The Supplements concert poster
Contributed by Garrison Martin on Feb 10th, 2023. Artwork published in
February 2023
.
Source: twitter.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Show post/poster for The Supplements at Miami bar/venue Thank You Miami. Two typefaces often miscredited to David Carson are used, Big Ed and Serifedsans. Edwin Utermohlen designed Big Ed in 1995. Address details come courtesy of Benton Sans Compressed as it’s the more legible choice to Serifedsans at such a low size.
Some 1990s/Wolf of Wall Street influence, for sure. I actually used some AI to sketch out an image based on keywords, then remade/refined with Photoshop.
Photo: Garrison Martin. License: All Rights Reserved.
7 Comments on “The Supplements concert poster”
I noticed that Serifedsans have the same design as Boback which caught my eye.
Good catch, Jay. Yes, it looks like Boback (introduced around 2006) is Serifedsans with a second bolder weight. That solves the riddle how this typeface could be used for the Channel 2 compilation from 2003. I have changed the credit. I’ll ask Nathan Williams whether he’s the designer of Serifedsans.
Virtually identical, Jay! I saw the other day how the first few issues of Ray Gun magazine from David Carson used a logotype in a similar style to Serifedsans/Boback.
Not just a similar style: the initial Ray Gun logo used in late 1992 is a perfect match for Serifedsans. Here’s a comparison – the spacing matches without any adjustments.
According to Williams, the basic typeface was provided to him by a designer working at an ad agency in Wichita, Kansas. He was granted the rights to offer it as a commercial typeface through Baseline Fonts, now named Boback.
Wow! That’s nuts! So that type probably existed as a digital font at the time. Could they have used Serifedsans (or whatever it was called then) on Ray Gun back in '92?
Yes, it looks like that. Either that, or someone made a font inspired by the Ray Gun logo, making sure it perfectly replicates the logo when setting these letters. I think it’s more likely that the font was indeed around already in November 1992.
This was the heyday of hybrid fonts – Dead History (VAG Rounded × LT Centennial) is from 1990, FF Fudoni (Futura × Bodoni) from 1991, and Time In Hell (Times × Helvetica) came in 1994. 1992 is probably a tad too early for this design to be made with FontChameleon, but of course such hybrids could also be created “manually”. Serifedsans is Trade Gothic Bold Condensed #20 with serifs tacked on.
FontChameleon was a program by Ares Software that lets one blend between existing typeface designs. Version 1.0 was presented in the Feb. 1993 issue of MacUser. Read more about it at TrueType Typography and see it in action in this demo video.