular.ttf.

    Supposedly, this typeface was obtained legally. I have had trouble with iFont in the past, so I don't install it anymore, but I have kept the exported typeface.