Valstiečių laikraštis logo
The nameplate in squooshed Daphne on issue 1, 1995
Valstiečių laikraštis (English: “The Peasants’ Newspaper”) is a Lithuanian-language newspaper targeting farmers. First issued on August 27, 1940, by the newly established Lithuanian SSR, it has survived into the post-Soviet era, making it the nation’s oldest continuously published newspaper.
The newspaper initially used different nameplates with custom lettering, see the images at the end of this post. The current logo was introduced in the early 1990s, after Lithuania regained independence. Chances are it debuted in 1992, when the newspaper was privatized after being briefly published by the Ministry of Agriculture. It’s definitely in use since 1995.
The typeface is Daphne, designed by Georg Salden (b. 1930) and released for phototypesetting with Berthold in 1970. You can read more about the typeface and how it led to the formation of the GST-Kreis in a previous post. I don’t think Daphne existed in digital form in the 1990s. It’s possible that the unknown logo designer used the phototype version, or worked from a printed sample found in a type catalog. Three decades later, the newspaper logo in green Daphne is still going strong and has been adapted to signs of various sizes, with varying amounts of stretching.
Since 2012, an official digital version of Daphne is available from TypeManufactur – with the correct proportions as intended by Salden.
The newspaper nameplate on an issue from 2010
Even more squooshed than usual: the logo in Daphne in extra-large use on top of a building close to Vilnius International Airport, spotted in 2015
Newspaper stand on Gedimino g. 27 in Kaunas
Office building in Vilnius, documented in 2022
The first issue of Valstiečių laikraštis had a nameplate composed of bold blocky sans-serif letters with a characteristic angular S (compare to Koloss). Shown here is a red version from no. 33, December 1940.
Already in 1941, the nameplate was redesigned to feature a free-wheeling bold italic didone. Like the precursor, it’s a custom logo and not based on a typeface. The shown issue is from 1946.
