Youth might have skipped class once or twice – but it has learned a lot from the ‘Bauhaus’ genre of the phototypesetting era. The style has been reimagined with dynamic rounded corners and lively proportions, creating an unprecedented energy in bold cuts. Youth is systematic in appearance but not modular in construction. Instead, optically corrected curves create a contemporary balance that improves upon the style of its film-based ancestors. A distinctively high x-height facilitates use in headlines and lead paragraphs, while unexpected turns in drawing give the font a distinct character. As a shout out to Herb Lubalin,¹ David L Burke² and other designers from the phototypesetting/Letraset years of the late 60s and 70s, Youth has multiple stylistic sets, including one featuring lightweight, contrasting diacritics, as well as a wide range of alternative characters (both kinetic and geometric) that give the typeface extra universality for branding and identity projects.

Youth might have been the cool kid in the playground, but was still studious enough to check the bibliotheca in order to mention the name of the ‘haus within its proper context. This genre of typography was inspired by the forms in Herbert Bayer’s Universalschrift (1925). These later interpretations are often associated with the Bauhaus by name, but are in many ways in opposition to Bayer’s radical concept, which was created with only lowercase letters in the name of consistency and efficiency.³

1     ITC Avant Garde Gothic was released in 1970, while the first issue of Avant Garde magazine (1968) featured Herb Lubalin’s famous masthead.
2    Burko Bold was designed by David L Burke in 1967 and released in 1969 by Headliners Phototype in New York. The identity of the designer to first revive this style is contested, with many similar fonts released during the same time period.
3    ‘warum wir alles klein schreiben?’ in bauhaus journal 1, bauhaus dessau, 1926, p 6.