A connoisseur of M.F. Benton’s work was inspired to combine the capitals of Wedding Text with the classic (not necessarily fitting) American Text. A sprinkling of Bernhard Modern rounds off this stroll through the ATF catalog. (The few bits of Myriad probably were not a deliberate choice, and therefore not worth mentioning).

Most likely, this label has been designed in-house at Sallandt – Alte Münsterländer Kornbrennerei & Liqueurdistillerie GmbH, however I cannot find definitive proof of this (but other labels in their collection look remarkably similar).

Kölsche Mösche (“The Cologne Sparrows” in the local dialect) is an alias used during carnival by the Quartettvereinigung Rheinland 1919. The men’s choir led by Heinz Eckert (1929–2015) recorded a couple of albums in the 1970s. This one, released in 1975 by Colorit and Music for Pleasure, comes with a cover photograph depicting Katz Castle with the famous Lorelei rock in the background.

The title is presented in François Boltana’s Stilla Caps (Letraset, 1974), with tight letterspacing and tildes used in place of dashes. The uncredited designer used those forms for the letters E, L, M and N that are not included in the digitizations by Linotype, Scangraphic and Elsner+Flake.

[More info on Discogs]

Letragraphica sheet LG1836 with Stilla Caps in 72pt. The alternates and extras are absent from the available digital versions.

This unworn T-Shirt from the Python Conference 2002 – before it was called PyCon – is currently available on eBay. In my opinion, the design (presumably by Erik van Blokland) perfectly embodies the whimsical spirit of Python.

These sets of “Party Loot Bags” use Cyrus Highsmith’s Eggwhite (2000). The designs probably date from around the mid-2000s, when Expression Factory (a brand of Regent House) used the typeface on their website, too. The domain is no longer in use since 2015.

“It’s Party Time!” additionally features Curlz by Carl Crossgrove and Steve Matteson.

Screen-printed poster for the Second Celtic Music Festival in Selb, Upper Franconia, Germany. The concert on 27 October 1979 marked “jazz pop & folk № 25” within the Rosenthal Feierabende, a series of cultural events sponsored by Rosenthal, the local manufacturer of chinaware.

The participating bands and artists were the Tannahill Weavers (Scotland), Wild Geese (Ireland), Ar Bleizi Ruz & Patrick Ewen (Brittany), and Joe & Antoinette McKenna (Ireland).

Primitive started life at Farmer, Little & Co, New York, in 1886. In Germany, it was also know under the name Alt-Englisch (“Old English”). Secondary text is set in all-lowercase Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Wow 2 is a live album by Japanese experimental noise rock band Boredoms, produced by John Zorn and released in October 1993 on his Avant Records.

The cover uses Zuzana Licko’s Totally Gothic caps – stretched by roughly 130%, and outlined to make them quite a bit heavier. The colorful stripes around the type are also all outlines of Totally Gothic, I am counting at least 25 stroke applications.

The stroke treatment makes Totally Gothic look a bit like graffiti – an unexpected transformation!

Design by Tomoyo T.L, with typography by Lisa Wells.

[More info on Discogs]

The rounded sans used for the Japanese text on the spine card (a.k.a. obi) is unidentified. [edit: it’s Sūbo, see comments]

Armand Van Helden’s simple production style embodies the spirit of the 1990s – this cover fittingly combines two prime examples of Emigre’s “grunge fonts” era – Zuzana Licko’s Journal and Frank Heine’s Motion. Hard to get more ’90s than that. The distressed bold sans used for “Presents” is unidentified.

[More info on Discogs]

House number tiles with Hermann Zapf’s Saphir, spotted in San Francisco’s Marina District in 2013. According to Google Street View, the sign was installed already in 2008.

For the Wereldhavendagen (“World Port Days”) in Rotterdam, local design studio 75B combined the heavily-inktrapped grotesque Bauziet with a customized version of Gill Kayo named Wereldhavendagen. The images shown here are from the 2023 edition, but this visual identity is in use since 2021.

The introduction video below explains (in Dutch) the ink traps in the Wereldhavendagen typeface: a reference to the rectangular ports that the city of Rotterdam has excavated along De Maas river over time.

All-lowercase Optex (Letraset, 1970), reversed and with black and white lines, for the cover of Cooking with Microwave Magic.

The spiral-bound cookbook was authored by Joan Toole, “a leading authority and pioneer in the field of microwave cooking” and also “president of her own firm, Microwave Magic Co.” [Morton Grove Public Library]. It was published around 1975 – in that year, the sales volume of microwave ovens for the U.S. industry had grown to one million, compared to 40,000 units in 1970. A third edition came out in 1977 (see below), and a sixth edition in 1983.

Revised enlarged third edition, 1977

Van Duijn is a transportation company from De Lier, the Netherlands. Their trucks use the Letraset classic Odin to great effect – large, orange, and in motion.

I would like to know why this design is called “Odin” – which is the supreme god of war, according to the Natural museum of Denmark. No matter what the explanation may be, Odin is a great design, these are great trucks, and the logo works even better because it’s orange.

Hobo mushrooms, spotted by Frank Grießhammer in Oakland, California, 2016.

3-dimensional Banco letters for the sign of a store offering door locking products and services. “Auto-Fermeture” is in Microgramma. The “AF” initials are custom, but appear to be loosely patterned after Stop. Auto-Fermeture is a carpentry and locksmith based in Paris’ 11th arrondissement, specializing in automatic doors, with more than 50 years of experience. Spotted by Frank Grießhammer in 2016.

A font in indirect use: The handpainted signs of the Heit Family Dentistry in Santa Cruz, California feature lettering that’s based on Premier Shaded. While the sign with the opening hours closely follows Colin Brignall’s typeface design, the one shown above takes more liberties, and has bolder strokes. In addition to the shadow, the letterforms are enhanced with a bright inline that fades out toward the bottom.

Spotted by Frank Grießhammer in 2015.

All-caps Siegfried for the signs of a multi-purpose shop (“Stationery / Gifts / Drug store”) in Prague, Czech Republic.

I am a book. I am a portal to the universe. is a new book by Stefanie Posavec and Miriam Quick. The book describes itself:

I'm different to any other book around today. I am not a book of infographics. I'm an informative, interactive experience, in which the data can be touched, felt and understood, with every measurement represented on a 1:1 scale. How long is an anteater’s tongue? How tiny is the DNA in your cells? How fast is gold mined? How loud is the sun? And how many stars have been born and exploded in the time you’ve taken to read this sentence?

In a refreshing and joyful manner, the book explains various bits about the universe in reference to itself, smartly illustrating curious, and sometimes surprising facts. The graphics and illustrations use FF Quixo Light and Italic exclusively, and very inventively: Quixo is not just used for setting the text, but also as a source for graphical elements.

As a type designer, I sometimes wonder if the time spent on drawing characters like U+00A4 CURRENCY SIGN (¤) or U+2202 PARTIAL DIFFERENTIAL (∂) is really worth it – now I can say that it definitely is! Both are used not once, but multiple times throughout the book.

Lawn sign spotted by Frank Grießhammer.

Ed Benguiat’s ITC Souvenir (1970) was one of the most popular typefaces of the 1970s and 1980s. In 1977, Mark Simonson wrote about the fate of successful typefaces, exemplified by Souvenir:

Great! Yawn. Next?
Here’s something that happens all the time. A new typeface appears. First, some big agencies start using it. Then more and more people become aware of it, and because of the demand more and more type-setting places start carrying it. Before you know it, it’s the most popular typeface in the country. Then, little by little, people get tired of looking at it and the popularity levels off. Around this time, it is “discovered” by mediocre-to-poor designers who proceed to drive it into the ground through over-use. Take the typeface above. It’s called Souvenir, a French word meaning “to remember”. It’s only a few years old, but many designers are already trying to forget it.

Fast forward to 2014. By then, ITC Souvenir was no longer ubiquituous, and had shaken off most of the negative connotations. It was a just neat chubby face again, with the added benefit of being familiar to many eyes. That’s why it could serve Libby Schaaf in her successful campaign for the 2014 Oakland mayoral election.

A flawless LTypI: ITC Bauhaus for the Bauhaus Automotive Repair Shop in Berkeley, California. The gap in A has been closed in this application.

Permanent display on the wall of the Bulgarian embassy in Vienna, Austria, advertising sunny Bulgaria as holiday destination. The tightly spaced caps are modeled after Revue, using J for an initial I, as it was common in sign painting and making in German-speaking countries. The descending N was included in Letraset’s original version as an alternate.

The ad was probably was installed around 1984, after the building was completed. The photo was taken by Frank Grießhammer in 2007. The location was kindly tracked down by Johannes Lang. By 2017, the sign was gone, as documented by Google Street View.

So good. Perfect specimen material for OH no Type Co.!