![]() Their initial delivery was by modem ( that’s how long the fonts have been around …). ![]() While the SpiegelHeadline font drawn to replace Franklin Gothic was sold to Der Spiegel outright, Luc(as) designed the other six sans serif fonts as non-exclusive products. After the first issue of the redesigned Der Spiegel hit the newsstands in January 1997, with his old-style figures added to Rotation, Luc(as) could ease clients’ reluctance toward using old-style figures by saying “see? They’re in Der Spiegel!” This gave them instant credibility with Germany, and besides – old-style figures make text look better, too. The Times New Roman used by Der Spiegel until the end of 1996 hadn’t used them either. Over the years, Luc(as) began to notice that old-style figures were used significantly less often in German typography than in his native Holland. Indeed, before Beyer’s redesign, Der Spiegel’s pages had been composed with Times New Roman and Franklin Gothic. ![]() In terms of its appearance, it looked back to Times New Roman. The typeface was for newspapers printed in relief on rotary presses. Ritzel was the head of the company’s engraving department, and his design was initially released in 1971 as matrices for Linotype’s hot-metal composing machines. Arthur Ritzel at the old D. Stempel AG foundry in Frankfurt designed Rotation in 1968. These included adding old-style figures and small caps. Meanwhile, Luc(as) built up a typographic arsenal for Der Spiegel’s editorial designers.Īlready in 1996, Luc(as) began the first in a long series of updates to the Rotation fonts. The magazine’s structure has remained amazingly consistent for the past 22 years, even though small changes were later made to it by Beyer himself, about a decade ago. Still in his old job at MetaDesign, Luc(as) worked late nights for a week and sent in sketches Beyer ordered six weights immediately.īeyer’s redesign of Der Spiegel must be viewed as an unquestionable success. A newly developed typeface, he argued, would lend an unmistakable personality to the magazine. Since Luc(as) found Franklin Gothic a little too generic, he offered to design a replacement font for Der Spiegel’s headlines. The magazine still uses fonts from Luc(as), but they’ve gotten a few more of them over the intervening years. By comparison, the first page of a title story from a June 2019 issue is shown on the right. On the left, you’ll see a page from the first Der Spiegel issue using Luc(as) de Groot’s fonts, printed in January 1997. Beyer showed his upcoming redesign to Luc(as). While Luc(as) de Groot visited Hamburg to give a lecture about the design of the upcoming Expo 2000, the two met. Uwe Beyer redesigned the news magazine in 1996, and for this, he was planning to pair Linotype Rotation for the articles’ main text with headlines in Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed. Our roundup of blackletter typefaces includes old Fraktur typefaces such as Schwabacher and Rotunda as well as modern interpretations like American Text.Germany’s Der Spiegel is based in Hamburg, where it was founded in 1947. ![]() So these typefaces are not the right choice for body text but are best used for headings and titles to convey a sense of nostalgia. Many are excessively ornate and have special text layout requirements (such as alternating the two different “s”). Therefore, blackletter typefaces should be used with care and only if they fit in with the overall context.īlackletter fonts are difficult for modern eyes to read. However, these fonts are also laden with nationalist connotations because they were heavily used by the Nazis (and are still popular with nationalists today). Having evolved in Western Europe from the mid-12th century, they remained popular in Germany until the early 20th century. Continue reading to learn which free Gothic fonts are ideal to create that WOW effect.īased on early manuscript lettering, blackletter typefaces (also referred to as Gothic, Fraktur or Old English) are characterised by broken up font lines. All these fonts are effective attention-grabbers. Sometimes you want to lend a medieval look to your designs, for example, when printing posters for a medieval festival or historical theatre play.
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