René Bieder’s Neurath X is a geometric typeface made for the age of AI

The Neurath X Collection began with a question: what might geometric typography look like in the age of AI? “I’m not referring to the way it was made, but to the world it was designed for,” type designer René Bieder tells us. “I wanted to create letterforms that feel unmistakably contemporary, with a subtle sense of futurism.” From there, the work came down to reducing geometric forms as far as they would go and keeping the clarity and readability expected of a contemporary typeface. Berlin-based independent type foundry Studio René Bieder has worked across custom and retail type since Bieder founded it in 2012, after several years as an art director and graphic designer. He has collaborated with clients including Volkswagen, Disney and Google. Much of the studio’s catalogue explores humanist or grotesque traditions, but the Neurath X Collection is a far more radical investigation of geometry and reduction. It comes as two companion families, Neurath X and Neurath X Mono, with nine weights and matching italics in each and 36 styles in all, designed to be used on their own as readily as together. The name comes from Otto Neurath, the Austrian philosopher and social scientist who co-developed ISOTYPE, which demonstrated how complex information could be communicated through simple, highly reduced visual forms. He was a contemporary of Paul Renner, the designer of Futura, and sought clarity through simplification in pictograms, where Renner sought it in typography. “I’ve always felt a strong connection between the philosophy of reduction and the geometric language of the typeface,” Bieder explains. Neurath, the original family, was his attempt to refine Futura’s geometric principles into something clearer, more coherent and better suited to contemporary use. Neurath X instead explores the more radical ideas that surrounded Futura, and Bieder asked how far they could be taken today. Its ‘X’ marks the next generation of the family and stands for ‘extreme,’ and it takes the geometry of the original much further, simplifying letterforms wherever possible. “Neurath X became the Futura that never could have existed,” he notes. Even so, every unconventional decision had to be clear, distinctive and highly readable.