Underskog

ultima 1927: Our signature font

When Ultima asked us to create a new identity for the festival back in 2012, we chose to focus on contemporary music’s modernist roots. More specifically, we focused on the earlier – and perhaps more experimental – phase of modernity. We were fascinated by the early incarnations of Paul Renner’s Futura font – one of the most successful typefaces connected to the ‘New Typography’ movement.
The earliest version of Futura, released in 1927, featured alternate glyphs with radically new designs of letters such as ‘a’, ‘m’ and ‘r’ – based on geometrical design principles rather than the traditional shapes derived from handwriting and calligraphy.
The first such digitized font that we tried for the Ultima identity was called ‘Futura Classic’ – a name that we found rather appropriate for a contemporary music festival. It was, however, not a very well made font, so we ended up using The Foundry’s Archetype Renner.
We were recently approached by Austrian type-designer Stefan Ellmer, who had been working on a version based on some of Renner’s earliest drawings of Futura. The experimentalism, innovations and ‘unpolished’ feel were even more present in these first attempts by Renner, and we seized the opportunity to develop a custom-made font – ‘ultima 1927’ – that will be one of the cornerstones of the visual identity of Ultima and Nordic Music Days 2014.