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Reklame Stencil

Type Design

During research for the exhibition design of „Fight for the City. Politics, Art and Everyday Life in the 1930s“ at Wien Museum, it became pretty obvious that a specific font would give the exhibition’s appearance and its communication media a unique character. Based on the title font of a former magazine, we created a whole family with minuscules and majuscules.

Cover of the original magazine for Austrian graphic design with illustration of mountains, a man leaning against a car with the magazine title "Reklame" in stencil capital letters
Detail of the magazine "Reklame" with an R as a capital letter in the Austrian colors red-white-red

In the 1920s, back when visual designers were still called commercial artists, there was no difference between art directors, contact persons and copy writers. Often, designers combined all skills in one person. An own magazine showed the rising interest in this new kind of job profile: the so-called „Austrian Advertisement“ (Österreichische Reklame) was first published in 1926 and it presented interesting personalities of the growing design world, such as Joseph Binder who invented the famous “Meinl Moor”.

The whole typo family of Reklame Stencil with letters and numbers

Einleitung

Just like the Futura Black, the title font of the magazine is based on simple basic shapes, like circle, triangle and square. Comparing the font with the Futura Black, it showed that the Futura doesn’t coherently use the radicality on the whole font family, neglecting numbers and special characters. The design of a font for the exhibition was therefore based on the magazine title, aiming to stick with the consequence of using few elements only to build a font family like with a simple construction kit.

Special drawing and glyphs of Reklame Stencil in gold-beige on black
Title of the exhibition, which inspired the writing design: "Battle for the city" written with Reklame Stencil
Exhibition posters for "Battle for the city" with images and title written with Reklame Stencil

Einleitung

„Fight for the City. Politics, Art and Everyday Life in the 1930s“ was a new kind of exhibition: everyday life events, historical facts and art were combined, and the exhibition design with its the strong typographic character worked as a natural brace. The newly created font, Reklame, gives the exhibition and all media a strong identity. The information design parts of the exhibition referred to the historical Otto Neurath info graphics.

Exhibition invitation in the design of the exhibition graphic with the Reklame Stencil
The exhibition catalog for "Battle for the City" inside, in which the typeface takes on a main design role for headlines
The exhibition catalog for "Battle for the City" inside, in which the typeface takes on a main design role for headings
The typeface in the context of the exhibition for exhibition texts
The typeface in the context of the exhibition for exhibition texts
The typeface in the context of the exhibition for exhibition texts
The typeface in the context of the exhibition for exhibition texts
Muh!