Futura®100 తెలుగు

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 Telugu. 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 Telugu’s design reframes how Renner’s work can be reinterpreted by focusing on the details. The focus is on reducing lettershapes to their essence and removing gestural flourishes. Roundness is intrinsic to Telugu, but further rationalisation was required to bring it close to Futura’s grammar. The design features distinctive round counters, instead of commonly-seen petal shaped ones; this acts as a shared motif within the Indic families. The thalakattu, recurring tick-like form on base letters that represents the inherent vowel sound, is trimmed down. When the thalakattu is floating in characters like స ప, it has a pointed corner in lighter weights and chamfered in heavy ones, mirroring similar shapes in Latin. The angles at which terminals are cut and how they are finished varies 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.

The flavours of Futura® and other modernist typefaces of the last century have seeped into the Indian lettering and graphic design landscape through globalisation and cultural exchange. Futura®100 Telugu is synthesised from these inheritances, while benefiting from direct access to Renner’s original designs. Streamlined shapes in అ ఆ ఖ డ, which are borrowed from street lettering tropes and speak directly to this multifaceted legacy. 

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 Telugu echoes this by having considerable width variation in Light, where it features billowing round counters in forms like ర and lean vertical ones like గ and న, which evens out to a more conventional cadence in Bold. The vertical proportions are also harmonised with other scripts in the family. The ottus, or below-base conjunct forms,  strike a delicate balance between being large enough to read while conserving line spacing, allowing for compact display typesetting.

Futura®100 Telugu contains the rhythm of Renner’s original Latin design in the body of Telugu, making it an excellent resource for graphic designers seeking to localise international designs for the Telugu-speaking market, as well as for local designers looking to make use of Futura®’s modern, rational spirit. 

Futura®100 Telugu 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, Bengali, Chinese, Cyrillic, Devanagari, Georgian, Gujarati, Gurmukhi, Greek, Hebrew, Kannada, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Latin, Malayalam, Myanmar, Odia, PanAfrican Latin, Tamil, 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.