Although sharing a part of its name (and the same author) with Futura, Steile Futura when released in 1952/53 didn’t appear to have much in common with its more famous relative. It was Renner’s attempt to create a typeface that would be closer to the nineteenth century sans serifs than to the geometric model. However, during the development of the final design some interesting intermediate versions were created. The typeface was evolving for almost twenty years.

Futura Schlagzeile shown in Bauer’s type specimen from 1964; the typeface appears in one version only.

Already in 1932 the typeface under the name of Futura Schlagzeile was issued by the Bauer type foundry (in some English type specimens it is also labelled as Futura Display). Although a modular appearance and a relatively low stroke contrast were perhaps the only features that Futura Schlagzeile shared with Futura, they were often shown (and probably sold) together in type specimens.

An interesting design, which was actually called “Renner-Grotesk”, appeared as a trial type casting from the Stempel type foundry in 1936. The typeface was rather condensed and still fairly modular (the design had some remarkable similarities to the condensed version of Eurostile, created only in 1962).

Renner-Grotesk - a proof made by the Stempel foundry; the typeface had two different forms of the lowercase “g”. [1]

Christopher Burke suspects that Renner-Grotesk could be “ ... taken over by the Bauer typefoundry in 1938 ...” , and mentions that “... in 1939 the grotesk changed shape to some extent, becoming less modular and incorporating references to the pen-made forms.” [2] Soon after, Renner Kurziv, a true italic companion to the regular version, was made. The work on the type family continued in the 1940s, but because of Renner’s weak health the progress was rather slow.

A showing of different versions of Steile Futura from the Bauer’s specimen made in 1964.

Nevertheless, Renner started to work again on this project in 1951 (he was 73 years old!) and the final version appeared the following year under the name of Steile Futura ("Steile" in German means "upright" or "steep"). In the Bauer’s type specimen from 1964 (figure above) the typeface is shown in 5 versions: mager (light), halbfett (medium), fett (bold), Kurziv halbfett (medium italic) and Kurziv fett (bold italic). The same specimen, which was produced for German, English, Spanish and French markets, shows that Bauer foudry used four different names for their products: Steile Futura (Ger.), Bauer Topic (Eng.), Vox (Spa.) and Zénith (Fr.).

Steile Futura in use; shown from the promotional material from the Bauer type foundry.

The final design had a rather condensed appearance and a strong vertical stress. Besides being a hybrid of the geometric and nineteenth century grotesque approach, the typeface possessed some handwriting features, which are especially obvious in the italic version (see lowercase “e” and “g”). Because of its unique character it is rather hard to put this design into a specific group of sans serif typefaces.

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[1], [2] Burke, Christopher. Paul Renner, the art of typography, London: Hyphen Press, 1998 (p. 194).
Other pictures taken from a not-dated specimen: Bauersche Gießerei. Steile Futura, Frankfurt am Main.