Kabel
Kabel
Year: 1927
Designer: Rudolf Koch
Foundry: Klingspor
There is a rich typographic tradition in Germany that dates from the days of Gutenberg and travels right up to modern masters of the craft like Erik Spiekermann. Among the many luminous names along that line is Rudolf Koch, a master calligrapher, illustrator and type designer. Koch created many typefaces, but Kabel may well be his most popular and enduring design. It has been used extensively in multiple media, but my earliest memory of Kabel is from a popular board game that I wiled away many an hour in my youth. My illustration is an homage to both that game as well as to the pantheon of German type designers and foundries.
Kabel has had many revivals since Herr Koch gave us this design nearly a century ago. Victor Caruso redrew the typeface for phototypsetting applications for ITC in the 1970s. An updated digital release called Neue Kabel was drawn by Mark Schütz in 2016, and is the version that appears here.