René Bieder’s Neurath X is a geometric typeface made for the age of AI — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

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.

Futura set out a radically geometric vision of the alphabet, but Bieder was particularly fascinated by Renner’s lesser-known alternate characters. “They reveal an even more experimental direction – one that was ultimately rejected in favour of broader acceptance,” he details. “I wanted to revisit that road not taken and explore how those ideas might work today.” Herbert Bayer’s Universal alphabet went further, doing away with uppercase and cutting letterforms back to their essential components. From it, Bieder took a willingness to rethink the alphabet from first principles. Four decades on from those early-twentieth-century experiments, Herb Lubalin’s ITC Ronda treated geometric construction as a playful, expressive language rather than a modernist ideal, and that gave Bieder the confidence to make Neurath X more adventurous and usable at the same time. In each case, it was the question the typeface asked that interested him more than the way it looked, each prioritising an idea over practical use to some extent. “Where I deliberately broke from all three was in readability,” he adds.

For Neurath X Mono, Bieder raised the x-height sharply, which keeps the simplified forms clear and expressive at a fixed width, and he deliberately chose the set width, the horizontal space each character occupies. “The unusually generous set width isn’t a compromise – it’s what allowed the geometry to survive,” Bieder notes. Throughout, finding the balance between mathematical consistency and what actually looks consistent became the defining challenge of the project. Under a fixed width, the geometric character becomes more pronounced, and the mono takes on an almost futuristic appearance.

Its OpenType features cover ligatures, fractions, tabular figures that line up in columns and case-sensitive punctuation for uppercase settings, and it supports more than 200 Latin-based languages. Beyond those, it has a wide selection of stylistic sets and alternate characters. Some revisit the radical reduction of early geometric typography; others go further still. “I’ve never been interested in adding alternates simply for the sake of offering more choice,” Bieder explains. “Instead, each one represents a deliberate extension of the typeface’s underlying design philosophy.”

Conceived as part of the project from the start, the campaign around the release features 3D animations, editorial imagery and motion design. Bieder worked closely with 3D artist Julian Braun on a visual language that complements the typography, and Laura Bergander wrote an original score. Braun’s animations were built from the same geometric vocabulary as the typeface, with simple forms assembling, transforming and reorganising into increasingly complex structures. “Reflective chrome surfaces appear alongside raw stone textures, creating a deliberate contrast between the synthetic and the primordial,” Bieder details. The animations communicate a quieter vision of the future through precision, rhythm and controlled movement. “The typography, motion design and visual identity were conceived together as different expressions of the same design philosophy,” he concludes.