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,.

“Decorations by W Aylward” is honest. “Decoration” is a term rarely used today given the serious emphasis attributed to DESIGN and the puffed-chest academic shamanism it takes to wield it. Honesty is refreshing. It’s only a poem, with illustrations and fancier titles than normal. Scribner’s Magazine dealt high definition entertainment in 1913, it was America’s first mass market rag to include COLOR illustrations (1887). Leading talent was commissioned to dazzle audiences. Lettered decorations along The Way to Inde pass through heat distortion, fluttering romances, shimmering confusion, and other trespasses. So, which South Asian script is this lettering approximating? Probably all of them, pulled from Aylward’s recollections of people in overheated environments with wavy flags and symbols which looped in and out of themselves breaking Latin logic. The horizontal stroke topping the “W” is a little Lombardic and excusably close for a seafaring Wisconsonian referencing linear connections in Devanagari or Bengali, but has little relation to the other typographic conventions on his page. The Way to Inde is mapless, adrift, and beset with guesswork. It picked up a backswooping “d” from some colony using early engraved French type. This confusion, or playfulness, is why I love it. Freed and odd. The strange beast has interesting contrasts, strong verticals in stems with rigidly bored (drilled) counters, like they’ve been tunneled into. Antfarm negative space? A lot of the action here is in the small shapes. The minimal counters, small gestures amplified by so much surrounding black, movement implied by inky little feet kicking out exit strokes (“h” up, “e” down), while partnering stems suction tight to the baseline. The lumpiness of the brush and ink curdles where multiple overlapping strokes define a curve. Inked with oatmeal. I stopped while debating how much bump and melt to apply to the “h” ascender serif-blob, questioning whether or not this could be approached as an eastern cousin to Cooper Black, and it seemed like a terrible idea.

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©1913 and ™ W. J. Aylward and Scribner’s Magazine?

Posted at 10:57am and tagged with: lettering, script, brush, 1910s, magazine,.

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,.

Something sparky and essential was lost by leeching the red and brush texture from the signpainterly title and has been replaced by cooled efficient seamless black in the digitized version. By negating those features, along with the needless quote marks (also core to the appeal of a practiced sign painter script) I feel I’ve turned it into a cartoon. I’ve switched off the neon sign and the sudden loud quiet of lost glow and hum is more significant than appreciating the bare shape of its letters. They still read as hand rendered brush strokes, their buttery girth remain, it is still remarkably fun looking (the lower curve of the “t” seeming to spring from the cross bar at a crooked angle, setting a new course turn right quick), but some heat has left.

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©1941 and ™ Warner Bros. Pictures?

Posted at 8:45am and tagged with: 1940s, lettering, brush, script, lowercase, movie,.

Consider me penitent. Sloppiness in lettering-hunting then file organizing meant the source material credits were lost. Or, never existed. Just now, I spent too long looking for “Around the world” on advanced image search for naught. This mysterymeat aesthetic looks equally 50s, 70s, 80s, more 80s, and 90s to me depending upon the market. Why did the lettering artist dot a “t”? How fundamentally punk. How can someone cognizant of letter shapes enough to break them so deliberately produce such a runt “e” dwindling next to lipoid thick “th?” Surely that is crafty negligence.

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© ? If you know, please educate me.

Posted at 12:37am and tagged with: lettering, script, inky, lowercase, brush,.

The things talented people can do with brushes and ink are sometimes small, and mighty, and under-loved. The “Air Step” is nice, but the incidental copy shines with the effortlessness of a trained hand crossing their Ts with force. Willpower is in that contrast, you can feel the body of the brush finally relinquishing a payload of ink, so thick crossing so thin strokes. And that was the initial appeal of this piece of calligraphy. The surprise when zooming in was the snagged ink of the vertical strokes, still wet and pulled right, pooling at the intersections. Such detail from throwaway headlines isn’t for our eyes, and I risk having revived a craftsman’s lack of patience, but to interesting effect. The weights all screwy and the counters aren’t matched, too needle-eyed tight, but the mistakes are the features here? 

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All ©1940something and ™ to Brown Shoe Company?

Posted at 5:44pm and tagged with: connecting script, script, lettering, ad, shoes, brush, lowercase,.

So many styles… it looks like the producers couldn’t decide the film’s tone, cut one too many times by successive editors from comedy to drama and back again? It’s almost punk in the ransom note grab-baggery. The “The” is a swaggering little brute, pushing its neighbors aside starting a turf war with its malformed ampersand sidekick. A gang of exuberant swashes. In isolation, the sweeping brush strokes are pleasant enough to overlook the odd things occurring in the reverse “3” “E” which crowds the “h” and is so loose and squiggly, unrelated to the “h”’s tight join of curve-to-stem. 

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©1934 and ™ First National and Warner Bros. Pictures?

Posted at 11:59pm and tagged with: 1930s, movie, brush, script, lettering,.

So what if the spacing’s strange given the wide entry into the massive looped “h” ascender and the “e” trails off the end. This is perhaps my favorite so far, just for the brash strike through of the “t” cross bar. The contrast of sharp to airy loop, with that much swagger in so few letters, appeals.

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©1939 and ™ to Regal Zonophone and Chick Henderson?

Posted at 3:44pm and tagged with: 1930s, album, lowercase, connecting script, brush, lettering,.

This advertising story book lettering is a treat, all over the place (in character width at least) and over indulgent. It connects, but it doesn’t. The curves are quick and sharp, but some angles are bowled round. I imagine the illustrator, if not the same person, politely grumbling at how large the title is, running all those tangents up against the hat and coif curves. That gnomish dairy farmer looks like he’s made out of shortening. I think “Dwiggins” but I know it isn’t.

The above was written before digging up more information on Vernon Grant, who probably did all his own titles as his signature is so considered. The vintage is similar, late enough to be inspired by Dwiggins’s ad work of the 30s and his venturing into type design for Linotype. There is a wealth of imagery and history on Grant here, including the tale of his creating Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

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©1943 and ™ Wright Silver Cream Company and Vernon Grant?

Posted at 2:57pm and tagged with: book, brush, 1940s, lettering,.

Cross strokes like claws. Highway to the Dangerzone, though anacrhonistic, runs through my head. The Danny Boy from Memphis Belle, the closest thing I can tell to era-appropriate based on the bombers in the background, seems too twinkly and upbeat for lettering more fit to be blazened on ATV leathers or after burner conversion kits for suburban Toyotas.

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All © and ™ to Commando?

Posted at 1:55pm and tagged with: toned, caps, sans, book, brush, lettering,.