Paul Friedrich August Renner (9 August 1878 - 25 April 1956) was a german graphic artist, painter, author, teacher and typeface designer and one of the pioneers of modern typography.
He was born in Wernigerode, and died in Hödingen.He is best known for his design of the Futura typeface (1927),which became one of the most successful and most-used types of the 20th century and still highly popular today. He had a strict Protestant upbringing, being educated in a 19th-century Gymnasium. He wasbrought up to have a very German sense of leadership, of duty and responsibility. He disliked abstract art and many forms of modern culture, such as jazz,
cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism.
Renner was a prominent member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation). Two of his major texts are Typografie als Kunst (Typography as Art) and Die Kunst der Typographie (The Art of Typography). He created a new set of guidelines for good book design and invented the popular Futura, a geometric sans-serif font used by many typographers throughout the 20th century and today. The typeface Architype Renner is based upon Renner's early experimental exploration of geometric letterforms for the Futura typeface, most of which were deleted from the face's character set before it was issued. Tasse, a 1994 typeface is a revival of Renner's 1953 typeface Steile Futura.