|Ziza Klex

When I think Nazis (and recently I happen to think Nazis quite often when I watch the news…), I think of dictatorship, the Holocaust, and repression.
But I also think of red-black-white, brown uniforms, and this gothic-looking Germanic typography.


These visual associations are not accidental:

propaganda depends on strict artistic direction, and this is something the Nazis mastered very effectively.

I’m telling you this because today, this subject suddenly stopped being abstract or historical to me and became directly connected to my own work.
How ? Well I made a shocking discovery through a French radio station : Unknowingly, I personally made the same artistic choice as the Nazis - and on top of it, I am not the first one: IKEA did it too.

It so happens that the Nazis originally used a gothic font called Antiqua Fraktur.
After some time, however, it became clear that many people, particularly in occupied countries, struggled to read its complex, ornamented design.

In practical terms, this created a concrete problem.
To make propaganda efficient meant ensuring that pamphlets and posters were accessible to everybody. This constraint eventually led to a major decision in the design department:
They switched to a different typography, and as always, they wouldn’t go just halfway!

They ultimately chose Futura, a typeface created in 1927 for a German foundry. It officially became the font style of the regime in 1941.
From that moment on, absolutely everything had to be produced exclusively in this typeface, including all copies of Mein Kampf printed afterward.

And if you are asking yourself whether you know what Futura looks like, the answer is YES. You’ve already encountered it many times before:

One of the most obvious examples is hard to miss. The gigantic Swedish furniture monopoly IKEA chose Futura for their logo. An interesting link, isn’t it? As it was revealed by author Elisabeth Åsbrink in her book "And in Wienerwald the Trees Remain," that its founder, Ingvar Kamprad, actively recruited members for the Swedish Nazi group SSS during his youth.

So, learning about this, I have to say, I was first shocked as I realized that I myself had chosen this very same typography for numerous of my creations.

At that point, I started wondering whether I should abandon the use of this font definitively. But then instead I made a little researche and learned more:

What I found during significantly changed my perspective.
This typeface was not actually created by the Nazis. It was created by a wellknowen designer and artist, later part of the Bauhaus movement, Paul Renner, who was not only a free spirit but also actively opposed to the Nazi regime.

This is not just a historical detail.
Listening to the rest of the radio show I found online, I began to understand the context in which this font history was mentioned.
In today’s political climate, one of Donald Trump’s latest decisions was to change the typography of all official documents from Calibri, which he judged as «too woke», to what he calls the more «classic» Times New Roman.

This decision feels like the logical next step in a broader effort to stop any diversity in cultural and artistic expressions in the USA. Previous measures had already set the direction, such as the recently signed executive order that mandates all federal buildings to “embrace classical architecture”.

To close the circle here, I can’t help but think of another regime that claimed to “embrace classical architecture” while destroying free artistic expression alongside random violence and the precise targeting of minorities…

In the end, I think it is time to give a new chance to the smooth and comforting style of Futura, keeping in mind that dictatorships are destructive, not creative. This also applies to those who claim to be democratic. They mostly appropriate already existing styles and ideas, deforming them in whatever way best suits their own ideology.
Ultimately, the best way of resisting them is to understand how propaganda works, while remaining as colorful, artsy, and diverse as we can be, in order not to let them steal our Future(a)!

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