Typeface Design for Emil Ruder’s Poster Font
A Basel wood-type revived from a retired teacher's personal archive
Ruder Plakat digitizes a wood-type poster font developed by Emil Ruder with students at Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel in the early 1950s, with wooden letters not press-ready until the late 1950s and widely used from 1961–62 onward. Designed by Hans-Christian Pulver, Arve Båtevik, and Anatole Couteau between 2018 and 2022, the project began when Pulver—at age 77—reworked proofs he had archived before the school printshop closed in 2001. Released by Lineto in 2022, with font engineering by Alphabet, Berlin, and digital-to-analogue restoration by Dafi Kühne of Babyinktwice, Näfels.
Set in Ruder Plakat
Insights
- The original wood type spanned 6 to 48 Cicero (up to ~22 cm), a broader size range than the condensed poster font previously available at the school.
- Pulver made the letterforms more internally consistent during digitization—extending the strong diagonal of 'S', 's', and '2' to the 'a', and carrying the wide black diagonal-stem junction from 'K'/'k' to 'X'/'x'.
- Båtevik expanded and refined Pulver's drawings at Lineto according to contemporary type-design principles, which aligned naturally with Ruder's early modular, grid-oriented approach.
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