Festival of Britain
“Prestige” poster for UK use
Festival Titling was designed by Phillip Boydell and cut by Monotype in 1950 as the official display face for the Festival of Britain, a national exhibition held throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951. The typeface was used for all official Festival announcements and was made available for general use in 1952.
A shadowed fat face (or lettering?) usually accompanied the Festival logo, representing the year. I don’t know it, but Ingeborg Block, an unrelated contemporary typeface, is similar.
The Festival of Britain was organised by the government to give Britons a feeling of recovery in the aftermath of war and to promote the British contribution to science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts.
This 16 page guide, designed by the London Press Exchange, features the Festival Star motif by Abram Games.
This pamplet uses an inline version of Festival Titling.
2 Comments on “Festival of Britain”
It’s very much worth reading this excellent article by Paul Rennie, which places the lettering in context of the revival of Victoriana over the last decade or so prior. People in this tendency included Nicolete Gray (who advised on 'indigenous’ lettering for the Festival events) Edward Bawden, John Betjeman, Rowland Emmett (who also did design work for the Festival - you must cover him sometime) and some of Ravilious’s design work for Wedgewood.
The image designed by London Press Exchange uses several of the Fanfare Ornaments designed by Berthold Wolpe for Fanfare Press; they published a specimen of Fanfare Ornaments in 1939. So it is likely that Fanfare Press printed the piece shown here since the ornaments were a proprietary design.
See mobile.twitter.com/stbridel…
RIT’s Cary Collection has recently digitized their copy of the Fanfare Ornaments specimen (in response to my inquiry, thank you!). See:
digitalcollections.rit.edu/…
(Hint: click on the single page icon in the lower right part of the screen for easiest scrolling.)