To capture its contradictory essence, Schütz focused on the letters that were ‘special’ to Koch. Maybe it’s because the design is too eccentric.’ ‘It’s strange … I can’t think of any other typeface as well known as Kabel that hasn’t gone through a revival. ‘I was interested in how the design would look if the font was conceived today, with the technology that we have and the demand for a huge set of fonts, styles, and extensions,’ he says. In revising Kabel, Schütz has faced the same push and pull: the project is a historical endeavour in its exploration of Koch’s design process, and a project rooted in the now, as Schütz has reconsidered the font for a contemporary context. Kabel is a typeface of conflicting sensibilities, encompassing two opposing ideologies: it markets itself on the Modern aesthetic, but it is simultaneously steeped in the forms of an expressionistic past. However, these capital letters do not belong to the Kabel family at all … the sketch was merely a clever piece of marketing used to emphasise the notion of rationality underpinning the typeface. Klingspor included a sketch of capital letters drawn on a grid in the type specimen for Kabel when it was released in 1927, highlighting the typeface’s supposed geometric conception. Yet while Kabel is predominately geometric, its eccentricities reveal Koch’s unwavering expressionistic and humanist instincts: the crossbar of the ‘e’ sits at an eye-catching diagonal, angled with the poetic, alert drama of a blackletter character. Kabel’s sibling typefaces Zeppelin (1929) and Prisma (1928-31, see sidebar, p.62) extended its Modernist traits. However the popular Neuland (1923) demonstrated another side. His earliest typefaces, including Deutsche Schrift (1908-10) and Maximilian Antiqua (1913-14), were richly detailed and steeped in the German tradition. It is interesting that Klingspor should ask Koch to design a geometric typeface as he was a blackletter expert. So Koch made Kabel: a name that connoted communication, connectivity, and the criss-crossing wires of city trams. It is believed that when the Klingspor Foundry heard that the Bauer Type Foundry, only a few miles away in Frankfurt am Main, was developing Futura, designed by Paul Renner, it commissioned Koch to design a rival. In the late 1920s, German type foundries were competing to create a font that would best signify the style of the times a sans serif devoid of decadent ornament, something stringently geometric that would fulfil Modernism’s demand for functionalism. So Schütz set about designing an update for his students – a project that developed into the ambitious concept of a Neue Kabel type family. And while in the original version Koch had created different designs for small text and display sizes, all sizes of ITC Kabel were derived from the display font. Among other distortions, ITC Kabel’s dramatically increased x-height made it unsuitable for dense blocks of editorial text. Schütz found that the available digital versions of the sans serif – including a 1975 adaptation by the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) – were unsuitable for the scope of the student project. This was an affectionate nod to the history of the institution, where the typeface’s designer Rudolf Koch (1874-1934) had taught while working for the local Klingspor Type Foundry. Four years ago, when designer Marc Schütz was teaching a class at the Offenbach University of Art and Design, his students decided to use the typeface Kabel (1927) for the text of the school’s annual report.
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