LL Ruder Plakat

According to several sources, Emil Ruder’s poster font was developed with students at Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel (AGS) in the early 1950s. Only towards the end of the decade, however, the new wood letters were ready for use on the school press. They were widely employed in a class Ruder taught in 1961/62, and started to appear on posters designed by Ruder as well as by Armin Hofmann following 1962. Until the closing of the school’s printshop in 2001, the wooden Ruder-Schrift was primarily available to students.

Compared to an earlier condensed poster font which was at hand at the school’s printshop in the 1950’s (and which was in wide use by students), the new design offered a broader range of sizes, from 6 to 48 Cicero (ca. 22 cm). It also came with a number of subtle formal changes to letterforms, most notably on ‘a’, ‘c’, ‘s’, ‘R’ and others, which made the overall appearance of the typeface more straight and more graphic. Compared to all similar shapes which were in frequent use on posters at the time, the formal rigour of Ruder’s letters is outstanding. Avoiding the slightest hint of any calligraphic strokes, Ruder’s letters are particularly clear and severe, and they are strictly aligned in almost every regard. Looking at them from today, they appear as if they were constructed in a grid using modular elements.

Knowing of the print shop’s impending closure, long-time typography teacher Hans-Christian Pulver proofed the full set of the 20 Cicero size (around 9 cm) for his personal archive. Almost fifteen years after retirement, with 77 years of age, he started to rework the typeface digitally. He made the shapes slightly more uniform and expanded the glyph set, and he transferred some outstanding features of individual letters to others: The strong diagonal to be found in ‘S’, ‘s’ and ‘2’ was adapted to the ‘a’, and the wide black junction of diagonal and stem in ‘K’ and ‘k’ was taken over for ‘X’ and ‘x’.

At Lineto, Pulver’s drawings were re-worked and the character set was expanded by Arve Båtevik, adhering to contemporary principles of type design which turned out to perfectly suit Ruder’s early attempts at grid-based design and modular letter-shapes. It is no coincidence that the technologies of digital type allowed to infuse Ruder’s shapes with new life.