“Tough team to beat.” Ford Ranger ad
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “italia”. License: All Rights Reserved.
Colin Brignall’s Italia, a redrawing of ATF Jenson issued by Letraset in 1975, in use in its Book and Bold weights for a print ad for “Ford’s tough Ranger 4x4” from 1985.
The signature and claim (“Ford Ranger / America’s truck / Built Ford tough”) uses all-caps ITC Lubalin Graph.
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Bart Solenthaler and tagged with “italia”. License: All Rights Reserved.
3 Comments on ““Tough team to beat.” Ford Ranger ad”
Looking at old magazine ads makes me wish that tight but not touching fonts were more common. I mean, I know that Scangraphic has their “SH” series but it seems to suffer from overshoot distraction. Just makes me wish and wish.
The thing with (some) display phototypesetting devices as well as with Letraset was that the spacing had to be determined by the user, letter per letter. With digital fonts, we expect the font to work out of the box. Throwing global negative tracking onto it just doesn’t cut it most of the time. And while it’s possible to manually fine-tune the letterspacing for print and static images as well as for live web text (with helper tools like Lettering.js), a solution built into the font itself is indeed much nicer.
Nick Sherman’s ‘Tyght’ version of his HEX Franklin is a proof-of-concept variable font that “minimizes the need for manual kerning on the user’s end when employing extra-tight phototype-style display spacing.”
Huh! I didn’t know that. You learn something new every day.