04
03 Block Schrift von H. Berthold, 1908
03
04 ITC Benguiat Gothic, 1979
03 Block Typeface by H. Berthold, 1908
04 ITC Benguiat Gothic, 1979
9
Typorama
… everything stays round? Rounded Typefaces are celebrating their revival. An abstract of the history of Rounded Typefaces If you take a stroll around any big city today, you might stop and think, ’everything is so nice and round here!’ Whether you look at logos, posters, company labels, or advertisements, all of the fonts in use seem to have been washed with fabric softener. Several brands here in central Germany – like REWE, Otto, Vaillant or tegut – have all chosen a new, softer, and more customer-friendly layout for their corporate designs. As a result, rounded typefaces are omnipresent. The same phenomenon has been seen with bell-bottoms and kidney-shaped tables: both were quite popular in the past, and each regained their fame with a comeback. Curvy as they are, rounded typefaces have undulated through the last century – sometimes more in vogue, sometimes less. They last had a great appearance in the 70s and 80s. Even though their popularity declined in subsequent decades, not everyone rode the downward wave: for example, the logo of the German television show Wetten, dass …? (Wanna Bet That …?), broadcast by ZDF (Second German Television) has been (almost) unchangeably round for more than 30 years.
Fonts in Focus 9 In the 70s all patterns, even the frames of tables, received rounded edges … even paper was perforated into a round shape on its edges! So it was no surprise that typeface design also got caught up in the rounded wave. Several rounded versions of popular sans serif typefaces appeared. In reviving ITC Souvenir in 1972, Ed Benguiat revisited an old American typeface classic created by Morris Fuller Benton in 1914. Due to its peculiar shape, Benton’s Souvenir had originally been used for tax declaration forms. Rounded edges seem to have come back in trend, too! In 1975, ITC Bauhaus was released; all the shapes of this typeface are round. The same goes for the similarly shaped Pump and Blippo typefaces, from the 1970. ITC Benguiat Gothic, another popular rounded typeface, emerged in 1979. The popularity of Rounded Typefaces provoked a surge of corporate redesigns. In 1973 the already-mentioned ZDF television channel in Mainz, Germany, received an entirely new appearance. The new ZDF Rounded typeface was even designed by Otl Aicher, who was inspired by the rhythm of Adrian Frutiger’s Univers. Due to both the low resolution of the television frames from that time, and the technique for showing typefaces, which made edges and serifs appear round anyway, the ZDF opted for a rounded typeface from the start. Volkswagen switched its corporate design from the classic Futura to a Rounded version in 1979: this typeface is widely known today under the name VAG Rounded. The Aral chain of petrol stations is another company that followed the contemporary trend and altered its corporate design to appear more round and friendly. The oldest rounded typeface found so far, however, originated in a considerably earlier period. Its genesis dates back to the year 1838. In Rob Roy Kelly’s work American Woodtype –