The Akzidenz-Grotesk You’ve Never Seen

Akzidenz-Grotesk is one of the most popular typefaces of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.¹ In German, its name is descriptive, informing customers of its intended use: a sans-serif designed for job printing. In English, its name sounds like a tongue twister. By the early 1950s, someone had the brilliant idea to rename Akzidenz-Grotesk for the American market. I suspect this was the work of Amsterdam Continental, which sold the fonts in the United States. The typeface’s anglicized name, Standard, seemed to make its future pre-determined.

Standard’s most prominent use was for signage in the New York City Subway System. Massimo Vignelli and Bob Noorda presented that system in the now-iconic Graphics Standards Manual, designed for the New York City Transit Authority between 1966 and 1970. The family’s bold weight — called Medium in those days — was used throughout. Standard Medium was the heart of the New York City subway’s visual identity until Helvetica replaced it. Helvetica, which is loved and hated the world over, was primarily created to compete with Akzidenz-Grotesk. It never entirely displaced Akzidenz-Grotesk from the market, however, or from New York subway signage.

This article introduces one custom style of Akzidenz-Grotesk from 1925. Its specific design has so far not seen any attention, either from the printing trades or from graphic designers and typographers. Very likely, it never appeared in the type specimen catalogs of its producing foundry. If the organization that commissioned it had followed through with its plans to use it, this version of Akzidenz-Grotesk might be more well-known today than Standard Medium became in New York.

Understanding Akzidenz-Grotesk

The Akzidenz-Grotesk family, begun at the close of the nineteenth century, slowly made its way from Germany to the rest of Europe, the Americas, and in particular, the United States. After the Second World War, Amsterdam Continental in New York began to distribute it, as fonts of metal type, and probably as fonts of wood and resin type, too. Typeface histories often provide specific release years. But when fonts were still movable pieces of metal type, expansion took time. New sizes might appear years later, while additional weights and styles could take even longer to make. For instance, more than sixty years separate the first and last weights of Akzidenz-Grotesk cast in metal.²

Some designers can close their eyes and call Akzidenz-Grotesk’s letterforms into their minds. These have played a significant role in graphic design for generations. Those shapes in your mind’s eye aren’t, however, the letters from the early twentieth century; they are from the 1960s. Günter Gerhard Lange made them while redesigning the family for photo-typesetting in the 1960s.³

Photo-setting, an almost forgotten era of typography, freed print from physical bits of wood and metal. With photographic negatives and machinery built along a dizzying spectrum of complexity, beams of light exposed letterforms onto photo-sensitive material. Camera lenses allowed fonts to be scaled up or down for the first time. While the best-quality phototype font makers offered size-specific products, users would often scale fonts to any desired size. If this sounds familiar, it is because digital fonts operate more or less under the same paradigm.

Even before Lange redesigned Berthold’s typefaces for that new medium, the company’s type-cutting department had been tinkering with the exact shapes of Akzidenz-Grotesk’s letterforms. That tinkering began only a decade after the first font’s release. A few years ago, archivists at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin uncovered surviving records from Berthold’s type-cutting department. They secured funding to digitize a cache of these in 2024.⁴ The uncovered records provide some unexpected backstory for typefaces Berthold published decades ago and, in Akzidenz-Grotesk’s case, more than a century.

I’ve mentioned Berthold several times now, and should explain why this Berlin-based business was so influential. Established by Hermann Berthold in 1858 as an electrotyping provider, it quickly transitioned to making brass rules for printers. These allowed documents to have printed lines and borders that were either perfectly straight or exquisitely ornamented.⁵ After its founder retired in 1888, the company merged with Gustav Reinhold’s typefoundry and quickly transformed into an industrial powerhouse — opening factories in Russia, and buying up competitors in Stuttgart, Vienna, Berlin, and eventually Leipzig.

Throughout the twentieth century, Berthold was at the forefront of type design, with many of its products being developed primarily for sale abroad. It published typefaces from well-known commercial artists, and by the 1930s, it collaborated with several avant-garde graphic designers including Herbert Bayer, who had studied and then taught at the Bauhaus. In the 1960s, it was one of few West-German foundries to successfully transition from metal type to photo-typesetting. Just as Berthold’s brass rules had developed a reputation of precision and quality, its photo-typesetting devices provided the sharpest quality on the market.

Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN)

Since 1917, the German Standards Organization (DIN) has defined norms for the country’s industries. These helped facilitate relationships between different companies and various branches of manufacturing by providing a common basis that could be relied on by multiple parties. Outside of Germany, the most prominent DIN norm is certainly its paper format standards, published in 1923. Although never adopted in the United States, the A and B series of paper sizes and the C series of envelope sizes have broad international use. The A4 paper size is slightly narrower and longer than an 8.5 × 11-inch sheet, and its dimensions are the same as those in the golden ratio. It doesn’t end with paper, though. There are DIN norms for screws, drill bits, guard rails, older letterpress technology, and even for typeface classification and legibility.

Beginning in the 1920s, Ludwig Goller, who had helped establish the DIN organization, directed his attention to lettering. The standard would become known as DIN 1451.⁶ In its earliest stages, DIN 1451 wasn’t just a series of templates for sign makers. It was also a family of typefaces with three widths. Specifically, it was three widths of Akzidenz-Grotesk cast as fonts of moveable metal type. The narrowest version is based on Akzidenz-Grotesk’s condensed style. The same was true for its widest version, which is based on Akzidenz-Grotesk’s extended style. In all three styles, changes have been made to some letters. The G’s are rounder, having lost their spurs, or beards, on the bottom right; the diagonals of the M’s do not come all the way to the baseline; and lowercase l has been replaced with a hockey-stick form.⁷ The regular width, however, exhibits the most significant revisions. This “Norm-Akzidenz-Grotesk” was based on Akzidenz-Grotesk’s first regular style. Of the several unique letterforms substituted into the design, the most notable are the S and s, which are considerably wider and more open than the originals.

If you’ve ever been to Germany, you may have seen its Autobahn signs, all made with DIN 1451. But that isn’t the DIN 1451 we’ve been looking at. So what happened? From surviving correspondence in the DIN archive, it is clear that Berthold’s collaboration with Goller received scorn and derision from printers and competing typefoundries. Both the printers’ union and the typefoundry owners’ association denounced the very concept of official or standardized letterforms. In part, this was driven by aesthetic considerations. Why standardize something that had been open to interpretation for centuries?⁸ Few in the mid-1920s would have had problems reading any sign painter’s work or the many mechanically engraved signs in city landscapes. Nevertheless, the biggest concerns revolved around fears of market displacement.

Let’s start with other typefoundry owners: There were more than a dozen of those, and they feared that Berthold would get a leg up on them if it had the new standardized typeface in its portfolio.⁹ What if the government decided printers could only print official documents with that typeface? It could turn into a financial catastrophe for their businesses.

The printers’ union’s fears were quite similar. Many designers today think fonts are too expensive, but digital font prices are nothing compared to metal type. Small printing businesses had just enough type to fulfill their day-to-day orders. If an official typeface was introduced, only larger printers could afford it in all available sizes and styles. Many printers would lose this kind of lucrative work altogether.

At first, Berthold and DIN doubled down. Even in 1932, their correspondence shows they were still collaborating on fonts for DIN 1451. Between 1932 and 1936, however, they must have given in. New DIN 1451 templates were published in 1936, no longer based on Akzidenz-Grotesk. Those templates don't perfectly match the DIN 1451 letterforms that are common today.¹⁰ Like Akzidenz-Grotesk, DIN 1451 went through a long, incremental evolution. But the stylistic break was in place.¹¹

The Legacy of DIN 1451 and Akzidenz-Grotesk

In recent decades, DIN 1451 or letters like it have been used in other countries as well, and its forms have crept into graphic design. In 1981, Berthold published two phototype fonts based on the DIN 1451 we came to know and love. By this time, there were no more concerns about market displacement; printing and type design had both changed significantly.¹² Fourteen years later, Albert-Jan Pool published the first styles of FF DIN through FontFont, FontShop’s digital foundry. They quickly became some of the most popular sans serifs in the world. It is quite possible that, in the last thirty years, graphic designers have used FF DIN even more often than Akzidenz-Grotesk.

After creating FF DIN, Pool spent decades researching the development of DIN 1451 and finding its stylistic predecessors in lettering systems developed by the Prussian and German railways.¹³ Instead of Akzidenz-Grotesk, these are the current DIN 1451’s true source of inspiration. As a result of FF DIN’s success, other foundries introduced their own takes, including Parachute, Monotype, Fontwerk, and even Microsoft — its version is called Bahnschrift (‘train type’), a fitting name.

Akzidenz-Grotesk has also had a digital renaissance. In addition to Berthold’s own digital versions, made available as PostScript fonts in 1991, a Chicago-based foundry successfully made various OpenType versions available this century. Better quality digitizations were introduced in François-Rappo’s Theinhardt in 2009, Kris Sowersby’s Söhne in 2019, and Erik Spiekermann and Alexander Roth’s Neue Serie 57 in 2022.¹⁴

One of the most striking aspects of the Akzidenz-Grotesk version of DIN 1451 is that it marked a brief union between two now ubiquitous and largely anonymous designs. Virtually everyone living in parts of the world that use Latin script interacts with a version of Akzidenz-Grotesk and/or DIN 1451 pretty regularly. Few realize where those letterforms came from or their relationship to each other.

Many of the images in this article come from Berthold’s type-cutting department records. These have already influenced one typeface’s design: 29LT Idris, a multi-script typeface whose Arabic component was designed by 29LT’s principal, Pascal Zoghbi.¹⁵ I hope that they’ll provide fertile ground for more designers in the future. Whether a digital Norm-Akzidenz-Grotesk is on the horizon, however, is anybody’s guess.