Futura®100 বাংলা

The original Futura® was the ultimate in geometric sans serifs, reducing a design category to its most concentrated concept and form. Futura®100 is the epitome of minimalist geometric typefaces. TypeTogether has brought together a highly talented team of designers to create Futura®100 Bengali. The result is a typeface family that – thanks to close cooperation with Bauer Types – remains faithful to the original design intentions and retains a constructed but warm quality.

Shapes in Indic scripts cannot be reduced to basic geometric forms because they are inherently complex. Futura®100 Bengali’s design reframes how Renner’s work can be reinterpreted by centering creative intentions and design details. The repeating triangular shapes of Bengali became the bedrock of the design’s geometric essence. They are complemented by distinctive round counters that are a shared motif within the Indic families. Another distinctive feature involves the angles at which terminals are cut, and how they are finished also vary throughout the character set. A mixture of angles — orthogonal to the stroke direction, vertical and horizontal — all borrowed from the original Latin creates a pleasant tension between humanism and mechanical geometry.

Careful attention has been paid to the rhythm of horizontal proportions, one of the features that makes the original Latin design stand apart. Within the confines of what is agreeable in the script, Futura®100 Bengali echoes this by having considerable width variation in Light, which evens out to a more conventional cadence in Bold. Bengali script depends on vertically-stacked conjuncts. Their depths were carefully rationalised without losing the geometric family resemblance or creating dense, dark patches in text. The result is a compact and striking effect, especially in heavier weights, that synchronizes seamlessly with other scripts in the family like Devanagari, Gujarati and Gurmukhi.

To avoid the trap of simply transliterating the Latin, the designers looked at vernacular lettering already present in Bengal's signage and modern architecture and even simplified forms used to teach children how to write; forms that are, in their own way, already geometric and rational. Lettershapes like ই চ ঙ ড দ প and consonant-vowel combinations such as হু borrow directly from such references. This approach gave the typeface a locally-rooted anchor, so that the geometry feels discovered within Bengali rather than borrowed from Latin. 

Futura®100 Bengali is an excellent resource for graphic designers seeking to localise international designs for the Indian market, as well as for Indian designers looking to make use of Futura®’s modern, rational spirit.

Futura®100 Bengali is available in six weights as well as a variable font. It joins 22 other scripts to serve more than 90% of the world’s population: Arabic, Armenian, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Myanmar, Odia, PanAfrican Latin, Tamil, Telugu, and Thai.

What was new and disruptive for its time has now become a hinge upon which type design turns and graphic design rests. More than mechanical, Futura®100 is structural. It gives such strength and stamina to the text that it has lasted a century and, with this iteration, will remain in constant use by more designers worldwide for the foreseeable future.

About Futura®
Original design: Paul Renner
Copyright of the original design: Bauer Types
Copyright of Futura®100: TypeTogether (with authorization from Bauer Types).
Futura® is a registered trademark of Bauer Types. Used under license.