“The key to choosing Futura is to make it your own. Which, with an important caveat, Thomas says you should do. And it almost certainly will change the way you use Futura. In either case, Never Use Futura may change the way you see our world. Seasoned designers will see layers of meaning in Futura (and its look-alikes) everywhere. New designers will start to notice Futura everywhere. It tells a smart, incisive story about the way one typeface became woven into our cultural sentiments and movements. As Thomas puts it, “Futura is really more about a more far-reaching idea … It is an aesthetic idea about modernity-clean lines with a slight human touch, embodied in a name filled with hope.” With a foreword by Ellen Lupton, Never Use Futura is neither a dense textbook nor an opinionated ramble on art history. For Thomas, Futura is not simply a typeface. And, it sits quietly on a plaque installed on the Moon. It is emblazoned across storefronts all over the world, signaling for goods ranging from laptops to luggage, pizza to prom tiaras, dog toys to diesel, mattresses to makeup, and coffee to confetti. It is on notebooks tucked in the shirt pockets of the everyman. It is on crayons in the tight grip of a preschooler.

With its clean lines and weights ranging from slim to strong, Futura (and its mimics) is a versatile choice for logotypes and advertisements, book and album covers, food packaging and people packaging (clothing). After providing meticulously researched historical context, Thomas then explores what ubiquity means for a typeface. Used at all scales, from buttons to posters, Futura had by this time become ubiquitous enough that it essentially felt non-partisan. political campaigns-representing both sides of the fence. After the turbulence of World War II had quieted, Futura was soon caught up in numerous U.S. Despite the boycotts, Futura maintained widespread popularity in the U.S. Yet, as Thomas points out, it is mostly through this prolific imitation that Futura firmly established itself as a model for geometric sans serif type. By this time, Futura had landed a spot on type boycott posters distributed in the United States-in the “Nazi-type” column. Yet, the Nazi Party later abruptly switched to using Roman typefaces, including Futura, claiming that blackletter faces had Jewish origins. In 'Entartete Kunst' (Degenerate Art), the Nazi Party’s exhibition to shame modern art, Futura appeared in prominent posters, contrasting starkly with the blackletter faces that were commonly used. With Hitler’s rise, the Bauhaus closed, Renner was arrested (as well as Jan Tschichold and many others), and modern art was generally deemed insulting and impure.

Designed by Paul Renner in 1920s Germany, Futura entered the world at a time when “typefaces were on the front lines of culture” and was quickly swept into a maelstrom of political turmoil. Author Douglas Thomas makes clear that, despite its simple lines, the typeface is anything but simple. Never Use Futura traces and deconstructs the layout of the page on which Futura sits: our world. And yet, like the hit documentary Helvetica, this book goes far beyond a myopic view of a typeface’s construction and explores how a typeface has shaped and was shaped by our culture and society. An entire book on one font can seemingly appeal to only one “type”: a true type nerd.

Or-dare I write it?- Never Use Helvetica.

Futura typeface poster