Akzidenz-Grotesk is a sans-serif typeface family originally released by the Berthold Type Foundry of Berlin in 1898. The German (literally 'jobbing' or 'used for jobs') indicates its intended use as a typeface for commercial print runs such as publicity, tickets, and forms—as opposed to fine printing—and , akin to grotesque, was a standard name for sans-serif typefaces at the time (grotesque in its original sense; bizarre, odd, or outlandish, not necessarily ugly, but visually jarring and outside the norm at the time).
Originating during the late nineteenth century, Akzidenz-Grotesk belongs to a tradition of general-purpose, unadorned sans-serif types that had become dominant in German printing during the nineteenth century. Relatively little-known for a half-century after its introduction, it achieved iconic status in the post-war period as the preferred typeface of many Swiss graphic designers in what became called the "International" or "Swiss" design style which became popular across the Western world in the 1950s and 1960s. Its simple, neutral design has also influenced many later typefaces. It has sometimes been sold as Standard in English-speaking countries, and a variety of digital versions have been released by Berthold and other companies.
Etymology Akzidenz-Grotesk is often translated into English as 'jobbing sans-serif', jobbing in the sense of 'used for jobs'. Both words were everyday, descriptive terms for typefaces of the time in the German language.
means some occasion or event (in the sense of 'something that happens', not in the sense of a high-class social event or occasion) and was therefore used as a term for trade printing; Akzidenzschrift was by the 1870s a generic term meaning typefaces intended for these uses. A modern German-language dictionary describes it as work such as advertisements and forms. The origin of the word is Latin accidentia, defined by Lewis and Short as 'that which happens, a casual event, a chance'.
Grotesque () was a standard term that had become popular in the first half of the nineteenth century for sans-serifs. It was introduced by the London type-founder William Thorowgood as the name for sans-serifs in the specimen books of his Fann Street Foundry around 1830. The name may have reflected the "primitive" feel of sans-serifs, or their roots in archaic Greek and Roman inscriptions, and by the late nineteenth century was commonly used to mean sans-serif, without negative implication.
Design characteristics
Like most sans-serifs, Akzidenz-Grotesk is "monoline" in structure, with all strokes of the letter of similar width. This gives a sense of simplicity and an absence of the adornment and flourishes seen in the more decorative sans-serifs of the late nineteenth century influenced by the Art Nouveau style. Modern type designer Martin Majoor has described the general design of Akzidenz-Grotesk and its ancestors as similar in letterforms to the Didone serif fonts that were standard printing types in the nineteenth century, such as Didot, Walbaum and their followers. This is most visible in the quite folded-up apertures of letters such as "a" and "c". The capitals of Akzidenz-Grotesk are wide and relatively uniform in width.
The "g" of Akzidenz-Grotesk is a "single-storey" design, like in many other German sans-serifs, but unlike the double-storey "g" found in most serif faces and in many of the earliest sans-serifs that had a lower-case; sans-serif types first appeared in London, but became popular in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Walter Tracy describes this style of "g" as a common feature in German sans-serifs of the period and apparently influenced by the tradition of blackletter, still very popular for printing extended texts in Germany in the late nineteenth century, which uses a single-storey "g" in upright composition.
The metal type of Akzidenz-Grotesk shows variation between sizes, with adaptation of letter-spacing and proportions such as looser spacing at smaller text sizes, something that was normal practice in the design and engraving of metal type. In addition, there is variation between weights: Karl Gerstner notes that even comparing one size (20pt), the medium and bold weights have different x-height, cap height and descender length to the light and regular weights. This is common with nineteenth-century sans-serifs, which were not designed with the intention of forming an extended family that would match together. (Berthold literature from the 1900s marketed the light and regular weights as being compatible, light at the time called "Royal-Grotesk".) The differences in proportions between different sizes and weights of Akzidenz-Grotesk has led to a range of contemporary adaptations, reviving or modifying different aspects of the original design, discussed below.
Early history
Akzidenz-Grotesk's design descends from a school of general-purpose sans-serifs cut in the nineteenth century. Sans-serifs had become very popular in Germany by the late nineteenth century, which had a large number of small local type foundries offering different versions.
H. Berthold was founded in Berlin in 1858 initially to make machined brass printer's rule, moving into casting metal type particularly after 1893. Berthold publications from the 1920s onwards dated the design to 1898, when the firm registered two design patents on the family.
Recent research by Eckehart Schumacher-Gebler, Indra Kupferschmid, Dan Reynolds and John A. Lane has clarified many aspects of Akzidenz-Grotesk's history. The source of Akzidenz-Grotesk appears to be Berthold's 1897 purchase of the Bauer u. Cie Type Foundry of Stuttgart (not to be confused with the much better-known Bauer Type Foundry of Frankfurt). The Bauer foundry had recently released a sans-serif with a drop shadow effect (). Akzidenz-Grotesk was based on this design, but with the drop shadow removed. Two design patents on Akzidenz-Grotesk were filed in April 1898, first on the 14th in Stuttgart by Bauer and then on the 28th in Berlin by Berthold, and Reynolds found that Berthold's records indicate that the design originated in Stuttgart. Some early adverts that present Akzidenz-Grotesk are co-signed by both brands. Early references to Akzidenz-Grotesk at Berthold often use the alternative spelling "Accidenz-Grotesk"; Reynolds has suggested that the name may have been intended as a brand extension following on from an "Accidenz-Gothisch" blackletter face sold by the Bauer & Co. foundry. In general, Reynolds comments that the style of Schattierte Grotesk and Akzidenz-Grotesk "seem to me to be more of a synthesis of then-current ideas of sans serif letterform design, rather than copies of any specific products from other firms."
The light weight of Akzidenz-Grotesk was for many years branded separately as "Royal-Grotesk". It apparently was cut by Berthold around 1902–3, when it was announced in a trade periodical as "a new, quite usable typeface" and advertised as having matching dimensions allowing it to be combined with the regular weight of Akzidenz-Grotesk. Reynolds and Florian Hardwig have documented the weight (semi-bold, or medium, condensed) to be a family sold by many German type-foundries, which probably originated from a New York type foundry.
Günter Gerhard Lange, Berthold's post-war artistic director, who was considered effectively the curator of the Akzidenz-Grotesk design, said in a 2003 interview Akzidenz-Grotesk came from the Ferdinand Theinhardt type foundry, and this claim has been widely copied elsewhere. This had been established by businessman and punchcutter Ferdinand Theinhardt, who was otherwise particularly famous for his scholarly endeavours in the field of hieroglyph and Syriac typefaces; he had sold the business in 1885. Kupferschmid and Reynolds speculate that he was misled by Akzidenz-Grotesk appearing in a Theinhardt foundry specimen after Berthold had taken the company over. Reynolds additionally points out that Theinhardt sold his foundry to Oskar Mammen and Robert and Emil Mosig in 1885, a decade before Akzidenz-Grotesk was released, and there is no evidence that he cut any further fonts for them after this year. As Lange commented, it was claimed in the post-war period that Royal-Grotesk's name referred to it being commissioned by the Prussian Academy of Sciences, but Kupferschmid was not able to find it used in its publications.
Many other grotesques in a similar style to Akzidenz-Grotesk were sold in Germany during this period. Around the beginning of the twentieth century, these increasingly began to be branded as larger families of multiple matched styles. Its competitors included the very popular Venus-Grotesk of the Bauer foundry of Frankfurt, very similar to Akzidenz-Grotesk but with high-waisted capitals, and Koralle by Schelter & Giesecke, which has a single-storey 'a'. (Monotype Grotesque 215 also is based on German typefaces of this period.) Seeman's 1926 Handbook of Typefaces (), a handbook of all the metal typefaces available in Germany, illustrates the wide range of sans-serif typefaces on sale in Germany by the time of its publication. By around 1911, Berthold had begun to market Akzidenz-Grotesk as a complete family.
While apparently not unpopular, Akzidenz-Grotesk was not among the most intensively-marketed typefaces of the period, and was not even particularly aggressively marketed by Berthold. A 1921 Berthold specimen and company history described it almost apologetically: "In 1898 Accidenz-Grotesk was created, which has earned a laurel wreath of fame for itself. This old typeface, which these days one would perhaps make in a more modern style, has a peculiar life in its own way which would probably be lost if it were to be altered. All the many imitations of Accidenz-Grotesk have not matched its character." An unusual user of Berthold's Akzidenz-Grotesk in the period soon after its release, however, was the poet Stefan George. He commissioned some custom uncial-style alternate characters to print his poetry.
Mid-twentieth-century use
The use of Akzidenz-Grotesk and similar "grotesque" typefaces dipped from the late 1920s due to the arrival of fashionable new "geometric" sans-serifs such as Erbar, Futura and Kabel, based on the proportions of the circle and square. Berthold released its own family in this style, Berthold-Grotesk.
However, during this period there was increasing interest in using sans-serifs as capturing the spirit of the time, most famously captured in the writings of German typographer Jan Tschichold. In 1923 Tschichold converted to Modernist design principles after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition at the Haus am Horn, where he was introduced to important artists such as László Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters and others carrying out radical experiments to break the rigid schemes of conventional typography. He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement; then a 1927 personal exhibition; then with his most noted work Die neue Typographie in 1927.Tschichold J. Die neue Typographie. Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäß Schaffende, Verlag des Bildungsverbandes der Deutschen Buchdrucker, Berlin 1928. This book was a manifesto of modern design, in which he condemned all typefaces but Grotesk and praised the aesthetic qualities of the "anonymous" sans-serifs of the nineteenth century. Its comments would prove influential in later graphic design: