Fonts In Use – Blog Only

Pussy Wagon

Florian Hardwig — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 17:35:11 +0000

The “Pussy Wagon” is a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck that features in Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 film Kill Bill: Volume 1. The pink lettering on its rear – replicated in the keyring pendant – is in a groovy 1960s style that, among other things, was used for cheesy pulp fiction with sexist tropes.

In an act of reframing through affirmation that’s typical of Tarantino, the bright yellow vehicle with the tacky name (and matching license plate) serves Uma Thurman as Beatrix “the Bride” Kiddo to launch her “roaring rampage of revenge” against the men (and women) who did her wrong.

The font in use probably is Action Is, an all-caps freebie from 1998. It was drawn by Jeff Levine based on an application of either Caruso Roxy or its close follower Holiday. The Identifont blog has the font’s origin story:

While working in the recording industry for Steve Alaimo, former singer and co-host of the 1960s TV show Where the Action Is, Jeff noticed an interesting typeface spelling out the show’s title on a photo album Steve kept from those years. Tracing the letters which existed on that page, and creating his own characters for those that were missing, the font was digitized by Brad Nelson of Brain Eaters Fonts and released as freeware under the name Action Is.

The iconic prop was subsequently produced as fan item, in the form of stickers, patches, keyring pendant, model cars, and more.

It has also been quoted more than once: in Tarantino’s Death Proof from 2007, a 1972 Ford Mustang is labeled “Lil’ Pussy Wagon”. The car again serves women to take revenge on a misogynistic murderer. And in 2009, the original Pussy Wagon made a cameo in the music video for Lady Gaga’s 2009 song “Telephone” featuring Beyoncé.

Quentin Tarantino used to drive the Pussy Wagon himself. Via the Quentin Tarantino Fan Club: “The thing about the Pussy Wagon is, whenever I drove it on the freeway, everyone recognized it’s me. Everyone recognized the Pussy Wagon. And then it would be a chain, because people would drive alongside me and try to talk to me.”

Embroidered iron-on/sew-on patch

Box for a Pussy Wagon truck replica in the scale of 1:32

Mary Elizabeth Winstead in her role as Lee Montgomery, sitting on the “Lil’ Pussy Wagon” in the second segment of Death Proof (2007)

Stills from the music video to “Telephone”: Lady Gaga leaves prison …

… and dances with Beyoncé in front of the Pussy Wagon.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Teo Moussev & Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra – Gershwin: Cuban Overture, Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra album art

Florian Hardwig — Thu, 27 Nov 2025 17:06:19 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

Album cover [More info on Discogs]

In 1977, Balkanton, Bulgaria’s state-owned record company, released an album with compositions by George Gershwin, performed by pianist Teodor Moussev and the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra under conductor Alexander Vladigerov.

The composer’s name is shown in inclined caps from an extrabold slab serif. It’s not set in a typeface. Instead, the letterforms were reproduced from an alphabet sample.

In her book Schrift und Schreiben (Leipzig, 1972), Hildegard Korger showed an “alphabet in the style of an italic Egyptienne” and two sets of decorative capitals derived from it – one with highlights and one with open letterforms – credited to Volker Küster, 1966. According to Günther Flake’s short biography of Küster, Black Bull is the title of a design for an Egyptienne typeface in three styles, drawn as part of his diploma project at HGB Leipzig in the mid-1960s. Korger doesn’t mention the name “Black Bull”, but I have to assume that the samples in her book show Küster’s graduation project.

Composite image showing letters from the “alphabet in the style of an italic Egyptienne” (top row) and two sets of decorative capitals derived from it (bottom row) by Volker Küster, 1966, from Hildegard Korger’s Schrift und Schreiben, VEB Fachbuchverlag Leipzig, 1972 (5th edition: 1982)

Details from two Cyrillic adaptations of Küster’s all-caps highlight style, reproduced in Шрифт from 1975 (top) and Декоративные шрифты from 1987 (bottom). The latter is credited to Oleh Snarsky.

Black Bull was not produced as a proper typeface. It still got around, as Korger’s book was distributed abroad, including to “socialist brother countries” of the GDR, like Bulgaria and the USSR, where it inspired local designers. I’m aware of two Cyrillic adaptations of the all-caps highlight style that were reproduced in Soviet books, in Шрифт (Leningrad, 1975) and in Декоративные шрифты (Minsk, 1987). The latter is credited to Oleh Snarsky, a Ukrainian lettering artist who drew numerous alphabets for lettering manuals and alphabet source books, including original designs and Cyrillic adaptations of existing ones. Snarsky had previously shown sample words based on Küster’s alphabet in his book Шрифты/Алфавиты для рекламных и декоративно-оформительских работ (Kyiv, 1979).

“РЕКЛАМА ВЫВЕСКА” – page 31 from Шрифты/Алфавиты для рекламных и декоративно-оформительских работ (“Typefaces/Alphabets for advertising and decorative design works”), Kyiv, second revised edition, 1979. Snarsky shows a Cyrillic version of Black Bull’s highlight style plus an original reversed variant. The lines at the top and bottom are based on Roger Excoffon’s Calypso and Vendôme. The boxed glyphs in the center are either from an unidentified source or represent an original design by Snarsky.

The record cover features both Latin and Cyrillic letters based on Black Bull. Did the uncredited cover designer copy them from Korger’s book and invent matching Cyrillic themselves? Or did they get the inspiration from one of the Soviet books, and reverse-engineer the Latin? Chances are it was the former: the У in “ГЕРШУИН” matches Küster’s original Latin Y, while both Soviet adaptations feature different, asymmetrical glyphs.

Cover detail: the letters were applied individually – at least that’s what the unruly baseline and the disregard for the O’s overshoots suggest. Note that the first G has a thinner bar. Smaller text is set in a Cyrillic version of Futura.

Inevitably, Black Bull was made into a font eventually, at least in parts. Digital interpretations of the all-caps highlight style include Brad O. Nelson’s freebie Thats Super (Brain Eaters Font Co., 2001) and Brocken (RMU, 2011). To my knowledge, neither is authorized by the original designer.

Volker Küster died on 15 November 2025 in Kleve, at the age of 84. Born in 1941 in Wernigerode, Küster trained as typesetter and studied in Berlin-Schöneweide and subsequently at the Leipzig Academy. There he became the assistant of Albert Kapr and started teaching himself. He worked for the Typoart foundry and made himself a name as an award-winning book designer. In 1984, he left the GDR for West Germany. Küster started working for Scangraphic in Hamburg, where he headed the type design studio and served in the role of Type Director from 1985 to 1989. His Today Sans Serif, a groundbreaking humanist sans, was released in 1988. After many years of teaching, initially in Hamburg and then in Essen, he devoted himself to free artistic work including iron casting.

Natascha Dell posted an obituary (in German) on the website of the Folkwang University of Arts in Essen. It includes quotes by former students Stephan Fiedler and Karsten Luecke, praising Küster’s merits as an educator. Albert-Jan Pool – who started his career as Küster’s assistant at Scangraphic – shared memories including images on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

The arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath

Nick Sherman — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 21:05:55 +0000

Contributed by Nick Sherman

Black Sabbath’s first four studio albums – Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master of Reality, and Vol 4, released in rapid succession between 1970 and 1972 – laid much of the groundwork for the heavy metal movement. While there were other bands playing heavy blues-inspired hard rock at the time, the gloomy, doom-laden stylings of Black Sabbath helped fuel their early success as one of the first – and most influential – heavy metal acts ever.

Sabbath’s dark aesthetic was established from the start with help from the visuals on their records. Their first four albums were released through the Vertigo record label in London and, as such, involved Vertigo’s in-house designer at the time, Keith Stuart Macmillan. Macmillan studied photography at Royal College of Art but has worked in various roles related to the visual side of music – from design to directing music videos. Early in his career he worked under the moniker Marcus Keef (or simply “Keef”) to avoid confusion with photographer Keith Lionel McMillan who likewise worked with rock musicians at the time.

In addition to his stylized photography, Keef also contributed design work to those first four albums, which – along with designs from the Bloomsbury Group – include now-iconic titling graphics. At least for the first two releases, he entrusted a fellow student from the Royal College of Art with the typography: it was Sandy Field who designed the titling for Black Sabbath and Paranoid.

Despite the ubiquity of those albums and the many design imitations they’ve inspired, the sources of their letterforms have been largely undocumented and obscured by the passage of time. Some of the albums’ titling has often, mistakenly, been assumed to be totally hand-lettered. Even when a typeface was suspected as a starting point, exact sources have proven elusive.

This situation is not surprising when you consider those first four Sabbath covers were all designed using uncommon sources from the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering – a relatively short period after the peak of letterpress printing but before the digital revolution. Type styles from larger companies of that era, like Photo-Lettering and Letraset, have been documented fairly well in subsequent years. But there were also smaller companies and publications at the time whose designs are still much less known today, partly because the original reference materials are so scarce.

All four of the first Black Sabbath records got their titling styles from exactly those kinds of niche sources.

Black Sabbath (1970)

Though it is multiple generations removed, the titling style of the first, self-titled Black Sabbath album has its origins in an ornamented typeface from the Central Type Foundry called Harper, first released in 1882. The curly design was part of a wave of type styles from that era that tried to evoke a sense of exoticism through unusual forms.

1892 Central Type Foundry specimen of Harper.

1889 Franklin Type Foundry specimen of Harper.

Harper Rimmed Initials as shown in the 1897 catalog of Day & Collins, a wood type manufacturer in Fann Street, London.

Harper included a set of outlined or “rimmed” initials which seem to have outlived the core design through adaptation by various other publishers over the years, for various other formats. One such adaptation was for fonts of wood type by the British company Day & Collins, who sold it as Harper Rimmed Initials. This adaptation, in turn, inspired many subsequent interpretations, especially during the era of phototype and dry transfer lettering.

One particular take on that design wasn’t even a proper typeface in the traditional sense, but instead was published as a standalone alphabet in the Twelve Unusual Alphabets Compiled by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes portfolio (1970). This adaptation of Harper Rimmed Initials appears to be the one used by Field to compose the titling for the cover of Black Sabbath.

Sheet 9 from Twelve Unusual Alphabets Compiled by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes. London: Mears, Caldwell, Hacker, not dated [1970]. This source was originally identified by Patrick Concannon.

A lineage of adaptations of Harper Rimmed, from top to bottom:

1970 Black Sabbath cover detail feat. the Unusual Alphabet #9 by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes, c.1970.

Harper with rimmed initials by Gustav F. Schroeder for Central Type Foundry, 1882.

Eminence by Photo-Lettering, Inc., 1962.

Manuscript Capitals by Bob Newman for Letraset, 1972.

Fancy Letter by Walter Haettenschweiler. Allegedly from 1957. However, the earliest known showing is in the 5th revised edition of Lettera 2 from 1976.

Abbey Scroll, shown by Formatt in 1974.

Daisy Rimmed, shown by Solotype in 1992.

Coincidentally, the Harper Rimmed Initials seem to have also influenced the design of the logo for Orange amplifiers around the same time. Black Sabbath weren’t regular Orange users but they were famously seen playing them for their 1970 performances on the West German Beat-Club television show.

The Orange amplifier logo as seen on an item in their circa 1970 catalog, seemingly based on some adaptation of the Harper typeface.

Tony Iommi playing guitar through an Orange amplifier, from the famous Beat-Club performance in 1970.

Paranoid (1971)

Following the success of their debut, the pressure was on for Black Sabbath to quickly release a follow-up album. Keef again handled the photography and design. The photography for the cover was prepared with the idea that the album would be titled War Pigs (after the song), however the title was changed to Paranoid at the last minute and the short turnaround meant there was no time to prepare new photography, resulting in an unintended mismatch of imagery and text. Despite this mix-up, the album was a hit, furthering Sabbath’s heavy metal influence.

As with the first album, Field’s title design for Paranoid made use of a fairly recent, somewhat obscure adaptation of an earlier letter style. This time, though, instead of using an alphabet from a book based on a typeface, it was a typeface based on an alphabet from a book.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Book jacket for Lettera 2 (left), “a standard book of fine lettering” edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler and published by Niggli in 1961. One of the included alphabets is Lettre coupé. The showing on page 53 (right) is caps only and omits the letter L.

In 1961, the Lettera 2 book was released as the second entry in the Lettera series of alphabet sourcebooks, published by Arthur Niggli Ltd. The book, edited by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler, included a collection of various alphabet designs – some taken directly from typefaces, others from original lettering samples. One of the samples was an original alphabet, titled Lettre Coupé, designed by Haettenschweiler with a hand-cut appearance.

Some designers adapted the alphabet for album artwork, sometimes modifying glyphs, altering the proportions, and/or improvising characters that weren’t included in the original sample.

By 1969, the alphabet had been adapted into a proper typeface by the Lettergraphics phototype company, offered under the name Black Casual. The typeface added new counterforms to A, B, and P, as well as a few new characters (L, comma, ?, and &). Black Casual appears to be what Field used to compose the titling for Paranoid. Given the Black name, the use might be considered a partial LTypI.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Californian phototype provider Lettergraphics turned Haettenschweiler’s lettering into a proper typeface. Their adaptation called Black Casual can here be seen in a catalog dated 1969. It adds the missing L alongside some punctuation glyphs (comma, question mark, ampersand) and also introduces counters in A B and P.

Perhaps inspired by the dark vibes of Paranoid, Lettre Coupé was adapted in 1973 for the title sequence of blaxploitation horror film Scream Blacula Scream.

Title frame from the opening sequence of Scream Blacula Scream (1973).

Master of Reality (1971)

The cover of Sabbath’s third album dropped photography entirely and went all-in on a text-only treatment, with large, bold, in-your-face, typography – twisted and warped as if being shaken by high-amplitude vibrations, or distorted by altered perception. While the photography of the first two Sabbath records gave them a dark, otherworldly feeling, the Master of Reality cover also puts an emphasis on HEAVINESS.

The darkness wasn’t abandoned though. Below the purple band name, the album’s title for the first pressings was only distinguished from the black background via embossing, resulting in raised letterforms that are equally as tactile as they are visual. If the question is “How much more black could this be?”, the answer is: “None. None more black.”

Eventually the record companies releasing new editions of the album decided that “none more black” was too black and/or embossing was too expensive, so the cover has seen many variants over the years with the title alternately colored gray, white, orange, green, pink, black with white outline, and more. Some releases have also colored the band’s name in alternating rainbow colors.

Source: www.discogs.com Discogs. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A sampling of the various colorways that have been used for Master of Reality over the years.

Despite the text-only cover, Keef’s stylized photography still made an appearance on a poster included as an insert with the original release. The design for the album is credited to Bloomsbury Group, a British firm active in the 1970s (apparently named after the early-1900s intellectual collective of the same name), with art direction by Mike Stanford.

The typeface on the cover is, yet again, an obscure phototype interpretation of an existing design. In this case, the ancestral type is Rudolf Koch’s Kabel which originated in the late 1920s. The reimagined adaptation used for Master of Reality is Lodwick Kabel, which pushes the weight of Kabel beyond any of its previous incarnations, and even heavier than ITC or Letraset would later take their interpretations in 1975 and 1980, respectively.

Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A comparison of the heaviest interpretations of Kabel as offered variously in phototype, dry transfer lettering, and digital type. Samples scaled to approximately matching cap heights.

Lodwick Kabel was available by 1970 from the Photoscript phototype company, and presented as an “Exclusive Royalty face”. The name suggests a possible connection to Hardy/Lodwick (a.k.a. Hardy/Escasany/Lodwick), a studio that was active in London in the 1970s – but that connection is unconfirmed.

Scanned by Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

London-based typesetting company Photoscript showed Lodwick Kabel in their List of Typefaces 1970, as “Exclusive Royalty face” and in two widths.

Lodwick Kabel as shown in a 1990 specimen book from the TypoBach typesetting company.

Since its release, the Master of Reality cover has been imitated many times, perhaps most prominently by British rock group Arctic Monkeys. Even Black Sabbath themselves have rehashed the warped sans-serif effect for a Black Lives Matter benefit T-shirt.

Vol 4 (1972)

The cover for Sabbath’s fourth album, appropriately titled Vol 4, continues the theme of extra-large, extra-bold type from Master of Reality. As with the precursor, the design is attributed to Bloomsbury Group with photography by Keef – this time credited by his real name, Keith Macmillan. For this release, Keef’s photography was brought back onto the cover, showing Ozzy with arms raised, giving his signature gesture of victorious peace signs ✌️ (not to be confused with the devil horns 🤘 popularized later by Ozzy’s successor, Ronnie James Dio). The image is treated more as a graphic element than a photograph, with a high-contrast monochrome effect, framed compactly on three sides with tightly-spaced, extra-heavy, geometric, sans-serif type. As with the previous albums, the name of the band and the name of the album are set in the same size and face.

Though there were plenty of heavy geometric sans-serif typefaces being used around that time with similar structural features, the style used for Vol 4 seems to be a primarily original design, and not a direct adaptation of some other existing face. The typeface in question is Gadget, available by 1971 from Alphabet Photosetting, who listed it as a copyrighted design. Dry transfer lettering sheets of a Lined variant of the face were produced by Zipatone, and they credit the design to Peter Bennett.

Source: www.flickr.com Scanned by Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Glyph set for Gadget with alternate forms for c e &, from an undated catalog by Alphabet Photosetting.

The striped variant, Gadget Lined, was also produced by Letraset competitor Zipatone for dry transfer lettering. This sheet from their Zipatone Designers Fonts (ZDF) range has caps in 84pt. Thanks to this adaptation, we know that Gadget is the design of Peter Bennett.

Due to the obscure nature of Gadget, many people over the years have assumed the Vol 4 titling was a case of one-off lettering and not composed with a proper typeface. As such there have been multiple typefaces in more recent years using the iconic design as inspiration for creating new typefaces. It’s interesting to see how others extrapolate the letters from the cover into an entirely re-imagined set of glyphs – with some letters matching Gadget quite closely but others being taken to totally new and different places. Some examples include OZIK, Volume Dealers, and VolumeFour.

Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A comparison of the original Gadget with related digital fonts, namely: K22 Gadget, VolumeFour, and OZIK. The latter two examples were based specifically on the cover of Vol 4, presumably without using a full alphabet of the original Gadget as a reference.

The iconic nature of Vol 4’s cover also makes it a common subject for imitation and parody, especially with assistance from those newer digital fonts.

The Vol 4 design came full circle recently when the digital VolumeFour typeface inspired by the album cover was used for promotional materials and on-stage graphics for Black Sabbath’s final show, “Back to the Beginning”, on July 5, 2025 – less than three weeks before the passing of Ozzy Osbourne.

Though Black Sabbath went on to release plenty of other noteworthy albums, the first four seem especially foundational. They are also unique in their common use of obscure typefaces, and their involvement of Keef for visuals.

Finding proper identifications for these typefaces has only been possible with the efforts of others, sometimes as a collaborative effort that unfolded over literal years in the comments of old Fonts In Use posts. Special thanks are due to Florian Hardwig, Daylight Fonts, Mark Simonson, Patrick Concannon, and Fontastique Faces. Additionally, Kory Grow’s interview with Keith Macmillan for Rolling Stone was extremely insightful, even though it didn’t discuss specifics of typography. Finally, investigative work for articles like this would be nearly impossible without Discogs and the Internet Archive.

If you have any further information about these typefaces or their use on the Black Sabbath records, please leave a message in the comments below or on the separate entries for each album. Those entries include more details about supporting typefaces, with additional detailed images:

✌️

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Fonts In Use is not active on Instagram

Nick Sherman — Tue, 15 Jul 2025 14:32:25 +0000

Contributed by Nick Sherman

Fonts In Use. License: CC BY-SA.

The Fonts In Use staff was never especially enthusiastic about maintaining our account on Instagram. The platform is antithetical to so much of the what we love on the web: hyperlinks, web feeds (e.g., RSS), advanced search, chronological timelines, archival functionality, cross-references, citations and proper credits, web standards, semantic formatting, and direct community connections, with freedom from corporate intermediaries and their agendas – the Open Web at its best.

We sincerely appreciate the 28,000+ people who’ve followed our account on Instagram, but the benefit of “being where the eyes are” has involved compromises that are increasingly incompatible with our staff’s values. It’s been almost a year since our last post on Instagram, and we wanted to explain why here, publicly.

Rejecting passive complicity

There are legitimate questions about whether Instagram is even an effective platform for sharing design anymore, but – more significantly – there are deeper moral considerations about the platform that can’t be ignored. Instagram and its parent company, Meta, have been involved in countless issues related to the invasion of privacy, psychological manipulation, unauthorized surveillance, corporate fraud, employee exploitation, security breaches, censorship, negative environmental impacts, copyright infringement, moderation negligence, and conscious facilitation of everything from housing discrimination to literal genocide.

It can be easy to forget or disregard all these issues while scrolling through a timeline of enjoyable posts from people you like. Surely, casually browsing photos of your friends or sharing some small design item doesn’t have anything to do with genocide, right? Meta has carefully engineered its experience to manipulate its users, and depends on this kind of passive complicity from otherwise critically minded people to maintain its stronghold via the network effect. Their power is dependent on a massive user base continuing to use their platform without thinking too hard about the consequences on a larger scale.

It’s too much for us. Fonts In Use can’t justify supporting such a morally corrupt company with more content, energy, or attention.

Doing what feels right

Discontinuing our activity on Instagram matches a broader ethos at Fonts In Use where we try our best to operate the project in a way we feel good about, even if doing so risks the possibility of a bit more work, a smaller operating budget, or a reduced audience. We’re proud to exist as proof that you can operate a successful, sustainable organization without relying on so many of the dystopian companies and technologies many people accept as necessary evils these days. We don’t claim to be perfect but – if you’ll pardon the cliché – we’re trying to be the proverbial change we want to see in the world.

That mindset has led to other significant changes for Fonts In Use over the years:

We stopped using Twitter, despite having tens of thousands of followers there, and embraced decentralized, non-corporate social media with Mastodon.
We cut the use of third-party cookies and scripts from our website.
We moved our website analytics away from Google and onto a privacy-friendly, self-hosted system.
We rejected sponsorship from companies we find problematic.

While some of these decisions make our work trickier, there are also notable practical benefits:

Our content and relationships with our community aren’t beholden to the whims of egomaniacal billionaires.
Visiting our website doesn’t require annoying consent pop-ups.
Our website loads faster.
Our readers’ privacy is secure.
We sleep better at night.

Best of all: despite abandoning all those practices accepted by many as inevitable compromises, Fonts In Use still has a stronger audience now than it ever has, by almost all metrics. More people visit the site more frequently, looking at more pages, and clicking more external links to sponsors, designers, and independent font companies than ever. Who knew removing unsavory variables from your online presence may actually be good for business?

Push the status quo

As with Twitter and Google, we don’t expect our discontinued activity on Instagram will have any immediate effect on that company’s behavior or bottom line. But maybe other designers reading this will reconsider how they manage their own content and relationships online, or be more proactive in removing toxic dependencies from their occupation. Maybe it will reduce the influence of predatory corporations on the world of typography just a little bit. One thing is certain: unless more people push against the status quo, the grip of horrible corporations will only become tighter and tighter.

If you’re considering a similar move away from questionable social media platforms, there's no better time than the present. Even if you don’t completely leave those platforms, you can always start building up an independent presence in tandem – on a decentralized social network, your own website, and/or an email newsletter – where you control your own content and aren’t trapped by any one gatekeeper to maintain connections with your community.

In the meantime there are several ways to keep up with what’s new at Fonts In Use:

Subscribe to any of our many RSS feeds: for all posts, staff picks, comments, just the blog, or any tag, designer, contributor, format, user-curated set, category, etc. (most listing pages on the site have corresponding RSS feeds).
Follow us on Mastodon.
Sign up for our upcoming email newsletter.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Star Wars movie posters from Hungary

Florian Hardwig — Sun, 04 May 2025 18:44:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

Source: movieposters.ha.com Image: Heritage Auctions. License: All Rights Reserved.

Csillagok háborúja (Star Wars), 1979. The custom acute accents are simple squares. The secondary typeface is ITC Avant Garde Gothic. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com.

Tibor Helényi (1946–2014) was a Hungarian painter, graphic designer, and poster artist. Among his most famous works are the posters he created for the original Star Wars trilogy, commissioned by MOKÉP, Hungary’s state-owned film distributor. Today, the posters are sought-after collector’s items.

The typeface Helényi used for the titles is Langdon Biform. Characterized by triangular notches, the boxy design is by John Langdon (b. 1946). To most people, the graphic designer and retired typography professor is best known for his ambigrams, and especially those he made for Dan Brown’s 2000 novel, Angels & Demons.

Langdon Biform is an early work of his, drawn in 1971 when he was in his mid-twenties, years before embarking on a career as freelance logo designer, type specialist, and lettering artist. Langdon submitted the design to a competition organized by Californian phototype company Lettergraphics, who added it to their library of typefaces. It didn’t take long before it was copied by other type providers. I’m aware of at least six digitizations, under various names including Lampoon, Harpoon ART, and Dominion, none of which were authorized by its original designer.

In a 2014 interview, Helényi was asked about a debate among fans who wondered whether he’d even watched Star Wars before designing the poster. After all, his art includes creatures that don’t appear in the film. Helényi laughingly replied that he indeed had seen the film, and that he had a lot of fun with designing the poster. In addition to his impressions from the advance screening, he also worked from lobby cards.

You can learn more about Helényi and see more of his work at his official website (maintained by his daughter Flora) and also at Budapest Poster Gallery.

A Birodalom visszavág (The Empire Strikes Back), 1982. Subtitle and credits are added in Univers Bold. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com.

A Jedi visszatér (Return of the Jedi), 1984. The secondary typeface for this poster is Univers Extended. More info on StarWarsMoviePoster.com.

The original painted art created for the posters was sold in Budapest Poster Gallery’s Tibor Helenyi Estate Auction in 2015, alongside many other items by the artist.

Stephen Coles. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Glyph set for Langdon Biform with its fifteen alternates, as shown in the “Do a Comp” fan by Lettergraphics International Inc., 1968–1975

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Harris/Walz 2024 US Presidential Campaign

Stephen Coles — Thu, 05 Sep 2024 20:12:00 +0000

Contributed by Stephen Coles

The Kamala Harris 2024 campaign identity, designed by Wide Eye Creative, is built around Sans Plomb, a condensed gothic not unlike the Bureau Grot used by Wide Eye for Harris’s 2020 primary bid – in turn inspired by Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign. This time, though, the typeface is from a French foundry, rather than from Anglo-American origins (Stephenson Blake via Font Bureau).

The logo for Kamala Harris’ 2020 campaign used Bureau Grot and an atypical asymmetrical layout.

It’s not clear to me why they made the switch. From a design point of view, the caps aren’t significantly different from Bureau Grot. Perhaps they liked the more constructed, “modern” feel? Personally, I would have gone back to Chisholm’s pick, the all-American Franklin Gothic, which has no shortage of contemporary versions for any use case. (At the risk of friendship bias, I recommend the interpretation from Fonts In Use cofounder Nick Sherman.)

The symmetrical layout for “Harris/Walz” is a much more conventional approach compared to Harris’s 2020 logo, which took a different road than most US presidential campaigns. The new look reflects her move to the center (no pun intended) for a broader audience.

Not the best kerning on this rally sign (AY). The font, Sans Plomb Super, doesn’t deliver that big of a gap out of the box, so something went awry in the typesetting.

The supporting face for “WALZ”, running text, and other small bits like “YES SHE CAN” merch is Balto, Tal Leming’s contemporary take on the American gothic genre, such as Franklin Gothic and News Gothic.

The Harris web store adds Sara Solskone and Jonathan Hoefler’s Decimal, a continuation of the Biden/Harris 2020 campaign. Seeing Solskone’s name makes me wonder if maybe there was a missed opportunity to also choose a typeface by an American woman for the main mark. For example, Program by Zuzana Licko, or Utile Narrow by Sibylle Hagmann.

The logo used in this web pop-up is the early version before it was redrawn (see below).

A refined version of the Harris/Walz logo (white outline) launched around August 11. The biggest changes were relieving the pinched curve at the top of the S and enlarging “WALZ” just slightly to the left for optical centering.

Hoefler, whose typefaces (or those of Hoefler & Co.) have been part of the logo for “every Democratic president in the twenty-first century”, recently revealed that the mark was refined on August 10–11, a few weeks after its initial launch. The work – which involved some redrawing and better “WALZ” centering – was done by Leming and Scott Dadich under the direction of Wide Eye’s Alayna Citrin.

Hoefler also commented that, “Trump has used Gotham for years, and NEVER bought a license. Color me surprised! We talked to a white shoe lawfirm in NYC about taking action, and was told, with a laugh, ‘take a number.’”

Ironically, it was Barack Obama’s 2008 run that made Gotham (and its lookalikes) a default for US political campaigns, regardless of party. At least Harris is diverting a bit from that 15-year-old trend.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

As We Are Now book jacket

Florian Hardwig — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 18:51:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

One advantage that lettering has over typeset text is that the artist can always alter letterforms ad hoc, depending on the context. This allows her to make the most of the available space, to dissolve awkward pairs into pleasing combinations, or simply to enliven a design by means of variegation.

Ursula Suess was a graphic artist who designed numerous book jackets in her career. For the majority of them, she’d come up with her own letterforms. I’m adding a selection of designs that hints at her stylistic range in the comments to this article.

An early jacket with italic lettering, designed by Suess for Sean O’Casey’s Sunset and Evening Star, Macmillan, 1955

Suess designed the jacket for The Confrontation by Lenore Marshall (W.W. Norton) in 1972, the year her Book Jacket typeface was released. The lettering could pass as an extrabold variation.

An undated portrait of Ursula Suess

In the early 1970s, Suess set about designing a typeface. According to a 2014 article by Ellen Sussman, she was in part motivated by the fact that “most type styles at the time were too wide and didn’t fit on a jacket.” Her typeface indeed is compact, both horizontally and vertically, with condensed, tight-setting letterforms and a large x-height with short extenders. Suess didn’t want to forgo all the flexibility she was familiar with from lettering, so she drew a large set of alternates. A TGC specimen sums it up: “She used lettering similar to this in her book cover designs, where space limitations called for lettering with many swash characters that was strong and condensed, yet rich and sensuous.” The calligraphic design was released by VGC as a stand-alone italic in 1972, named Book Jacket. Whether you find the name boring or brilliant, it did clarify the intended application area.

And Book Jacket indeed was used for designing book jackets. One example by Suess herself is shown here. (See Robert Halsband’s biography of Lord Hervey for a second one.) As We Are Now is a novel by Belgian-American writer May Sarton (1912–1995), published by W.W. Norton & Company in 1973. Suess used her typeface in two sizes, with the alternate swash caps for the big initials, a wider terminal form in “We”, and hardly any space between the last two words of the title. For the subline, she opted for more restrained forms overall, but inserted a descending h, a sweeping f that embraces the preceding o, and a single swash cap L in “LOVE”. The a in “author” is the double-story alternate. May Sarton’s name is set in Richard Isbell’s wide Americana.

Partial glyph set of Book Jacket Pro, the digitization drawn by Patrick Griffin and released by Canada Type in 2010

Ursula Suess was born August 13, 1924 – which means it’s her 100th birthday today. Canada Type, who released a digital version of Book Jacket in 2010, provided a biographical outline:

Ursula Suess was born in 1924 to German parents in Camden, NJ, and grew up in Munich, Germany, where she attended two semesters of design school at the Academy of Fine Art before it burned down during the war [in July 1944]. She then studied calligraphy with Anna Simons for two years. She returned to America in 1946 and established herself as a graphic designer working for Oxford University Press, Macmillan Co., Harper, and other publishers. She also taught calligraphy for 20 years at the Westchester Art Workshop, and at the Cooper Union in New York City. In her 50s she learned to cut gems and eventually became an accomplished gem carver. She moved to Green Valley, AZ, in 1998, and has been applying her artistic versatility with clay, water-color and acrylics.

In Arizona, Suess became a long-time member and supporter of the Tubac Center of the Arts. Ellen Sussman mentions paper sculpture, pottery, and collage as additional techniques she engaged in. Apart from Book Jacket, she is credited with at least one more typeface: Rotalic is a low-contrast italic sans featuring swash caps with ball terminals. It was also released with VGC. One of its four styles was recently digitized as BN Rascal.

Suess passed away in May 2020, at the age of 95. She left us a large number of beautiful works, including many pieces of lettering and two unique typefaces that have stood the test of time.

Ursula Suess at the Tubac Center of the Arts. The Center has a number of her donated works and continues to honor her with the URSUS award for abstract work in their annual members’ exhibitions.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Martyr! book jacket

Stephen Coles — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 09:50:00 +0000

Contributed by Stephen Coles

Martyr! is a novel by Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar that combines modern situations with traditional imagery. For the jacket, prolific cover designer Linda Huang did what she does so well: pick a striking and relevant typeface and let it do a lot of the work.

Left: Salem, as advertised in the Inland Printer, Vol. 28, No. 2 (November, 1901). Right: Daria Cohen’s reinterpretation, Zangezi (2018), with additional weights, italics, and condensed (2021).

Her choice was Zangezi Condensed, a fresh, fashion-forward take on Salem, in which Daria Cohen took a turn-of-the-century dazzler, narrowed it, and increased its stroke contrast, giving it even more spike and sparkle than it already had. The idiosyncratic type is the perfect companion to the contemporary use of antique illustration. Huang also deftly delivers the commercial necessities – a blurb and “a novel” – in an inconspicuous way.

Huang on the design:

Despite its heavy themes, I found Akbar’s novel to be insanely funny,” Huang told Literary Hub. “I cackled many times while reading the manuscript. More than anything, I wanted to evoke this unique tragi-comedic tone on the cover. One of the central, recurring images is this Iranian ‘Angel of Death’ warrior. I experimented with scale and ultimately found the warrior in miniature to be most striking, with ‘a novel’ set in a deadpan speech bubble. I was also lucky to stumble upon the perfect decorative typeface to activate all that negative space. To me, humor is one of the most alluring qualities in a book (and really, in life) so it was an absolute treat to work on Akbar’s novel.

Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com License: All Rights Reserved.

The version of the cover seen in bookstores today.

Martyr! quickly became a New York Times best seller – soon enough for the cover to get an extra speech balloon celebrating that fact. You can also see an improvement on the letterspacing in “Akbar”.

A Digression and Suggestion

Once you get to the end of a book, “a note on the type” is a great way to learn about the creation of the letterforms you’ve been staring at for hours.

Back jacket flaps usually include an author bio and designer credit. This is good. Could they include a bit more?

The interior of this book, designed by Betty Lew, includes “A Note on the Type”, a lovely hundred-year-old publishing tradition which not only credits the text face (in this case, Dante), but tells a bit of its story. Why not have a typeface credit on the jacket flap, too? Sure, you’re reading a lot more Dante than Zangezi when you read this book, but it’s the cover that often sells the book. Also, the type used on book covers is more likely to be something newer that the interior text, and thus more likely to be made by living designers. Isn’t it time we give them a nod?

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Metra tickets, 1990–1991

Florian Hardwig — Sun, 17 Sep 2023 14:50:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

January 1990, ft. an unidentified rounded sans

February 1990 ft. Italia Bold

C82 is the website of Nicholas Rougeux, a Chicago-based designer and data artist. One of the many great things one can find on C82 is his collection of train tickets sold by Metra. Every month, the commuter rail system in the Chicago metropolitan area releases a new ticket design. In 2004, Nick started collecting. Over the years, and with the help from other ephemera enthusiasts as well as of Metra, the archive considerably grew in size. At the time of writing, it includes an impressive 1,395 tickets, spanning more than fifty years of commuter history.

This post highlights the monthly tickets from 1990 and 1991. In a recent blog update, Nick comments:

In the early 90s, ticket designs varied significantly with new typography and visual styles appearing each month. I can’t say these are some of my favorites but I recognize that this may have been in an effort to curb counterfeiting. However, I do enjoy some of the typography from the 1990s tickets. I owe a big thanks to fellow collector John for these and others.

Each of the tickets features a different typeface. Many of the chosen fonts stem from the libraries of ITC (Korinna, Quorum, Serif Gothic, Zapf Chancery, …) and Letraset (Caxton, Italia, Romic (Letraset), …). There are also classics that go back to the era of foundry type, like Beton, City, or Optima, and Monotype originals like Albertus and Plantin. The typographic smorgasbord is completed by designs as diverse as Moderne Schwabacher, a turn-of-the-century blackletter; Salut, an upright script first cast by Gebr. Klingspor in the 1930s; and Checkmate, a futuristic sans with chamfered corners, dreamt up at Schaedler in the 1970s – all of which were either used still as phototype, or in the form of early digitizations.

For the year 1990, all abbreviated month names are shown in vertically stretched letterforms. The source of the stacked numerals (“90”) was identified by Quinn as City Bold, see comments. The bitmap caps (“D/A”) are likely custom. While the spelled-out month names and the ticket numbers are similar to OCR-B, the specific font appears to be a proprietary design with some differences, probably from a specialized printing machine.

The Metra logo seen on the depicted train as well as on some of the tickets is Crillee. See also the dedicated post about it.

March 1990 ft. Macbeth

April 1990 ft. City Bold

May 1990 ft. Checkmate

June 1990 ft. Roberta

July 1990 ft. what appears to be a version of Filmotype Amber (or a similar face)

August 1990 ft. Salut

September 1990 ft. Moderne Schwabacher a.k.a. Chalet Text

October 1990 ft. Clarendon Condensed

November 1990 ft. Beton Bold Condensed

January 1991 ft. ITC Quorum Bold

February 1991 ft. ITC Kabel Ultra

March 1991 ft. ITC Serif Gothic Heavy with the pointed forms for M and A that were omitted from the digital version. “March 1991” uses ITC Korinna and Times New Roman.

April 1991 ft. a bold variant of Plantin

May 1991 ft. a bold variant of Albertus

June 1991 ft. Caxton Bold

July 1991 ft. Optima Bold

August ft. ITC Cheltenham Bold

September 1991 ft. ITC Zapf Chancery Bold with the alternate swash caps

October 1991 ft. a bold variant of Century Oldstyle

November 1991 ft. Romic (Letraset) Bold

December 1991 ft. ITC Berkeley Oldstyle

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers by Josef Müller-Brockmann

Florian Hardwig — Fri, 28 Apr 2023 14:36:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

Book jacket (second edition by Niggli, Teufen, 1964)

Dan Reynolds, esteemed friend of the site, writes on Mastodon:

125 years ago today – at exactly 12:05 in the afternoon, Berlin time – H. Berthold AG filed prints of 13 sizes of Akzidenz-Grotesk’s regular weight with the Berlin Muster-Register. That means that it is the typeface’s “birthday” right now.

You can read more on his Typeoff blog and see internal Berthold documents from the Historical Archive at the Deutsches Technikmuseum.

Book jacket (second edition by Alec Tiranti, London, 1964)

We celebrate Akzidenz-Grotesk’s big day by posting one of its most iconic uses, by a die-hard fan of the typeface.

Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers (English: The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems, French: Les problèmes d’un artiste graphique) was written, compiled and designed by Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914–1996). He worked on the book while serving as professor of graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, or School of Applied Arts, a position he held from 1957 to 1960. It was first published in 1961 by Verlag Arthur Niggli, Teufen AR, Switzerland. Alec Tiranti published it in the United Kingdom. A second edition followed in 1964, a third in 1968.

Book cover (first UK edition by Alec Tiranti, London, 1961). According to Felix Wiedler, this is 48pt Akzidenz-Grotesk halbfett. It’s used with very small word spaces.

Title page (third edition, 1968)

On 188 pages organized in eighteen chapters and a grid-based layout with four columns, Müller-Brockmann outlines his approach to solving visual design problems. As the subtitle hints at (“Design and Training in Commercial Art”), the book is directed at beginners and students. At the same time, it serves as a personal monograph: most of the shown works are by Müller-Brockmann himself. He does include works of others, too, for example by Ursula Keller, Nicoletta Baroni, Ruedi Rüegg, and Christof Gassner – who were among his students at the Kunstgewerbeschule.

Akzidenz-Grotesk is not only used throughout the book, from the cover to the captions. It’s also featured in numerous of the depicted examples, some of which were covered in previous posts on Fonts In Use.

In his book (design) story #89, Felix Wiedler points out that Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers was issued two years after Gerstner+Kutter’s Die neue Graphik and one year after Hans Neuburg’s Moderne Werbe- und Gebrauchs-Graphik, and that “the cover is very similar, too, with its asymmetric title in large Akzidenz-Grotesk letters. The brownish-grey jacket with black and white type is actually quite ‘Gerstner’)”.

Fun fact: when this book came out sixty-two years ago, Akzidenz-Grotesk was about sixty-two years old.

Colophon (third edition, 1968)

Preface and start of first chapter about “the graphic artist and his task”

Typography in advertising

Photography in advertising: two posters from a campaign for more road safety

The drawing in advertising

Colour in advertising.
Left: even JMB got his stuff rejected: the poster for OLMA 1959 remained unrealized.
Right: Der Film was an exhibition shown at the Kunstgewerbemuseum Zürich in 1960.

Colour in advertising

Concert posters for the Tonhalle Gesellschaft Zurich

A training system for the graphic designer

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

März book covers, 1969–1987

Florian Hardwig — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 16:41:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

Source: www.booklooker.de katzensohn (edited). License: All Rights Reserved.

März Texte 1, 1969. Compilation of texts by Bazon Brock, Peter O. Chotjewitz, William S. Burroughs, LeRoi Jones, Uve Schmidt, Hermann Nitsch, and others.

Among German publishers, März is probably the most iconic example for our tag “typeface plus color equals brand”. In this case, the first ingredient is Block, a bold advertising typeface with rough contours that was first cast by the Berthold foundry in 1908. The second one is the color yellow, or rather the color combo yellow, red and black. März has stuck to this formula throughout its turbulent history, creating a striking identity for their emancipatory books.

Richard Stoiber describes what made their publishing program special:

[MÄRZ] used to publish what other publishers didn’t dare to: Beat literature from the U.S., comics, poetry collections, sex ed books, pornography and political theory. For many years, MÄRZ set trends for a new aesthetic and a new political movement in the old Federal Republic. Leonard Cohen’s poems were published at MÄRZ, long before he became a singer-songwriter in Europe. For 20 years the publishing house offered the German public a multi-layered program.

The publishing house was founded in Frankfurt/Main in 1969 by Jörg Schöder and others. It was also Schröder who came up with the concept for the cover designs and the typeface choice. The co-founders left already in 1971, and in 1973, Schröder had to file for bankruptcy for the first time. The company was rebooted a year later, now with Zweitausendeins as distribution partner. Barbara Kalender joined Schröder in 1981. In 1987, after Schröder suffered two heart attacks, März Verlag had to be liquidated. The project lived on in the form of the März Desktop Verlag, which relocated to Berlin in 2005.

When Schröder died in June 2020, it seemed that März had come to a final end. In 2021, however, Richard Stoiber together with Kalender relaunched the publishing house. You can read about this new chapter in the post by Andreas Seidel, and see his custom typeface MaerzType in use on the new covers.

Manifest der Gesellschaft zur Vernichtung der Männer S.C.U.M. by Valerie Solanas, translated by Nils-Thomas Lindquist, 1969

Sexfront by Günter Amendt, 1970 (this printing: 1978). In 2007, Schröder described this controversial book about sexual education for teenagers as the “most memorable and important März title, because it made a whole generation happier.” The red T is a play on words, allowing an alternate reading as “Sexfron” – Fron is German for drudgery.

Die Befreiung Guineas by Basil Davidson, 1970

Antiautoritäre Erziehung und Psychoanalyse. Ausgewählte Schriften, Bd. 3 by Siegfried Bernfeld, 1970

Kampf um Mozambique by Eduardo Mondlane, translated by Heidi Riechling, Stefan Rössel, Burkhard Bluem, 1970

Lernen und Freiheit. Aus der Praxis der First Street School by George Dennison, 1971

Dunkelbraun by Michael McClure, translated by Heiner Bastian, 1971, with MÄRZ in yellow letters – the exception proves the rule.

Laß jucken Kumpel by Hans Henning Claer, 1971. For some reason, the Ä in the logo was made smaller.

Mondstrip. Neue englische Prosa by Rolf Eckart John, 1971

Aktionen auf der äußeren Rinde by Paulus Böhmer, 1972, featuring two of Block’s compact capital umlauts

Acid. Neue amerikanische Szene by R.D. Brinkmann & R.R. Rygulla (eds.), 1975. At that time, März books were distributed by Zweitausendeins.

Hamlet by Peter Kuper, 1980 (third edition, 1981)

Hamlet oder die Liebe zu Amerika by Peter Kuper, 5th edition, 1982. This paperback cover uses a wide E and a narrow T in the title, as well as a K with curved arm in the author’s name. The dust jacket of the hardback edition shown above uses different forms for these letters.

Blumen für Hitler by Leonard Cohen, 1982

Die Küche der Armen by Huguette Couffignal, 1982

Schläfer erwacht by Kenneth Patchen, translated by Marc Adrian, 1983

Das große Der Die Das by Gunter Schmidt, 1986 (2nd later edition)

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

The Mystery of the Dune Font

Florian Hardwig — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 15:01:28 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

In the six decades since the publication of the original Dune novel in 1965, the science fiction franchise has gone through many different typographic identities. Notable examples include the use of Giorgio for the British paperbacks by NEL (c. 1968) and Albertus for David Lynch’s movie adaptation (1984). But another typeface has even stronger ties to Dune and its author. It appeared on the covers of dozens of books, including the classic Dune trilogy and its sequels, and also on other titles by – or about – Frank Herbert, from various imprints. Strangely enough, the name of this typeface is barely known even among die-hard fans.

Dune (1965) and Dune Messiah (1969) as published by Berkley Medallion in September 1975. Cover art by Vincent Di Fate. [More info on ISFDB about Dune and Dune Messiah]

Davison Art Nouveau was drawn by lettering artist Meyer M. “Dave” Davison for Photo-Lettering (PLINC), a typesetting company in New York City. It was first shown in PLINC’s 1967 Alphabet Yearbook. Basically a bold all-caps roman with long bracketed serifs, Davison Art Nouveau comes in three variants of increasing ornamentation: Art Nouveau with Flourishes, Modified, and Ornate.

One-line samples for the three variants of Davison Art Nouveau, compiled from a page in PLINC’s Alphabet Yearbook 1967

Each variant includes additional alternates, some of which sport swashes, fox tail extensions, and curlicues that reach above and below the line. Depending on which glyphs are selected, the look of words set in Davison Art Nouveau ranges from sober to discreetly flowery to full-blown carnivalesque. That’s one reason this face isn’t easy to track down – it can take on so many different appearances. The other reason is that it was exclusive to PLINC. And PLINC was a service provider, not a font retailer. You couldn’t buy or license a copy of Art Nouveau. If you wanted to have some text set in this font, you had to place an order at their Manhattan office at 216 East 45th Street, in person or by phone or post.

Children of Dune, first edition by Berkley Putnam, 1976. Cover art by Vincent Di Fate. [More info on ISFDB] The secondary typeface here is Columna Solid with its alternate long-legged R.

Children of Dune (1976). Berkley Medallion, 1977. Cover art by Vincent Di Fate. [More info on ISFDB]

A later printing of Children of Dune by Berkley, 1984. Instead of golden embossed letters, it features plain beige ones.

Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune, in undated paperback editions by Ace and Berkley Medallion

The liaison between Dune and Davison Art Nouveau started in September 1975, when the typeface was used by Berkley Medallion for a paperback edition of the first two novels. At the time, the Berkley imprint was owned by New York-based publisher G.P. Putnam’s Sons. When Berkley Putnam published the first hardcover edition of the third novel, Children of Dune, in 1976, the new typographic identity was applied there, too. Later on, Putnam used the typeface on the jackets for hardback editions of other, unrelated books authored (or coauthored) by Frank Herbert.

After Berkley acquired Ace Books in 1982, Ace took over as Putnam’s publisher for science fiction paperbacks. During this period, some of Herbert’s books also appeared under the Del Rey imprint. Despite the change in imprints, though, the link between Herbert and Art Nouveau lasted – that is, until around 1988. Such “author branding” was rather common, especially with science fiction and fantasy writers. Other examples on Fonts In Use include Roslyn Gothic for Philip K. Dick, Dynamo and Corporate for Arthur C. Clarke, and Pipeline for Robert Heinlein.

The uncredited typographer worked with the Modified variant – at least that’s what the A with curved bar and the E with curling middle bar shown in the limited typeface samples I’ve been able to compare suggest. The letterforms were used with varying degrees of condensation, something that was easily done with phototype. Given that Art Nouveau came with so many alternates, its use for Dune and beyond is impressively consistent. Across the dozens of applications, only a handful of variant glyphs were employed: see for example the two forms for A, one of them with a right stem that curves inward; the R with the curling terminal for “Trilogy” versus the one in “Frank Herbert” on the box set below; or the S with and without ball terminal at the top.

Right from the start, Friz Quadrata was introduced as the supporting typeface, a choice that was maintained for most of the following books.

This post showcases a considerable number of book covers and jackets featuring Art Nouveau, more or less in chronological order, without aiming for completeness. The credit for selecting Art Nouveau probably goes to an unknown art director working at the Berkley Publishing Corporation. My research didn’t turn up any names. If you have any additional insight, please leave a comment.

Dune Trilogy: The first three books were also issued in a boxed set by Berkley Medallion, 1977. [More info on ISFDB] “The complete” is added in caps from Futura.

The Worlds of Frank Herbert (1970), Berkley Medallion, 1977. Cover art by Paul Alexander. [More info on ISFDB]

Whipping Star (1970), Berkley Medaillon, 1977. Cover art by Paul Alexander. [More info on ISFDB]

The typographic identity extended to items other than books, too. Frank Herbert’s Dune Calendar 1978 was published by Berkley in 1977, with illustrations by John Schoenherr.

The Dune Calendar 1978 doesn’t only offer stunning art …

… it’s also a great resource if you’re looking for a complete set of numerals from Davison Art Nouveau.

The Illustrated Dune, illustrated by John Schoenherr, Berkley Windover, August 1978

The Dosadi Experiment (1977), Berkley, 1978. Cover art by Paul Alexander. [More info on ISFDB]

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by admiral.ironbombs. License: CC BY-SA.

Destination: Void (1966), Berkley, Dec. 1978. Cover art by Paul Alexander. [More info on ISFDB]

The Jesus Incident (1979) by Frank Herbert & Bill Ransom, Berkley, 1980. Cover art by Paul Alexander. [More info on ISFDB]

Soul Catcher (1972), Berkley, 1979 (this printing from 1985). Cover art by Wayne Barlowe. [More info on ISFDB]

The Godmakers (1972), Berkley, 1981. Cover art by Paul Alexander. [More info on ISFDB]

God Emperor of Dune, first US edition by Putnam, 1981. Cover art by Brad Holland. [More info on ISFDB]

God Emperor of Dune, Berkley, Sep. 1981. [More info on ISFDB]

The Book of Frank Herbert (1973), Berkley, 1981. Cover art by Vincent Di Fate. [More info on ISFDB]

Under Pressure, originally titled The Dragon in the Sea (1956), Del Rey / Ballantine, 1981. Cover art by David B. Mattingly. [More info on ISFDB]

The Heaven Makers (1968), Del Rey / Ballantine, 1982. Cover art by Darrell K. Sweet [More info on ISFDB]

The White Plague, first edition by Putnam, 1982. Cover art by Abe Echevarria. [More info on ISFDB]

The Lazarus Effect by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom, first edition by Putnam, 1983. Cover art by Abe Echevarria. [More info on ISFDB]

The Dune Encyclopedia by Willis Everett McNelly (ed.), a collection of essays written as a companion to the Dune series, first edition by Berkley, 1984. [More info on ISFDB]

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Drümmkopf. License: CC BY.

Chapterhouse: Dune, first edition by Putnam, April 1985. Cover art by John Schoenherr. [More info on ISFDB]

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Drümmkopf. License: CC BY.

Heretics of Dune (1984), Berkley, April 1986. Cover art by John Schoenherr. A similar edition was published by Ace in 1987. [More info on ISFDB]

God Emperor of Dune (1981, see above), Ace, June 1987. Cover art by Vincent Di Fate. [More info on ISFDB]

Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr byJim Linwood. License: CC BY.

Frank Herbert: The Maker Of Dune, edited by Tim O’Reilly, Berkley, 1987. [More info on ISFDB]

The Ascension Factor by Frank Herbert and Bill Ransom, first edition by Putnam, 1988. Cover art by Ron Miller. [More info on ISFDB]

Davison Art Nouveau in the digital age

Photo-Lettering, Inc. didn’t make the transition to digital typesetting and went out of business in 1997. Davison Art Nouveau disappeared together with the company and thousands of other alphabet designs. In 2003, House Industries purchased the assets. The Delaware design studio partnered with Erik van Blokland and Christian Schwartz and started digitizing a number of typefaces by PLINC, with the help of friends and colleagues. These were initially made available in 2009 via a special web service that replicated the exclusive PLINC experience for the digital age. House Industries later switched to offering them for conventional licensing. At the time of writing, Davison Art Nouveau is not among the digitized designs.

In 2009, a Dune aficionado who goes by the moniker DuneFish (DFUK) and/or MEP made a digital font called Orthodox Herbertarian, “painstakingly traced from scans of the typeface that was used on the American Ace editions […] of Dune and many other Frank Herbert books”. This amateur digitization is freely available at kullwahad.com. The font is caps only (A–Z), with a basic set of punctuation characters and scaled-down caps in the lowercase. Because it’s based on the book covers (as opposed to the original typeface), it naturally adopts the narrowed proportions. Orthodox Herbertarian is a laudable effort, but it doesn’t include any of the alternates or the numerals. In 2020, Reddit user purgruv added lowercase letters and numerals to this freebie and offered it for download as Extended Herbertarian. The additions aren’t faithful to the original and unfortunately aren’t well drawn, either.

Orthodox Herbertarian arguably covers the needs of most Dune fans. Nevertheless, I hope to see a professional, fully featured digitization of Davison Art Nouveau one day.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

The original Davison Art Nouveau in three variants (line 1–3) with some – but not all – of its alternates, compared to the digital Orthodox Herbertarian (line 4). As a basic caps-plus-small-caps font without any extras, the freebie can do only so much. It is a decent option if you want to quickly emulate Dune’s typographic style, though.

Thanks to B., G., and Justin Hoggard, who all suggested I write an article about this use; and to Caren Litherland for the valuable edits. Kudos to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which helped a lot in identifying and dating the numerous editions and printings.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie titles

Florian Hardwig — Mon, 26 Dec 2022 23:11:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

“Rankin/Bass present” is lettering based on Weiß-Initialen Serie II, or Weiss Initials Series II, with the alternate forms for A and E, rendered bolder, with rough contours and a bouncing baseline.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a Christmas TV special that first aired on December 6, 1964. It was produced by Jules Bass and Arthur Rankin Jr. – then doing business as Videocraft International, Ltd., and later as Rankin/Bass Productions – in collaboration with the Japanese MOM Productions. From Simon Byrne’s article for Watch the Titles:

Based on the Johnny Marks song of the same name, it tells the story of the famous misfit reindeer with the glowing red nose who – together with his friends Hermey the elf and the bearded prospector, Yukon Cornelius – have a series of adventures, including run ins with an abominable snowman, a winged lion and an island of unwanted toys.

The stop-motion classic has been telecast every year since 1964, making it the longest continuously running Christmas TV special in the United States. It was directed by Larry Roemer, with assistance from Kizo Nagashima. The animation was supervised by Tadahito Mochinaga.

The story’s narrator is Sam the Snowman, voiced by Burl Ives.

Instead of MCMLXIV (1964), the roman numerals read MCLXIV, i.e. 1164. An error, or an obscure nod to the Romanesque period?

The opening titles feature hand-drawn capitals with an unconventional distribution of thicks and thins, peppered with perky curls, with roughed-up contours as found in ruling pen calligraphy, and playfully arranged on a bouncing baseline. They are not taken from a typeface, and yet are closely patterned after prefabricated letterforms.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Showing of Lawless Type in Lettera 2. Teufen: Niggli, 1961.

The source is Lawless Type, an alphabet reproduced in the second volume of Lettera. Started by Armin Haab and Alex Stocker in 1954, this book series was published in four volumes by Niggli in Teufen, Switzerland. The books were distributed in over 70 countries, and used by designers both as inspiration and as a direct source of display letterforms. Lettera 2 was edited by Haab together with Walter Haettenschweiler and came out in 1961. In the appendix, Lawless Type is described as follows:

With latinizing tendencies and italic elements, the skilled typographer can produce a sans serif with a naive effect all of its own. The individual faces [this should read ‘glyphs’ when compared to the original German text], however, must be readapted to each sequence of letters.

A note on YouTube by the Miser Brothers Press, who distributes merchandise related to the TV special, says that “[t]he lettering that is featured on the packages in the original end credits [not shown here, but stylistically in tune with that seen in the opening credits] was done by Tony Peters and Arthur Rankin, Jr.” Peters was the storyboard artist and Rankin was the producer. Rankin, who had worked as a TV art director, also drew the characters, so he probably directed Peters on the lettering.

Lawless Type was designed by Walter Haettenschweiler. While the first edition of Lettera 2 exclusively credits the prolific designer from Zug, the fifth revised edition from 1976 additionally mentions co-editor Armin Haab. According to Martino Stierli,

it was inspired by the American artist and graphic designer Ben Shahn (1898–1969), who professed a socially critical realism but also experimented early on with typography and graphic design. Haettenschweiler’s homage to Shahn […] embodies elegance and festivity in its strict linearity, but by means of its title also expresses a certain rebellion against too much faith in rules.

In: Haettenschweiler. Schriften für die Welt, Logos für Zug. Zug: DNS-Transport GmbH, 2006 [my translation from the German]

Below is a piece of Shahn’s lettering that exemplarily illustrates this style of his, made for Haggadah for Passover from 1966. It includes the A with the asymmetrical top bar and the curling G. See also the painted jacket maquette on Letterform Archive’s website. This particular work can’t be the one that Haettenschweiler referenced, as it was published several years after Lettera 2, but Shahn employed this style already in earlier works.

Haggadah for Passover. Copied and illustrated by Ben Shahn, with a translation, introduction, and notes by Cecil Roth. Boston: Little, Brown & Company and Paris: Trianon Press, 1966.
Left and center: cover and spine, title page. Images: Invaluable.

Right: vellum box stamped with gilt lettering. Image: Henry Sotheran Ltd.

A sampler of letterform variants found in Romanesque lettering, compiled by Gerard Unger and reproduced from his doctoral thesis, Alverata: hedendaagse Europese letters met wortels in de middeleeuwen. Universiteit Leiden, 2013.

Shahn didn’t invent the peculiar construction for A and G himself either. His lettering in turn takes cues from medieval inscriptions from around the 11th and 12th century. In his doctoral thesis from 2013, the late Gerard Unger examined the history and design of such Romanesque capitals. According to his research, capitals from this period – which precedes the Gothic style – are characterized by the blending of three types of letters from different times and cultures – namely derivations of Roman capitals, of uncials, and insular or Celtic letter forms, homogenized in terms of weight and contrast – as well as by exuberant variation and inventiveness. Among the endless variations collected by Unger is “the A with a flat top or with a transverse bar on top”. He also mentions the “coiled G” as a form frequently found in this period [all quotes: my translation from the Dutch].

Unger touches upon revivals and echoes of Romanesque capitals in the 20th century. One example is Shahn’s lettering. Unger offers a possible explanation for the presence of Romanesque-inspired forms in the artist’s work: immediately after completing his training in 1922, Shahn traveled through Spain and Italy, among other places. He probably saw Romanesque inscriptions or manuscripts along the way and made notes of them, later incorporating them into his graphics.

Source: www.flickr.com Scan: James Puckett (edited). License: CC BY.

Detail from a specimen for Weiss Initials Series II, showing its alternate forms for A and E as well as the curling G

A second example is Weiß-Initialen II, a set of initials by Emil Rudolf Weiß. To Unger, it is “as clear as day that these were designed along the lines of the Romanesque capitals”. First cast by Bauer in 1931, Series II was later extended as Weiß-Lapidar, with added numerals and punctuation as well as a second bolder weight. At least in a broadcast from around 1989, the end credits of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer aren’t rendered in Lawless Type. They are set – you guessed it – in Weiß-Initialen II.

For further reading on Romanesque letters, see Gerard Unger’s doctoral thesis (in Dutch) and the design notes for Alverata, his interpretation of “contemporary European letters with roots in the Middle Ages”.

Lawless Type was adopted for phototypesetting, under various names, but to my knowledge, there is no direct digitization. There are two digital fonts based on the title lettering for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: Island of Misfit Toys, a freebie with alternates made by Steve Ferrera in 2006, and Snow Job JNL, drawn by Jeff Levine in 2017. The former was used for a series of postage stamps issued by the USPS in 2014 [see comment]. Bensgothic is a font based on Ben Shahn’s lettering, started by Harold Lohner in 1998. For information about digital interpretations of Weiß-Initialen, see our typeface page.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

From top to bottom: Lawless Type (Walter Haettenschweiler, 1961), Island of Misfit Toys (Steve Ferrara, 2006, using those glyphs that come closest to Lawless Type), Snow Job JNL (Jeff Levine, 2017), and Bensgothic (Harold Lohner, 1998)

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

The Exorcist movie titles

Nick Sherman — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 15:09:49 +0000

Contributed by Nick Sherman

The Exorcist is a 1973 horror film directed by William Friedkin based on William Peter Blatty’s 1971 novel of the same name. The story focuses on the demonic possession of a young girl and the efforts of her mother and a pair of Catholic priests to rescue her. Regularly named as one of the greatest horror films of all time, The Exorcist was the first horror film to be nominated to receive an Academy Award for Best Picture. In 2010, the Library of Congress recognized it as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The Exorcist in its original book form served as the basis for the story and typography of the film.

The film’s titling, by Dan Perri, takes design cues from the typography of the book’s first-edition dust jacket, designed by Frederick Cantor. Specifically, it adopts the use of Weiss Initials No. 2 for the primary title, name credits, and location intertitles. In the credits at the end of the film, Friz Quadrata is also used as a secondary typeface for role credits and other smaller type. Subtitles in the opening scenes are set in News Gothic.

Gemini is another typeface often associated with The Exorcist , due to its use on the book’s paperback edition and, subsequently, on the iconic posters for the movie. But that typeface makes no appearance in the titles of the film itself.

The Exorcist’s titles are fairly minimal, composed with static red type on a black background, but there were still technical, artistic, political, and even legal considerations behind the minute typographic decisions. An interview with Perri at The Art of the Title goes into many details about the production considerations.

For example, Perri talks about how each decision is more sensitive when there are fewer elements involved:

“The simplicity of the titles is in the delicate handling of all the elements. On screen, the fewer the elements, the more important each becomes. So we’re dealing with two elements: a screen that’s black and type, the name of the film. How those two words interact, the size relationship, the size on the screen, the placement, how it enters the screen, all those things have impact and those are all part of my process.”

The interview also touches on how the relationship between the author and director influenced details of sizing and line-breaking:

It was a well-known fact that Friedkin and Blatty were not getting along during filming, and the design of the titles reflected that tension as well as certain legal obligations. “The two credits that precede the main title have to announce the director because it’s his film, and then the writer’s connection to the film,” explains Perri.

“It’s ‘William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist’, it’s his possessory, but then it’s ‘A William Friedkin Film.’ There are legal guidelines as well; their names had to be the same size but where Bill Blatty has three names, of course they had to be the same size. … If you look at the Friedkin title next to the Blatty title, the Blatty title looks bigger because it’s three names and two lines, whereas Billy’s name is ‘William Friedkin’ in one line. I could have stacked ‘William’ over ‘Friedkin’ the way I stacked ‘William Peter’ over ‘Blatty’. When I showed these to Billy I probably showed him a version where both their names were stacked similarly and the version we wound up using, which gave him distinction as being arranged differently than Blatty’s name.”

Perri also explains how the format of film impacted considerations for color and exposure of on-screen typography:

“Relative to putting it on the screen we all felt it had to be red. But dealing with red at all on film is always difficult because it’s so intense, the colour is so raw. When it’s exposed against black it tends to, what’s called, bloom. It swells, it glows, it’s very hard to control. I had to do a lot of exposure tests just to get the right red that wouldn’t bloom. Then the typography could do its job and convey its subtleties in the letters.”

Perri’s work on The Exorcist helped further his career in movie title design. He continued on to design the titles for other iconic films like Star Wars, Taxi Driver, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Warriors, Raging Bull, and many more.

Changes for the 2000 extended cut

An extended “director’s cut” of The Exorcist was released in 2000 with a handful of new scenes not included in the original theatrical release. That newer version of the film retains the use of Weiss Initials for the introductory titling as well as the intertitles, but for some reason the main title and other credits at the end of the film replace Weiss Initials with Optima. It’s a curious replacement, especially because the layouts seem to be nearly identical to corresponding credit screens in the original.

The replacement may have been related to practical availability though. Since the new edition of the film required additional screens of credits for digital remastering etc, those screens would have required new typesetting. But in 2000 there doesn’t seem to have been a properly authorized and/or high-quality version of Weiss Initials that was easily available for digital typesetting. So it’s possible that instead of having mis-matched type for the old and new credits, or having the new credits typeset with letterpress type, everything was reset for consistency using the digital fonts that were available. (One of the new credits of the extended cut for “additional visual effects” is given to Pacific Title, a producer of film title sequences that may have handled the new typesetting.)

For more info on the typography of The Exorcist, check out The Art of the Title’s interview with Dan Perri, and the other posts here at Fonts In Use about the iconic movie posters as well as the book’s first hardcover and paperback editions.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Reclaiming the City, Reclaiming Words: Póli Gynaikón – City of Women

Maria Paganopoulou — Thu, 06 Oct 2022 12:22:00 +0000

Contributed by Maria Paganopoulou

Covers of the magazine Póli Ginaikón

Marsha Rowe, editor of the groundbreaking feminist magazine Spare Rib, famously recalled: “Suddenly, words were possible.” She was referring to a general climate of liberation in the early 1970s, when the creation of women-run print media allowed women to express themselves freely. This is also how women in Greece must have felt when the second-wave feminist movement erupted after a painful seven-year military dictatorship (1967–1974). But Greek women’s liberation and involvement in writing and publishing didn’t start then; in fact, women were present in publishing in Greece long before that.

The newspaper Εφημερίς των Κυριών (Efimerís ton Kirión, “Ladies’ Gazette”), issue of November 19, 1900

One prominent example is Εφημερίς των Κυριών (Efimerís ton Kirión – “Ladies’ Gazette”), which covered the evolution of women’s liberation and employed solely women writers as early as the 1880s. These developments, however, were probably not recorded in any historical account in the 1970s, when a general process of democratization gave momentum to the feminist movement, expressed by a growing number of feminist periodicals. In many cases, these were politically affiliated magazines funded by large political parties. But because of the popularization of the means of typographic production – with the introduction of dry transfer lettering, phototypesetting, and offset printing – several independent, mostly anarchist publications also sprang up. Πόλη Γυναικών – ανοιχτό περιοδικό θεωρητικών και πρακτικών προβλημάτων χειραφέτησης (Póli Gynaikón, “City of Women” – an open magazine for theoretical and practical emancipation issues) was one of them.

Article in Póli Ginaikón titled “Housewife: the Demon of Consumption.” The headline pairs Pluto and a Greek version of Helvetica Condensed, available from Letraset and Mecanorma, respectively. For all letters required to spell “ΝΟΙΚΟΚΥΡΑ,” the designer found equivalents in the Latin-only Pluto.

Poli Ginaikon first appeared in January 1982. It was initiated by Ntina Malliakou, who had taken an interest in feminist issues somewhat earlier, as her contributions to Leonidas Christakis’ Ιδεοδρόμιο (Ideodromio) in 1981 indicate. Christakis, a well-known artist deeply interested in graphic design, also designed Poli Ginaikon. He sought the professionalization of the field of graphic design in Greece and served as the editor of various independent publications from the 1950s on. For Poli Ginaikon, he is specifically credited with doing the editing, the “cache” (layout), the “page montage,” and the “page creation.” In later issues, the name of Niki Konidi, who according to the masthead was a member of the editorial team, appears next to Christakis’ for the “page montage” credit. The printing and binding was done in various print shops in Athens, also meticulously recorded in the credits.

Article in Póli Ginaikón titled “Media and Autonomy.” The title set in Futura Black features an original capital Σ (Sigma) and Ω (Omega), the only letters in the words that did not have an equivalent in the Latin script. Even in absence of a proper Greek-script version, the modular nature of Futura Black must have facilitated the addition of these letterforms.

The fact that Christakis – a professional in the field who was not formally part of the editorial team – undertook the design of the magazine constitutes rather an exception to the way radical political periodicals were then produced. Many other publications followed a more pronounced DIY approach. For example, the lesbian-feminist Amazon Quarterly was typed and laid out with machinery purchased and operated by the editorial team. The design, however, was a difficult and multilevel operation, as the editor of Amazon Quarterly attests. It would have been much easier to entrust it to a veteran editor and experienced publication designer.

Article in Póli Ginaikón about feminist art in the 1970s. The title is set in Blanchard Solid. The first letter, Φ (Phi), looks like it comprises a rotated numeral 0 and the stem of a capital F or T. For Μ (Mu) and Ν (Nu), the designer didn’t repurpose the Latin M and N, as one might assume. In Blanchard, these follow the lowercase construction. As such, they were considered unfit to double as Greek capitals. Σ (Sigma) and Δ (Delta) are custom creations as well.

The topics covered in Poli Ginaikon were highly diverse, running the gamut from examining the representation and position of women in media, Greek folk art, and scientific theories to analyses of the traditional roles and activities of women (as mothers and housewives, for example, and their reproductive labor in the household). The magazine also reported on news about feminist art, and published poetry and interviews. What united all articles was their ideological compass: a far-left anti-authoritarian stance and a framing of topics with a deep knowledge of sociological and political theories. The articles also demonstrate that the magazine came about at a time when feminist organizations had matured; topics like feminist self-awareness groups were viewed critically as early as the first issue.

In terms of the imagery and typography, two core aspects of its design, Poli Ginaikon seems like a labor of love. The issues hint at extensive research for appropriate iconography and typographic experimentation with many different headline typefaces.

Eric Gill’s drawings of the Greek-script version of Perpetua, along with instructions on how to create a Greek typeface by modifying Latin characters

Generally speaking, graphic designers, sign makers, and indeed anyone who worked in visual communication in Greece in those days had to perform incredible feats of ingenuity to enhance their designs with display typefaces. The vast majority of such typefaces were produced abroad and did not offer Greek characters. Greek type designer, educator, and artist Takis Katsoulidis recalls that to widen the palette, graphic designers had to step into the role of type designer, repurposing Latin letterforms, modifying them to make them resemble Greek ones, or even creating new glyphs in the spirit of the desired typeface. The process of creating official Greek script extensions by established non-Greek type designers was much the same, as illustrated by sketches for the Greek extensions of Eric Gill’s Perpetua or Jan van Krimpen’s Romulus. Treating an alphabet this way – as derivative of the Latin script – has been criticized as impractical for the intended audience (mostly native users of the script), as not very creative, and as disrespectful of the specific cultural context the script belongs to. Despite the fact that the practice of deriving Greek letterforms from Latin ones is formally similar in the cases of both Gill and Van Krimpen on one hand and Greek type users on the other, the power dynamics at play and the occasions are in fact very different. Designers in Greece were responding to a need – the lack of typefaces – and had insight into the formal possibilities and limits of their native script. They were therefore capable of creating readable, usable letterforms even in a makeshift, one-off way, in order to express their individuality and creativity.

“With a soft rub and the letter … is imprinted instantly.”
Advertisement by Letraset in the Greek magazine Αρχιτεκτονική (Architektoniki, “Architecture”) in 1967. Reproduced in Marina Emmanouil, Graphic Design and Modernisation in Greece: 1945–1970. Doctoral dissertation, Royal College of Art, London, 2012.

For Poli Ginaikon, the majority of the titles and headlines seem to have been done with Latin-script typefaces produced for dry transfer lettering. The logo is based on Candice, a bold script issued by Letraset in 1976. While most of the Greek letters are repurposed Latin glyphs, some had to be customized. The Greek capital Π (Pi), for example, apparently is a combination of a swashy stem as found in the Latin capital T, merged with the left part of V and rotated 180 degrees. Other typefaces used include Pluto, Blanchard, and Futura Black, all likewise available from Letraset. These elaborate typographic choices, especially in the context of radical presses, have been perceived as breaking away from the minimalistic orthodoxy of the International Typographic Style. When designing for graphic design magazines, Christakis himself used sans serif typefaces, in a departure from his work for Póli Ginaikón. This suggests that he understood the publication’s specific requirements and was familiar with DIY publications abroad. The body copy in Poli Ginaikon, just as in other instances of radical magazines like the The Black Panther and Amazon Quarterly, was produced on a typewriter, using various monospaced styles. The specific typewriter styles have not yet been identified.

Collage of the Póli Ginaikón logo from issues 1, 3, and 4. In addition to Π (Pi), several other Greek letters were also created by modifying Latin glyphs from Candice: Λ (Lamda) is an upside-down V, Γ (Gamma) probably started out as a T, Υ (Upsilon) is a Y with a trimmed descender, and Ω (Omega) was made by mounting the numeral 0 onto the base of L.

The source material: an instant lettering sheet for 72pt Candice as produced by Letraset. The shown detail depicts the capitals from which Christakis assembled the logo for Póli Gynaikón.

Letraset. Scan courtesy of Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

The range of proper Greek typefaces offered by British manufacturer Letraset was limited: a catalog from 1981 lists ten families, with fifteen styles in total. For comparison: users working with the Latin script could select from 471 different styles. The same fifteen styles with Greek support were already shown in a catalog dated 1971: Chisel, Compacta, Eurostile Medium Extended and Bold Extended, Fortune (a.k.a. Volta) Extra Bold, Gill Sans Medium and Bold, Grotesque Condensed and Outline, Helvetica Light and Medium, Modern 20, Times Medium and Bold, and Upright Display (cf. Monotype Egyptian).

Mecanorma, the French competitor to Letraset, showed fifteen families with twenty-three styles in the Greek section of their Graphic Book 14 from 1988, out of a total of 605 styles: Futura Demi Bold; Pascal; Helvetica Medium and Light; Eurostile Extended and Bold Extended; Times Bold; Univers 68 and 83; Eurostile Outline; Avant Garde Light and Medium; ITC Fat Face; Antique Olive Nord; Handel Gothic; Helvetica Bold, Medium Italic, and Light Condensed; Sully-Jonquières; Sayer Script Bold; Gill Sans Medium; Grotesque Condensed; and a formal script of unknown origin. The number of typefaces with Greek support increased from eleven styles in 1980 to nineteen styles in 1986.

For the covers and also the interior illustrations in Poli Ginaikon, images by foreign feminist groups (from Denmark, for example) were included, as well as artwork by feminist artists like Judy Chicago, forging a link between the Greek women’s liberation movement and efforts abroad. One can also find sketches and engravings by local artists that visually explored relevant issues, maintaining a link to the local art scene, of which Christakis was an active member. Last but not least, images found in alternative magazines from the 1930s on (Charlie mensuel, Bizzare, and others) were included, not only demonstrating an interest in periodicals as a genre, but also presenting ways in which similarly gendered themes have appeared in media throughout history.

Cover of Póli Ginaikón, issue 2. The image on the cover is a reproduction of “the poster of the first feminist school in Denmark, 1979” as documented in the credits. The featured typefaces are Greek versions of Helvetica Condensed, Times Bold, and ITC Souvenir Bold Italic. The issue number is taken from Candice, just like the logo letters.

With its vertical structure dominated by narrow columns, Poli Ginaikon’s layout reflected the serious tone of the magazine, faithful to the reconstruction and dissemination of knowledge – but it also made a playful jab at puritanism with its imagery and typography. It initially measured 28 × 14 cm; after the fifth issue, though, the size was reduced – a change readers seemed particularly fond of.

Cover of Póli Gynaikón, issue 14, with a rotated version of the logo

The final issue of Póli Ginaikón includes articles about women living in cities.

Poli Ginaikon ceased publication in February 1985, having produced sixteen issues. The theme of the final issue was the precarity faced by women living in cities, thus coming full circle to the topic that gave the magazine its name. Its contribution to the reevaluation of the narratives and dismantling of myths that have cemented the traditional gender roles of women, and especially the gender roles of women in Greece, is undeniable.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Call for Entries: Finding Forte

Fonts In Use Staff — Thu, 12 May 2022 15:22:03 +0000

Contributed by Fonts In Use Staff

The call for entries is now open! Forte in use for a shop sign, spotted by Tom Koch in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

Trial No. 2 for Monotype Forte, as sent to and approved by John Dreyfus and Stanley Morison in May 1960.

It saw the light of day exactly sixty years ago and is arguably Austria’s most successful contribution to type design. We are of course talking about Forte, a bold brush script by graphic artist Karl Reißberger (1915–1983). Literally designed at a kitchen table in post-war Vienna, Forte was produced as a typeface for machine typesetting by the Monotype Corporation in England, and officially released in May 1962.

When metal type was all but dead, Forte got a new, larger lease on life. Microsoft licensed the digitized version and bundled the font with their Office software, starting with Publisher 97. This meant instant ubiquity: Forte was suddenly available on millions of computers across the globe. Reißberger’s typeface consequently appeared on shop signs in Mumbai, food packaging from Singapore, and manhole covers in Palermo. It also meant putting the font in the hands of people who weren’t always trained designers, and who happily squeezed, slanted, stacked, or tracked out its chubby letterforms. Like Mistral, it’s a brilliant design that has fallen into disregard after years of amateur use.

Viennese graphic designer Tom Koch wants to remedy that and shine a new light on Forte. Together with Reißberger’s daughter Mara, Koch exhaustively researched its history. Coinciding with the typeface’s sixtieth anniversary and the twenty-fifth anniversary of its adoption by Microsoft, Koch is putting together an exhibition that will be shown at the Designforum Wien in October 2022, as well as a book that will be produced with the cooperation of Slanted Publishers. The project as a whole is accompanied by a crowdsourcing campaign titled Finding Forte, and a dedicated website has been set up to gather in-use examples from around the world.

If you’ve spotted Forte in the wild, submit your finds and help document Forte’s global spread. Every image included in the book will be credited by name as a gesture of thanks. A selection of the most interesting in-use examples will be published on Fonts In Use. Happy Forte spotting!

Detail of the growing gallery on the Finding Forte website, with some of the first finds of Forte in use.

Frohes Schaffen – have fun finding Forte!

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Sega logo (1976–present)

Stephen Coles — Tue, 17 Aug 2021 07:25:46 +0000

Contributed by Stephen Coles

The Sega logo used since 1976, in its official color for the Japanese market.

Sega logo used from the late 1950s to 1974.

Sega was founded by American businessmen Martin Bromley and Richard Stewart as Nihon Goraku Bussan on June 3, 1960. The name is derived from the first two letters of each word in its predecessor’s name, Service Games of Japan.

According to enthusiast wiki site, Sega Retro, Sega’s first standardized logo — a hand-drawn simplified blackletter — came into use in the late 1950s. While the exact date of its creation is unknown, early examples of its use include the Mini-Sega slot machine (thought to be released in 1958) and the Sega 1000 jukebox from 1960.

In 1976, the company switched to the higher tech logo that we recognize today. The letters — while all customized to some degree — are clearly based on Yagi Double, a typeface by Japanese designer Teruoki Yagi which was widely available from phototype suppliers by that time.

Yagi Double (Solotype specimen) compared with the Sega logo.

The logo designer (whose identity is apparently unknown) started with the standard S and alternate A from the font, widened the E to regularize the proportions with the other letters, and created a new G that reflects the flat-sided shape of the E. The lines are slightly heavier than Yagi Double’s, as well. In its first few years, the logo underwent other modifications, such as a narrower A, but has otherwise remained unchanged since the 1980s — except for the addition of optical size variations shown below.

Source: en.wikipedia.org Image: Evan-Amos on Wikipedia. License: CC BY-SA.

The SG-1000, Sega's first video game console, introduced in 1983.

After entering the game console market, for which the brand became internationally known, the logo was seen almost exclusively in blue. Sega Retro reports that Sega designates two official colors for its logos; “Sega Blue” (#008dd0) for Japan, and a darker blue (#0060a8) for international markets, including North America, Europe, etc. That said, the tint and hue varies due to the constraints of screen displays or printing — or simply a failure to follow the corporate style guidelines.

Two Sega logo variations: for uses over 7mm high (left), and for uses under 7mm high and screen printing (right). The heavier inline on the second option retains the correct optical appearance when printed ink might otherwise eliminate the inline. Unfortunately, the compensations don’t take into account other interior spaces, such as the counters between strokes and the triangle of the ‘A’.

Source: en.wikipedia.org Image: Evan-Amos. License: Public Domain.

The Game Gear, a handheld video game system created by Sega and first released in 1990 demonstrates the ink-bleeding effect of a screen printed logo at a small size.

Sega logo versions in Chinese (世嘉, used briefly in Hong Kong during the Sega Master System's lifespan) and Arabic.

The signature inline effect of Yagi Double allowed for fairly recognizable localizations of the Sega logo, regardless of script, including Chinese and Arabic.

After Sega’s iconic use of Yagi Double, the typeface became a favorite of technology and entertainment brands, and was subsequently implemented by products such as the Mattel Electronics Portable Electronic Games and the Demolition Classic pinball machine, and most notably as the basis for the CNN logo.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

I ❤️ NY

Florian Hardwig — Sat, 26 Jun 2021 11:20:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

“I ❤️ NY” presentation board, two-line version, 1976, as archived in MoMA’s permanent collection.

“I ❤️ NY” presentation board, one-line version, 1976, as archived in MoMA’s permanent collection.

Much has been written about what is probably Milton Glaser’s most famous work. His logo for the “I Love New York” campaign was drawn in 1976 and introduced on July 15, 1977. Not only is there an entire section about it on the graphic designer’s Wikipedia page, the logo even has its own entry in the encyclopedia. There, one can read about how it came into being. At a time when New York City’s reputation was in tatters and the city on the verge bankruptcy, the State of New York hired advertising agency Wells Rich Greene to work on a PR campaign to boost tourism. Commissioned to work on a logo, Glaser famously sketched out the basic idea for it in the back of a taxi, on a paper envelope. That doodle is now in the MoMA’s permanent collection, together with the concept layout and the original presentation boards, with variants in one line and in two lines.

Milton Glaser created a logo that New Yorkers and tourists alike could identify with. Along the way, he invented a whole new form of visual expression. While the combination of letters and pictures in rebuses is an age-old device, the formula of “I ❤️ ____” did not exist as a popular meme before this logo. In fact, even the formula of “I [symbol] [something]” wasn’t really established yet, and the use of emoji still years in the future. This is almost as big of a cultural contribution as the actual logo itself.

For this article on Fonts In Use, we focus on the chosen typeface.

Glaser’s idea, as scribbled in a taxi on the way to a meeting for the campaign. The original sketch is in the collection of the MoMA, donated by Glaser.

Concept layout, 1976, as archived in the MoMA collection.

Most sources will tell you that the letters in the logo are from ITC American Typewriter. Officially released by the International Typeface Corporation in 1974 for phototypesetting, it’s a proportionally spaced typewriter face with long serifs and rounded terminals. A precursor appeared in the 1971 catalog of NYC-based typesetting studio Photo-Lettering as Typewriter 4, with alias American Typewriter. The ITC release came in three weights, all in regular and condensed widths. The Light and Medium styles are by Joel Kaden (1914–2003), who isn’t credited with any other typeface designs. The Bold plus an outlined variant were added by Tony Stan (1917–1988), a local type designer who worked on many faces for Photo-Lettering and ITC. American Typewriter was presented in U&lc magazine in 1974, a hundred years after the first commercial typewriters with monospaced typefaces had been introduced:

The resulting “typewriter look” has for generations been the machine’s hallmark – a hallmark instantly recognized by the man-in-the-street, in-the-office, in-the-shop, and in-the-home. More elaborate escapement mechanisms threaten to obsolete this familiar style, but its hundredth anniversary is an appropriate time to salute the shapes that have so intimately tied themselves into every area of our history. American Typewriter strikes a happy compromise with its forerunner. The rigid spacing is dispensed with but the distinctive typewriter flavor is generously enhanced. And there is just enough nostalgia in American Typewriter to give it top billing in contemporary typography.

American Typewriter as introduced in ITC’s U&lc magazine, volume 1, no. 3 (1974).

On closer examination, one can see that the “I ❤️ NY” logo doesn’t use American Typewriter out of the box: the letterforms are slightly bolder than the Medium weight. Especially the serifs were made considerably thicker, and the cupping was reduced. According to John L. Waters,

Glaser wanted the logo to be informal. “It was somewhere between typography and a note,” he says. “l wanted a counterpoint to the voluptuous and erotic nature of the heart.” Glaser asked his colleague George Leavitt to modify the letters of the American Typewriter typeface so that they would be less rounded.

Leavitt was a long-time collaborator of Glaser, and is credited for “lettering execution” for many of his type designs, including Baby Teeth, Baby Fat, Baby Curls, and Glaser Stencil. When comparing the one-line version of the logo to the one with two stacked lines, one can find small differences, too: most notably, the top left serif of Y is longer in the latter.

The “I ❤️ NY” logo (from the 1976 presentation board), overlain by scanned letterforms from ITC American Typewriter Regular (phototype version as shown in a catalog by Phil’s, 1980) in white.

Despite the small modifications made to the typeface, “the classic, frozen-in-amber application of American Typewriter remains the three black capital letters that surround the red heart in Milton Glaser’s ‘I Love New York’ logo,” as Michael Beirut has put it. “Any attempt to rip it off (and would anyone even dare to guess how many there have been?) doesn’t quite work unless it’s set in American Typewriter.”

Thanks to its beautiful simplicity, the logo has indeed seen countless imitations and riffs. The organization that manages licensing for the “I ❤️ NY logo” is notoriously protective of the trademark. It’s even difficult for photographers to sell a photo containing the logo. New York Times graphics editor Larry Buchanan wanted to get to the bottom of the magnitude, as Lilly Smith recounts for Co.Design:

After coming across an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible about the I ♥ NY trademark, and an article detailing a coffee shop’s dispute with the NYSDED [New York State Development of Economic Development], Buchanan went down an I ♥ NY trademark infringement “rabbit hole,” as he detailed on Twitter. He submitted a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request […] in 2015, requesting all the cease and desist letters the state had sent for trademark violations of I ♥ NY the previous year. He got a “glorious” 381-page PDF back, chock full of out-there iterations on the logo.

Source: www.flickr.com Toby Bochan. License: CC BY-NC.

The logo can be seen on a range of merchandise products, from mugs and stickers to bags.

Source: www.flickr.com H.L.I.T. License: CC BY.

The most popular carrier remains the iconic T-shirt featuring the stacked logo version.

I ❤️ NY More Than Ever

After witnessing 9/11 firsthand, Glaser revisited the logo with the declaration of love to his hometown, and devised a poster. From the School of Visual Arts:

“Over the next couple days, I did – purely out of the way I was feeling – an ‘I Love New York More Than Ever’ [poster], because that what was everyone wanted to say – everybody suddenly realized, like, with a sick parent who’s dying, I didn't realize how much I loved them.”
The original small poster became an SVA Subway poster that was distributed all over New York and its five boroughs by students from the College the week of September 11, 2001. The image quickly spread and became a symbol of their enduring love for the city.
People in the streets and on their way to work saw this expression of their deep feeling about the city on every storefront and doorway. The same iconic image was used as the front and back page of the Daily News on September 19, 2001.

“The original small poster that was distributed all over New York by students from the School of Visual Arts, the week of September 11, 2001. People in the streets and on their way to work saw this expression of their deep feeling about the city on every storefront and doorway.” — Milton Glaser. The small print is in Frutiger.

For this reinterpretation, Glaser added a small blackened burn to the bottom of the heart. While the big letterforms are, more or less, those of the logo, with thickened and straightened serifs, the added words “More Than Ever” make direct use of the American Typewriter typeface. This becomes evident when comparing the two capitals N’s. The original phototype version featured two forms for R, one with a hook, and one with a flat exit stroke, the latter of which has been used here. While Bitstream’s and Elsner+Flake’s digitizations include only the former, and URW’s only the latter, ITC’s American Typewriter Pro has both, with the flat-footed R as the default.

ITC American Typewriter comes with alternates for R e & $. These are included in ITC’s “Pro” digitization.

According to 99% Invisible, the firm that represents the NYSDED “sends out about 200 cease and desist letter per year to people they believe are in violation of the I ❤️ NY trademark. Ironically one of those letters got sent to Milton Glaser” for his 2001 update. “The state of New York apologized to Glaser, and chalked it up to a bureaucratic misunderstanding.”

Whether the logo earns New York state around $30 million per year, as stated in an article from 2015, or “just” $1.83 million, as mentioned in a 2011 interview with Glaser in the Village Voice, it definitely was a bargain: Milton Glaser didn’t ask a penny for it. He created it pro bono, out of pure love for his city, believing it wouldn’t last longer than six months anyway.

“The same combination of words and imagery was used as the front and back page of the Daily News on September 19, 2001.” — Milton Glaser

Source: www.flickr.com Toby Bochan. License: CC BY-NC.

Shopping bag spotted in Manhattan, 2005.

Source: www.flickr.com Can Pac Swire. License: CC BY-NC.

“I ❤️ NY” booth with balloons in Toronto, Canada, 2007.

Source: www.flickr.com insane gal. License: CC BY-SA.

T-shirts in various color variants, 2010.

Source: www.flickr.com Dominik "Dome". License: CC BY-NC-SA.

“I ❤️ NY” as illuminated sign on a shop front, NYC, 2013.

Source: www.flickr.com US Embassy Canada (cropped). License: CC BY.

Pinback buttons offered by the U.S. Embassy in Toronto, Canada, 2015.

Source: www.flickr.com ppdiaporama. License: CC BY-NC.

Three-dimensional version of the logo (with straightened letter shapes) in Pine Valley, Moreau, New York, 2020.

Source: www.flickr.com Joseph O. Holmes. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

The T-shirts with the iconic logo can be found all over the world, from Times Square (2006) …

Source: www.flickr.com Michael Bianchi. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

… to Malawi, Africa (2007).

At the end of the 99% Invisible episode, Milton Glaser says he thinks that the logo’s sustained success

has something to do with the rigidity of that letterform, and the attempt of the grid to contain the erotic nature of the heart. There’s something that creates an act of closure in people’s minds when they see it. […] They can look at it a hundred thousand times and still not saying “I had enough”. […] There’s simply the mystery of form: Why does a certain curve and a certain color and a certain contrast hold our attention? And why do certain other forms bore us? I don’t know. It’s a profound mystery.

The official logo as used in 2021 on the iloveny.com website by the New York Department of Economic Development.

This article was made with the help and input of Matthijs Sluiter and Nick Sherman.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Philip K. Dick paperback covers (Panther Science Fiction)

Florian Hardwig — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 19:35:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

Now Wait for Last Year (1975). Cover art by Chris Foss. [More info on ISFDB]

Roslyn Gothic arguably saw its most extensive and iconic use on the paperback covers with works by Philip K. Dick as published by Panther Books.

Designed by Harry Winters, Roslyn Gothic was released by Visual Graphics Corporation (VGC) in 1972, to be used with their Photo Typositor, a popular display typesetting machine of the phototype era. There were three styles; Medium, Bold, and Outline. The sans serif of condensed proportions is infused with some traits that seem to harken back to Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil: counters in d, g, or p are tear-shaped, e has a diagonal bar while the top arm of K is vertical, some stems in m, n, u are slightly curved, A is asymmetrical, and G is pointed at the bottom. Several of these features can also be found in German typefaces from around 1900, like Sezessions-Grotesk or Skulptur. By giving his design a large x-height and tight letterspacing, Winters turned these influences into a quintessential 1970s display typeface. With its punchy yet slightly alien-looking shapes, Roslyn Gothic became a popular choice on book covers in the science fiction genre.

Roslyn Gothic and its designer, Harry Winters, as shown in Industrial Art Methods, December 1972. Roslyn Gothic isn’t yet shown in a VGC catalog dated 1972, indicating it must have been new when the magazine came out.

As it was common with other publishers, too, Panther didn’t use a single typeface for all of their science fiction releases, but rather assigned a certain typeface to each author, building multiple sub-identities to increase their recognizability: Kabel Black for Asimov, City for Ursula K. LeGuin, American Uncial for Brian W. Aldiss, etc. The face chosen for Philip K. Dick was Roslyn Gothic Bold. The first of Dick’s paperbacks with Roslyn Gothic on the cover were issued in 1975. This choice was maintained at least until 1992.

Established in 1952, Panther Books Ltd. was a British publisher specializing in paperback fiction. By 1968, it had been acquired by Granada Group Ltd., making it a subsidiary company of Granada Publishing Ltd., and Panther Science Fiction a Granada imprint. Some of the shown books were published under other Granada imprints, including Triad Panther, or Grafton.

The Zap Gun (1975). Cover art by Peter Andrew Jones. [More info on ISFDB]

The typeface used for “Hugo Award-winning author” between 1975 and 1980 is a version of News Gothic Condensed. It sometimes appears with the standard double-storey g, sometimes with a single-storey form, and occasionally with both, in changing positions. I wonder whether this was some sort of running gag among the typesetters.

In 1990, Garrett Boge of LetterPerfect digitized the boldest weight as Roslyn Gothic LP Bold. Mecanorma’s digital version, Roslyn, covers all three styles. Released by Red Rooster in 2010, Ryder Gothic is a reinterpretation by Steve Jackaman and Ashley Muir that adds a new light weight and several alternate glyphs. [There’s a fourth digitization by Panache Graphics, see comments.]

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Three digital revivals of Roslyn Gothic Bold. From top to bottom:
1. Roslyn Gothic LP Regular (LetterPerfect, 1990)
2. Roslyn MN Bold (ITF Mecanorma)
3. Ryder Gothic Pro Bold (Red Rooster, 2010)

Clans of the Alphane Moon (1975). Cover art by Peter Andrew Jones. [More info on ISFDB]

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1976). Cover art by Richard Clifton-Dey. [More info on ISFDB]

Our Friends from Frolix 8 (1976). Cover art by Jim Burns. [More info on ISFDB]

Source: www.flickr.com Svenn Sivertssen. License: CC BY-NC.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1977). Cover art by Peter Goodfellow. [More info on ISFDB]

A Scanner Darkly (1978). [More info on ISFDB] The Brian Aldiss quote is set in Impact.

Ubik (1978). Cover art by Ian Robertson. [More info on ISFDB]

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1978). Cover art by Peter Gudynas. [More info on ISFDB]

The Penultimate Truth, 1978. Cover art by Peter Goodfellow. [More info on ISFDB]

A Handful of Darkness (1980). Cover art by Colin Hay. [More info on ISFDB]

Martian Time Slip (1983). Cover art by by Gerry Grace. [More info on ISFDB]

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1983). Cover art by by George Underwood. [More info on ISFDB]

The secondary typeface here is all-caps Franklin Gothic.

Lies, Inc. (1985). Cover art by Trevor Webb. [More info on ISFDB]

Source: www.flickr.com Steve. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

A Maze of Death (1984). Cover art by Tim Gill. [More info on ISFDB]

A Scanner Darkly (1985). Cover art by Trevor Webb. [More info on ISFDB]

We Can Build You (1986, reprinted 1988). Cover art by Chris Foss. [More info on ISFDB]

Galactic Pot-Healer (1987). Cover art by by Gino D’Achille. [More info on ISFDB]

The Preserving Machine (1987). Cover art by Chris Foss. [More info on ISFDB]

Radio Free Albemuth (1988). Cover art by Tony Roberts. [More info on ISFDB]

I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon (1988). Cover art by Chris Foss. [More info on ISFDB]

The Divine Invasion (1989). Cover art by Chris Foss. [More info on ISFDB]

Valis (1992). Cover art by Chris Moore. [More info on ISFDB]

Counter-Clock World (1990). Cover art by Chris Moore. [More info on ISFDB]

The Game-Players Of Titan (1991). Cover art by Chris Moore. [More info on ISFDB]

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1992). Cover art by Chris Moore. [More info on ISFDB]

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

10 Years of Fonts In Use

Nick Sherman — Mon, 21 Dec 2020 17:29:34 +0000

Contributed by Nick Sherman

Fonts In Use officially launched 10 years ago today, on December 21, 2010. The site, which started as just the Blog before opening up to public contributions in 2012, has grown far beyond our expectations when we first set out to create a platform for documenting and discussing typography in the real world. Since then, the site has amassed a collection of almost 17,000 designs, each using at least one of over 12,000 typeface families from more than 3,500 type companies.

Such an extensive amount of information would not exist without the hard work and moderation from our staff, past and present. It also would not be possible without submissions from the nearly 2,400 readers like you who have submitted designs to the Collection.

The information about those designs constantly grows as well, thanks to almost 7,000 comments that continue to expand beyond each submission’s original context. We’re proud that Fonts In Use is a website where we can still look forward to reading substantial, thoughtful, and insightful comments.

As much as the content is the backbone of the site, it also would not be possible without the generous support from our sponsors. They've helped the project remain a practical reality that we can continually build on and improve over time.

So what’s in store for the next 10 years at Fonts in Use? As the site continues to grow at an increasing rate, we’ve been discussing ways to help visitors discover the information that’s most interesting to them without getting bogged down by everything else. The next big change will likely be a revised homepage design where we can highlight multiple cross-sections of the database – especially the content that might otherwise be buried or underappreciated.

Over the past 10 years we’ve also built up a substantial amount of information about the fonts themselves, and we’re working on making that information more useful and accessible beyond the context of just how the fonts are used. The historical information and links between related typefaces have become essential tools for our own work, and we’d love to build on that by offering even more helpful ways to explore typefaces.

Finally, we hope to expand the scope of the site even further, to include more information about typography beyond our current focus on Latin-based text. Over the years we’ve enjoyed an increasing number of submissions from contributors with expertise in Chinese, Japanese, Korean/Hangul, Arabic, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and more. We look forward to continuing to promote more diverse content from even more segments of the type-using community, making Fonts In Use increasingly helpful for anyone interested in typography.

The statistics numbers on this page are set in Etna XX Condensed from Mark Simonson Studio who has been a sponsor of Fonts In Use for a majority of our 10-year existence.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use