Her Alibi (1989) movie poster
Contributed by Jayce Wheeled
on May 28th, 2021. Artwork published in
.
Source: fffmovieposters.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Her Alibi is a 1989 American romantic comedy film directed by Bruce Beresford, written by Charlie Peters and starring Tom Selleck, Paulina Porizkova, William Daniels, and James Farentino.
The movie poster features a logo that seems to be based on Harting [see comments], and the remaining text set in ITC Garamond Condensed Book.
4 Comments on “Her Alibi (1989) movie poster”
I’m not exactly sure what we’re looking at here. I’m aware of two different versions of Harting; Plain (also known as Harting I) and Regular (Harting II). All of these fonts have a “© 1992” date in the font metadata, and hence came later than this poster. Harting isn’t a perfect match for the letterforms either.
On the other hand, numerous details in the artifacts of the ribbon texture do match, to the point where they can’t be accidental. See e.g. the thickened crossbar in H, the dot between its base serifs, the little nose in the aperture of e, the notch at the center of the r’s base serif, etc. pp. So, maybe there’s another (bolder) Harting that was available already in 1989? Or is the 1992 date wrong, and it’s simply Harting, modified (or drawn over)? Harting’s A and the right part of its r are rather weak; it would make sense to beef up these details a little. Or was there a precursor under a different name, from which Harting was derived?
The image below shows the movie logo compared to Harting Plain, slightly stretched and with adjusted spacing. I’ve added “uncertain typeface ID” for the moment.
This mystery is (partly) solved: Harting (1992) is a digitization of Ribbonfaced Typewriter, which was around at least since 1978. I’ve adjusted the typeface credit, even if we still don’t know where Ribbonfaced Typewriter came from, and in which form it was used for this poster.
Ribbonfaced Typewriter seems to have originated at ATF. The earliest specimen I’ve found is in the 1906 catalog, although you need a high-resolution scan to actually make out the texture. This is from the 1912 catalog:
That’s an outstanding discovery. Thanks, fangly!
Knowing the original spelling of its name, I was able to dig a little deeper. Turns out the typeface originated at the Boston-based Typewriter-Type Company as early as 1900. The design was acquired by ATF a few years later. I’ve updated the typeface page.
Here’s an ad from the May 1900 issue of the Inland Printer. The copy suggests that such a ribbon effect was possible already before, but it required extra steps of processing the output: