Introduction

In the 1920s, designers sought to modernize typefaces and typography as a whole, leading to the creation of geometric sans-serif typefaces—a category that remains widely popular to this day. While the modernization movement primarily focused on sans-serif designs, attempts to apply these principles to serif or blackletter typefaces were relatively rare.

The images shown above are from a competition from the 1920s for covers of the typography magazine Typographische Mitteilungen. While sans serif letterforms dominate, blackletter is included as well. Herbert Bayer’s Bayer-Type is a rare and interesting attempt to use geometric constructions for a serif typeface.

But how did blackletter fonts evolve during the 1920s and 1930s? We take a closer look on the following pages.