Space: 1999 titles

4 Comments on “Space: 1999 titles”

1. Dwight Williams says:

   Mar 23rd, 2019 2:01 am

   How do you come up with Neil Bold for this TV series?

2. Phil Williamson says:

   Apr 7th, 2023 10:57 pm

   The main title logo isn’t actually Neil Bold. It might be based on it, but it’s hand-drawn and significantly modified. You won’t get an accurate representation of the logo by using Neil Bold as-is.

3. Dwight Williams says:

   Jun 10th, 2024 2:15 am

   Also, Neil Bold was created decades after Space: 1999 went off the air!

4. Florian Hardwig says:

   Jun 10th, 2024 7:05 am

   Dwight, that’s incorrect: Neil Bold came out in 1966. That’s almost a decade before Space: 1999 first aired. Maybe you’re thinking of the digital versions, which came much later, of course.

   Phil, you’re right: the TV show logo doesn’t represent a direct use of Neil Bold. As you say, it was rendered by hand. It’s still clear that Neil Bold served as the basis. We tag such indirect uses with “lettering derived from typeface”.

   See the comparison below. The middle line shows the glyphs from (a scan of) the original phototype. The distortions of the perspective effect aside, the letterforms were made boxier and the grooves in P and E were closed, among other things. The bottom line has a resetting in Canada Type’s digitization, which is largely faithful to the original, with the exception of the 9: this numeral originally had a larger aperture – just like in the TV show logo.