Adobe is Reviving the Stunning Lost Fonts of the Bauhaus (fastcodesign.com) 83
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.
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.
For free? (Score:5, Insightful)
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It’s Adobe. Take a guess.
Re:For free? (Score:4, 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.
I'm waiting for the next two fonts... (Score:2)
...in the series: Love...and Rockets. Word is that these fonts are so alive.
iFont for Android (Score:2)
The iFont [google.com] 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 [xda-developers.com], so I don't install it anymore, bu
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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 [bbc.com].
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Bela Legosi's dead...
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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.
Re:For free? (Score:4, 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 [wikipedia.org] 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?"
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Smell-O-Vision?
I prefer Feel-Around [youtube.com]
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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
Re:For free? (Score:4, Insightful)
Depending upon your jurisdiction, both [wikipedia.org]. 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...
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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.
Re: For free? (Score:2)
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.
Re:For free? (Score:4, 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.
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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
Re: For free? (Score:2)
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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.
Boring fonts (Score:3, 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.
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It's bauhaus. You know, the movement that inspired boring concrete buildings and all that. Of course its boring as ear wax.
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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.
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Boring, indeed. That's why the video is 1 1/2 minutes of suspense rather than actually showing the fonts.
actually showing the fonts [typekit.com]
I saw an article about this somewhere... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Oh, goody (Score:4, Funny)
Adobe macht frei.
Comment removed (Score:3)
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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.
Re:Comic Sans (Score:5, Interesting)
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"One" is a number, not a letter.
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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.
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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.
News for nerds... (Score:1)
News for nerds, stuff that's locked behind five licenses.
Futura. (Score:2)
That is all. There is none better for signage.
A special kind (Score:2)
Re: A special kind (Score:2)
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They hurt worse than Comic Sans.
Bela L'adobe's Dead (Score:5, Funny)
hmm. (Score:3)
Pointless - nearly unreadable fonts, illegible. (Score:1)
Those two fonts that are currently available is hard to read. I would not use them for anything.
Form Follows Function (Score:2)
Fucking millsters and hipennials (Score:2)
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?"
ugly fonts (Score:1)