Ooh this just popped into my head and thought it might be a fun ask if you have a random moment to kill! What's a font/typography fact that you found recently that made you go "oh that's dope/cool how they did that/super pretty/wild history"? Just one of those little things you weren't aware of before but made you happy to learn, as general or esoterically niche as you want. I figure you've probably stumbled across some interesting things in your studies and my dragon hoard is collecting people's fun little tidbits from the things they study for fun!
Futura (1927) [Daylight Fonts Β· Fonts In Use Β· Identifont] is one of my favorites out of the well-established sans serifs, but one thing that annoys me about it is how C and c have vertical terminals, while G and e have angled terminals.
Besides being internally inconsistent, I find the vertical terminals ugly. (I dislike Antique Olive (1962) [Daylight Fonts Β· Fonts In Use Β· Identifont] for the same reason, but at least it uses its vertical terminals consistently.)
I recently learned the reason for this (from the book Paul Renner: The Art of Typography): Futura was designed first and foremost for writing German. In German the letter c only occurs before h and k, and in traditional German blackletter typography, ch and ck are obligatory, inseparable ligatures.
Futura doesn't have joined ch/ck ligatures, but ch and ck were still cast on a single piece of metal, with a smaller gap between the c and h/k than between other letters. The vertical terminal on the c was necessary to allow these letters to be placed so close together.
If Futura had been designed in a non-German-speaking country, the C would probably look different. Yet the German design was used and continues to be used all over the world (though usually with a normal-sized gap between the c and the h/k).
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