The Art And Soul Of Futura

No, I’m not talking about the artist who created the creepy Pointman character for UNKLE. I’m referring to the typeface, which has been around since 1927 and is still in wide use today. How’s that for an aptly named font? As much as I love Futura, though, I struggle to use it these days. I like it best when used for single words, all lower case, with lots of letter spacing.

My introduction to Futura came via Frankie Goes To Hollywood, though it’s unlikely I had any concept about typefaces at the time. All the Pleasuredome-era Frankie releases were typeset with various weights of Futura by in-house designers XLZTT. Journalist Paul Morley used to write all the funny/strange liner notes on the Frankie sleeves, mostly set in Futura Book. It was a fitting typeface to use: I found it to be clean, modern, yet creepy and whimsical, especially when used with words or short phrases in quotation marks, in all lower case. This was Frankie’s font, and it subtly defined their early image, other than the famous Katharine Hamnett-ripoff “Frankie Say Relax” shirts (designed by Morley). Strangely enough, Frankie’s second album, Liverpool, flopped (I blame its use of Helvetica).

Futura bold became part of the early Sub Pop template for their 7″ singles, and for a few years was widely seen on designs by Vaughan Oliver (particularly on sleeves for the Pixies, Throwing Muses, Lush, Pale Saints, and the first All About Eve EP). Lately it’s been seen on sleeves for Broken Bells and the Pet Shop Boys. Outside the music realm, Volkswagen uses it, and IKEA famously used to employ a custom version, before their controversial switch to Verdana–a font that I’d say is practically devoid of all the soul Futura has. Yes, good typefaces have soul.

To close, here’s a gallery of Futura applications.