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.

Comments

For free?

[Fly Swatter]

Or copyrighted up the ass?

Re:For free?

[Anonymous Coward]

It’s Adobe. Take a guess.

Re:For free?

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

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

Re:For free?

[grep -v '.*' *]

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?"

Re:For free?

[DRJlaw]

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...

Re:For free?

[Strider-]

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.

Re:For free?

[jabuzz]

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.

Boring fonts

[omfglearntoplay]

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.

I saw an article about this somewhere...

[TiggertheMad]

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.

Comic Sans

[reboot246]

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.

Re:Comic Sans

[ortholattice]

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.

Re:Comic Sans

[Actually, I do RTFA]

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

"One" is a number, not a letter.

Re:Oh, goody

[PPH]

Adobe macht frei.

Bela L'adobe's Dead

[razorh]

Undead undead undead

hmm.

[supernova87a]

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.