Manoli Limit
Artist
Hans Rudi Erdt
1883–1918. Plakatstil designer. Born in Benediktbeuern, Bavaria.
Erdt trained in Munich and moved to Berlin around 1908, where he worked closely with the printer Hollerbaum & Schmidt. With Lucian Bernhard, Julius Klinger and Julius Gipkens he shaped the Plakatstil, or object poster.
His posters for Opel, Manoli and Problem cigarettes reduced the message to a product and a word. He drew his letters himself, from geometric capitals to soft, bouncy serifs.
- Hans Rudi Erdt
- c. 1910
- Plakatstil
- Germany
- Geometric sans
- Hollerbaum & Schmidt, Berlin
- 96.5 × 70 cm
- Collection Marc Wegner, Berlin
- Wikimedia Commons
- Public domain
Fonts
Berlin Geometric
Letters from the poster
Full typeface
Lettering style
Download
History
Manoli was a Berlin cigarette maker and one of the great early clients of German poster design. Its posters by Lucian Bernhard and Hans Rudi Erdt helped define the Plakatstil: show the product, name the brand, stop.
This one, for the Limit brand, is by Erdt and dates from around 1910. The letters are built from circles and straight strokes, closer to a drafting set than a brush. They come more than a decade before the geometric typefaces of the 1920s.
It was printed by Hollerbaum & Schmidt, the Berlin firm behind much of the Plakatstil. The scan on Wikimedia Commons comes from the collection of Marc Wegner in Berlin.
Source and rights
Hans Rudi Erdt died in 1918. His work entered the public domain on 1 January 1989.
Scan from Wikimedia Commons. Brand names on the poster belong to their owners and are never used as font names.
Related posters
Same era, lettering or artist.
