Patria ad (1936)

4 Comments on “Patria ad (1936)”

1. Florian Hardwig says:

   Mar 5th, 2014 9:11 pm

   The Patria port­able typewriter was launched in 1936. Quick a.k.a Trafton Script was released only three years earlier. Stempel Garamond kursiv (1926) and Futura fett (1928) were also relatively contemporary choices. The whole ad looks very modern, with the colored photography and the contrasting mix of typefaces. The warped Patria logo may look like a cheap and inappropriate MS Word effect to us, but it must have felt pretty adventurous back then.

   There are lots of little things to discover: The figures of metal Futura fett were not tabular. The italic text uses a couple of ligatures: ch, ff, ft. Emphasis within italics is achieved by the means of letterspacing (“einmal” on the 4th line from the bottom).

2. Stephen Coles says:

   Apr 17th, 2014 11:41 pm

   Also, the square-barred ‘1’. I assumed that Futura’s always had an angled terminal and that Spartan and other followers were flat. I guess not! Here’s another square-barred ‘1’ in 1936 Germany.

3. Blythwood says:

   Jun 25th, 2017 5:00 am

   I think the geometric sans is Berthold-Grotesk and the light condensed grotesk could be Venus – the Internet Archive specimen shows exactly the same oddly low hyphen besides the high-waisted 'R’.

   I’m also pretty sure that lines 1 and 25 of the list also have the original dot-terminal Futura 'r’, for some reason – the difference between “Normale” in lines 1 and 2 looks a bit much to be just differences in ink spread.

   Seeing extended passages of Futura Bold makes me realize again how hard it can be to design a convincing geometric 's’ in a bold font – it looks so much more slender than the letters around it.

4. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jun 25th, 2017 5:27 am

   Agreed on all points. Added, thanks!