Wordmarks from a private stock of predigital lettering scoured from low resolution archives, personally converted to bezier outlines by Robb for use by today’s graphic designers who appreciate the wonky shapes of yesteryear.
These are not fonts, sorry.

An adventure that will blaze… A love that will flame… ‘Till the stars grow cold… is illustrated as a strident horse-and-camel epic ranging from the UK to a plate tectonically confused Euraisafrica. Impetuous adventure. Brush lettering is flared for the swashbuckling men in turbans, some condensed romans dance for western blondes in red heels. Here, multiple layered brush strokes were required to build up weight but leave tell tale hillocks at overlaps, artifacts which betray the hand of the letterer. I decided to exaggerate them and regulate the quirks into features. Certain of the digitization’s traditionally flat(ish) bases’ stroke ends now have arcing shapes emerging from the severed ends. The “h” ascender deserves a logical corner joining two true trajectories. A respectable point, perhaps just a little blunted from the brush’s glob of ink. Instead, the sure shot is interrupted by a spear point jutting northeast. This is no longer a mistake of naturally occurring doubled strokes with performance enhancement but a new shape emerging from within, or overlapping the silhouette? Where the emergent shapes are potentially violent in the flats, bladed, the curved strokes were also emphasized with cushioning bloats in the “T” top swash and “e” round. Sharp and soft. Adventure and love. Conquest and comfort.

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All © and ™ 1950 20th Century Fox?

Posted at 5:12pm and tagged with: movie, lettering, brush, 1950s, poster,.

Suzie Wong’s significance, book to stage to film to ballet adaptations was unknown to me, before my media-aware time. Some claim the story classic. Others may target it for any number of offenses: Estranged Westerner in an Exoticized Eastern Land. Saving the Hooker with a Heart of Gold. Pandering Pidgin English. Yellow Fever. Regardless, it stuck. Maybe “the west [America] was trying to prove they have gotten over racism” according to France Nuyen (Suzie on stage) or Ming Wen’s reductive speculation that “male fantasy for a pretty subservient concubine” is key? The character’s appeal, or attraction to postwar East/West culture clashed lovers schtick endured, revived as nightclubs on three continents, implying a lifestyle beyond story. The aesthetics range, it is curious to see which interpretations of nostalgia were adopted. Amsterdam and New York chose squared geometry of ebony window screens. Beijing revived the film’s 60s gogo jetstream sans logo, full-sail shapes previewing the international swinging world to come, where large scale free form plastic or fiberglass paneling was grafted to functional bodywork, obscuring the boring normal bits of life. Too much speculation over Brush Script titled 2010 novel retelling the story for today’s global economy could spiral into questioning whether the art director was typographically misinformed, a sad attempt at calligraphy, or meant it to look appropriately street-level OEM cheap in a fit of brilliance. Or, was it a contemporary typographic “retelling” of the hand lettered 1950s cover shown here? My favorite bit, is that the lettering coupled with the illustrated girl of indeterminate age (ignoring shifty shore leave sailor background and her brazen red nail polish) could very well be Suzie Wong Girl Detective/Reporter/Blogger. Harriet the Spy by way of Veronica Mars. Time and place are anywhere/when choker-collared dresses could be deemed fashionable on a girl with more determination than you. Handwritten script runs all vague directions, kid carefree or adult vice. It is Reiner Script to the (crooked) bone. Differences in letter construction vary, and perhaps the letterer doused the pen with too much ink, changes in direction left globbier rounds unlike the chiseled look of Reiner.

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©1957 and ™ Richard Mason and Fontana Books

Posted at 9:16am and tagged with: lettering, script, brush, lowercase, 1950s, book,.

The little I know of this book: it was based on Gauguin’s life and met with scandal upon publication (burnt in a filming of Fahrenheit 451) for all the irresponsible libertine artiste urges? Society was shunned in the name of capital “A” Art. So too was typographic logic cast aside for the freedom of organic pen and brush strokes in the Bantam edition’s title. Caps do not match their lowercase by traditional standards. Caps do not match themselves. Two out of three (“T” and “M”) are what I generalize as Nonthreatening Postwar Modern, built upon the legacy of Bodoni but drawn with cartoon squish and bounce for midcentury headlines. Baselines wavered. Straight strokes swung gently, warped inward a little, like letters stretching after a nap. Sometimes waists, like the “T” here, are cinched a little, sucked in ensuring a gut is kept at bay. Lowercase serifs climb up above the usual ramrod straight clip, a more human touch with some historic precedent. The lowercase x-height is inconsistent. Stress dips back to oldstyle. Relationships from thick to thin stay sparkly Modern, connections are fragile like candy floss and begin to pull pieces away from the “h” stem which looks unsettling and biological, as if the entry point was barbed? I don’t understand why serifless “h” feet ignore the logic of the single serifed “n.” Perhaps the transparency got damaged before press, features were lost. Perhaps the letterer could not be bothered by my narrow expectations of serif relations’ diversity. Philistine am I.

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©1950 and ™ W. Somerset Maugham and Bantam Books

Posted at 12:51pm and tagged with: lettering, book, serif, book, 1950s,.

What looks good small might lose its sheen big. Consistently contradictory methods drive this site and declare I don’t adjust the spacing for whim or preservation’s sake. The excitable reader in me, not just the traditionalist typographic education etched into my post-script tracking bones, wants those letters to tighten up. Big and bare, “The” is no longer urgent as it shouts on the cover. Letters enlarge, so must the vacancy between them. Users would be best to cram those stems as tight as legibility and output can handle for the suspenseful effect compressed italic sans were historically perfected for (not to mention the now vacuous counters and gaping “e” aperture.) Bear with the tangent, but might the notion of tight spacing best sells EXCITEMENT be both economical as well as aesthetic? Busier tense flickering of dark and light positive/negative shapes make the links between eye-brain-nervous system trigger faster and harder? And, we were raised in an era of advertising descended from broadsides. Ink plus paper plus space (on and off the paper) equaled money so space was filled with tight headlines yielding greater copyfit as a result of thrift which became urgency’s look and feel? Scrollable (and “pinchable?”) screens become endless. How much longer will the notion of FILL ’ER UP last? When can tall letters track out beyond our current comfort zone? When, or has, the nineties’ broken rule returned as a viable option? Perhaps it is, perhaps this looks fine to the fresh-faced youth. To my eye, the “e” yawns, no danger is pending at The Farmhouse.

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©1950 and ™ Helen Reiley and Dell?

Posted at 7:05pm and tagged with: 1950s, book, condensed, italic, sans, lettering,.

“The workman in drawing letters should use the technical limitations of the craft in which he works, to its own advantage. He should not endeavor by trickery to obtain results in one material or method that by right belong to others. Nor should he undertake to master that which in the nature of things is not to be overcome…he should not draw in line to imitate the technique of a woodcut, or design a type to give the effect of a letter engraved in copper…” — Frederic W. Goudy reflecting upon his 1905 design Engravers’ Roman, which could likely be attributed to his initial, and relatively out-of-character, weight of Copperplate Gothic drawn in succession for the invitation market. “Today, I would refuse even to consider such a commission; then my ideas were not so fixed.” I thank Goudy’s lapse. I thank a titan of original American type design for that family. Sadly, careless typographers blow it up without recognizing how fine serifs in small sizes turn warty when large, and shouty (or ignorant) typographers discredit the font as a blight. So, when I see lettering artists keep true to the engraved formula of however big+sharp thin serifs, especially with widened proportions, it looks lovely.

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All ©1957 and ™ Scripto and F. Siebel?

Posted at 9:29am and tagged with: lettering, serif, caps, ad, 1950s,.

A child treated to Tom Hamil’s Brother Alonzo is, parents hope, a budding artist. Hamil bridges the abstract joy of paint and color for the whim of it amidst “representational” smiling tonsured monks, pulling off much with simple blocks of pigment and spare black outlines. A less-is-more approach in cartoon anatomy doesn’t transfer to his letter shapes. The fortunate child may stumble in their future career as a lettering savant if so inspired by the book whose titles are flowery, flouncy, and sometimes a mess-without-reference. The title spread is blackletter of a sort, because that’s what Monastic texts used, right? But what does that actually look like again? Cap “A”s do what? Sharp things, curly things, just add some confused feature bits and kids will get it as “old.” I forgive him, because he means so well and fumbles it with affectionate craft. Better, the farewell script is as soupy joyous as the smiling brothers. This is the end, there is no room for restraint, one last indulgent hurrah. Weights gone erratic, those close “h” and “e” trajectories are going to hug. That is not a collision course.

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©1957 and ™ The MacMillan Company and Tom Hamil?

Posted at 11:49am and tagged with: book, connecting, script, 1950s, lettering,.

Abbott & Costello Part Two. One for the rebels looking to take the Tuscans and Kurilians of old out of the Westerns ghetto. Well, it is Hollywood west, but sans cowboys. What fascinated me more was that the letterer took the load bearing width of workhorse bracketed slab Clarendons like Ionic (which if, assuming you’re not aggregating this, you are reading right now) and modified them using decorative wood type accents at the serifs and mid-stem. The ample space between characters actually allows the modest spurs to be features and not distractions which is typical in the compressed display cuts favored by old poster folk and produced a Big Top variation of the “picket fence effect.” The weight and proportions here are reinterpreted to blend the crisp details of the title with the width of the genuine though tinier “the.” Purists be forgiving.

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©1955 and ™ Universal International Pictures?

Posted at 11:56am and tagged with: caps, slab, Tuscan, serif, movie, 1950s, lettering,.

This is where digitization from low resolution images makes for the loosest of interpretations. Do I believe the points of this baseball banner lettering are actually blunted nubbins? No. Are they dulled in reproduction by photographing or screen-shooting the inherently fuzzed image? Probably, and so it becomes a feature to explore and the lottery of soft focus-to-pixel grid created nubbins of varying sizes (small for diagonal serifs and top/bottom extremes, larger for horizontals). Other remnants imperfectly kept include the floating “E” and misaligned “H” serifs. I only know see that I forgot that the “H” shadow ends just shy of the “E,” damn.

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©1951 and ™ Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer?

Posted at 11:56pm and tagged with: serif, movie, caps, toned, tuscan, lettering, shadow, 1950s,.

There is not much to say beyond admiring, after so many looped script variations filled to the brim with effort, the simplicity that only a few angles can bring to a sans wordmark. Also, had Mr Hartley gone over the top, the title would fall apart into goofiness, a job capably handled by smiling elephants. I only learned this was a Disney work after finding an unattributed image link, taken from their 1957 magazine or so Kevin Kidney’s exhaustive company illustration archive explains. Thanks for documentation Mr. Kidney.

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©1957 Walt Disney Magazine, illustration by Paul Hartley

Posted at 11:14am and tagged with: sans, caps, 1950s, magazine, lettering,.