The Children’s Place logo and ad
The Children’s Place newspaper ad from the Courier Post, Thursday, Dec 17, 1970.
The Children’s Place is a children’s clothing retailer founded in 1969, comprising hundreds of stores, which operates primarily in the United States and Canada. They began using a tightly-tracked implementation of Formula for their logo, and continued to use it throughout the 1970s.
Given that Formula was released in 1970, and the Children’s Place began using it that same year, this is likely to be one of the earliest significant uses of the typeface.
[Edit: it’s probably not Formula, but a customized Helvetica, see comments.]
Kids from the 1970s and 80s often remember this store fondly as it has a slide, a TV, and a pipe to crawl though (crawl pipe shown in one of the images below).
The title and body text of the print ad are set in Tempo, Ludlow’s Futura follower. The giveaway is in the alternate two-story a used in the headline.
The logos of Creative Playthings (in Helvetica) and the Echelon Mall (Optima) fall outside the scope of this post. The bold grotesque caps used for “upper level next to Strawbridge” are unidentified.
Detail
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Logo from a newspaper ad in the Delaware County Daily Times, Thursday, Aug 22 1974
The store sign is based on the typeface Formula.
7 Comments on “The Children’s Place logo and ad”
the undentified type is Gothic No. 13
Looks good, thanks! Added.
Bit of a discrepancy here — this logo was designed in 1968 by George Nelson & Co. and made its debut in December of that year with the announcement of personnel needed for the first store in Hartford, Connecticut, set to open February 1, 1969.
As Formula is claimed to have been released in 1970, this may either knock back the face’s design date by two years or this logo used a bespoke Helvetica customization predating Formula entirely.
Thank you, Ryan! What’s the source of your information? Not that I doubt it, but it’d be nice to be able to reference it.
I found showings of the logo and the George Nelson & Co. credit in Industrial Design, Vol. 16 No. 4, from May 1969, and again in No. 10 from December 1969.
What strikes me as odd about the Formula ID is not so much the date – 1970 is the recorded release date, not necessarily the design date; it might have existed earlier. Rather, it’s the fact that a design from a fledgling and relatively obscure phototype company in London, UK, would end up in early use across the pond, in the United States. After Formula got adopted by Letraset, it certainly enjoyed international distribution, but before? I find it unlikely (but can’t rule it out either).
I find your suggestion of a bespoke Helvetica customization more plausible. Unfortunately, the logo doesn’t include any of the glyphs where Formula is clearly different from a rounded Helvetica (like G). One detail that looks off in comparison to Formula is the exit stroke in a and d, which appears to be at a slight angle and not fully rounded. See the shop sign in a photograph in Interiors, Vol. 129 No. 6, January 1970, below. This detail is also visible in some of the images included in the post.
Jayce, if you agree, I’ll adjust the typeface credits.
Florian, my primary information comes from the 1976 book American Trademark Designs by Barbara Baer Capitman, and the information about its appearance in advertising came from a quick search of Newspapers.com (the first reference to the store being in early December 1968).
Thank you, Ryan! American Trademark Designs has a good reproduction of the logo. It exhibits the same differences in regard to the terminals of a and d (as well as some other, less clear ones like the i dot), see the lowercase of Formula One below:
I think it’s safe to say that it’s in fact a customized Helvetica, and not an early use of Formula. I’ll adjust the credits.
All good—change it up. Good find.