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,.

This is the blockbusteriest of films that 1925 had to offer. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stupendous Story of Adventure and Romance states the opening title. Or, Mighty Prehistoric Monsters Clash with Modern Lovers! as an alternate Professor Challenger character poster proclaims. Stop motion thunder lizard gore! Actors with too much eye liner and harshly justified hand lettered interstitials! Generations’ poor archiving of painted promotional posters leads to wobbled intentions in digital revivals! The source was less than 100 pixels wide, but the crashing heavy wordmark was interesting enough to puzzle out. There is no such thing as “fidelity” in the digitization. Edges warp in the humidity (The Lost World is in South America). Soft arcs along each facet give the impression of inflating a jewel. Whatever the beastly intent of the letterer, “The” now has  the severity of a ring pop or mylar balloon. Hints of a mold’s hardness are denied by materials used in mass production. Character recognition is reliant on very slight counters amidst all the heavy strokes. The “e” may have once been an inline, long faded yellow near invisible. And, that cantilevered swash of unusual proportions? Grecians tend to be extreme, stony monolithic, things but rarely are they “jaunty” enough to defy gravity so boldly. A support system is missing here, buttresses may be hidden using mirrors. I do not believe in the architectural trickery allowing that to stand. 

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©1925 and ™ First National Pictures?

Posted at 5:50pm and tagged with: lettering, movie, 1920s, swash, grecian, slab, serif,.

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,.

There is damage in hoarding physical objects. Less so if one’s hoarding is digital and orderly in archiving files. However, what is slight and privately embarrassing hidden between mattresses feels really icky living buried in a harddrive. Icky, traceable, and on-the-bad-sort-of-listable. I don’t remember where this title still was swiped from, worrisome, and I’d no clue what breed of film it titled having only appreciated the brush lettering I know has nothing to do with mid-to-late-90s Pilot Jumbo chisel tipped marker tagging which it resembles. I like it best without context. I want to think there is a hidden bundle of RNA code linking vigorous lettering by youthful, maybe dangerous, artists across generations. It provides them genetically stiff wrists, glancing knowledge of technique, and turns them unhindered with a talent to play hooky by age 12. That’s the sort of person I imagine lettering this. Factfinding for documentation proved dirtier. Now, I imagine director Sarno scrawled it atop a piece of mylar without care in order to get back to lighting taboo smut to best Bergmanesque effect. Previous vigor feels lascivious in context. I can’t help but view the motion. That shrinking x-height across lines as heaving, exhaling. Those connecting strokes a little more determined than common brush lettering and literally, stroking. Curved characters dipping below propriety’s baseline and cramped spacing of “indelicate” is… it’s just sex lettering and I’ll stop. Regardless, it’s confident and pretty, criteria for this site. What I assume to be the original crisp connections are digitized rather than the subtle curved joins softened by filming and probable hand-me-down-the-back-room duping since The Indelicate Balance was too scandalous (or plain bad) to commercially release.

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All ©1969 and ™ to DeLuxe Pictures and Joseph W. Sarno?

Posted at 12:28am and tagged with: lettering, script, marker, movie, 1960s,.

Here Be Monsters, for Hallowe’en. Letters lurching, a script gone jerky and clanking, like the groom’s kneeless shuffle. The combination of styles is remarkable as always in these 1930s Hollywood 100% hand lettered showcards and ads. While the script has Frankenstein’s Monster’s gate (packed spacing, tall ascenders, slightest of curves at the overlaps of tense direct strokes equal tense?), the round letters in the bottom copy deny curves for neck bolt rigidity. Clever.

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©1935 and ™ Universal Pictures?

Posted at 11:52pm and tagged with: 1930s, ad, movie, script, connecting script, 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,.

Abbott & Costello Part One. Are those the dots of a strafed machine gun? Perhaps the animated sign painter’s cartoon, in the High Renaissance use of the term (how Pre-yet-Post Modern could that have been)? No matter, taken out of context, and after fidgeting with the irregularity of the brush tip marks, the bundle of circles are nice and timeless as display lettering can be. It should be noted that Boris Karloff also stars as a Swami. Copywriting we don’t get treated to anymore: Yipes! Those Killer-Dillers are out to get the King of the Killers! 

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©1950 and ™ Universal Studios?

Posted at 11:21am and tagged with: caps, lettering, sans, movie,.

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,.

Twisting and turning through all the shadowed byways of a skyscraper city. An unaccustomed, truly unnecessary, five tones here, frantically inspired by a lack of trust in digital gradients to truly match the brushed (human, imprecise) title card and the random joy of enlarging low resolution images to gather grayscale palettes from pixel-Pointilist blocks. 1948 was well out of the American Deco era, but the film title still retains the high cross bars and high contrast associated with those times. The choice is interesting considering the art-conscious story of a magazine editor, note the bevvy of two flatly sober serif, script, and condensed sans ___ways logos beneath the film title. But, The Big Clock is a crime story, and so Hollywood most likely relied on the dimensional sans noir trope in case you hadn’t noticed the emphasized nor heard the literal “suspense” of the trailer.  

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©1948 and ™ Paramount Pictures, Inc.?

Posted at 10:51am and tagged with: lettering, movie, caps, sans, shadow, toned, 1940s,.

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,.