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.

And baby makes 100. Come see the screwball 3D sans mismatch a story about Navajo and Fed agent clashing, racism, horse swindling, patriotism, enlistment, The Great War, and broken promises! This sans has joy buzzers and whoopie cushions in mind, not the weighty conflicts of The Vanishing American’s story. It makes me wonder whether 1920s Hollywood didn’t believe in advertising according to plot, or in targeting audiences. Maybe vivid color and westerns was enough to put butts in seats. Anything to jar the eye and demand attention, including confusing “inappropriate” lettering. I look at the overlapping baselineless angled shapes and think on how many contextual alternates it would take for an OpenType font to recreate this sort of complexity as a tool. The engineering feat, as an act of logic and intelligent coding would be more artful than the visual product. Incredibly smart fonts producing questionably dumb typesetting is not worth it. This sort of goofiness is best lettered, by hand, custom-fit for the job, because the number of occasions bouncy 3D sans is the best option cannot outnumber the hours or dollars dedicated to replicating its effect in software.

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©1925 and ™ Famous Players-Lasky Corporation?

Posted at 1:19pm and tagged with: 1920s, Toned, caps, lettering, poster, shadow, sans,.

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,.

Death Danced Beside Her. Bad printing makes for interesting letters. Shadows do not meet their natural casting corners and serifs blob out a little due to sloppy drawing or over-inking. Bouncing latin serifs, ever the exoticizing type treatment when combined with bronze skinned vaguely tropicalian beauties, are a virile little breed. They show up everywhere. I’ve seen them lurch along announcing zombie films and endanger the safety and security of level baselines in thrillers, how very fitting to combine both here. The decaying voodoo texture is a nice touch, for that special overkill flavor.

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All © and ™ to Gold Medal Books

Posted at 7:03pm and tagged with: book, caps, serif, shadow, toned, latin, lettering,.

Vincent Price, not Bruce Wayne. The logo could easily have been swiped from Bob Kane’s costume design, but that’s not the point. The sheer 3D-ness of this awesome thing floors me. Not only did they flare out the shapes like Etruscan wood type, not only did they give it a deep drop shadow, they gave it a vertical lip outline with inner shadows. I urge you to hear the crime scene horn section ringing the murder mystery thriller in. It does not disappoint. Yes, the spacing is a little tight with so much contrast and extraneous eye candy to get in the way, but who cares?

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©1957 and ™ Liberty Pictures?

Posted at 10:31am and tagged with: 1950s, caps, flared, toned, shadow, movie, lettering,.

The splintered spooky edition.

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Posted at 1:22am and tagged with: movie, ragged, shadow, caps, distressed, lettering,.

More two color goodness. I’ve never much liked this calligraphic cap form of T, it’s too close to the J. Not running the top stroke across the stem seems too un-T-like for my taste, but illogical drop shadows are distracting enough to serve for the flashier crowd and their damnable irreverence.

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Posted at 12:58am and tagged with: toned, movie, shadow, connecting script, pen-based, lettering,.

A potentially seasonal offering this time around as it approaches blackletter but seems to stay clear of anything too illegible and old world, all beveled and cheerful instead. It’s too stubby to be threatening, I imagine this was the Hollywood letterer’s mass market blackletter softening, equivalent to the web 2.0 balloon sans logo trend. I believe it was swiped from a rollicking swashbuckling film where men were men, bandits were dueled, women swooned, and none of the period costumes were stained with period grime. The downloadable .EPS file is separated into four grouped pieces for your polychromatic fancy: outline and drop shadow, fill, bevel highlight, bevel shadow.

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Posted at 12:07am and tagged with: toned, blackletter, shadow, bevel, movie, lettering,.

A bit of deco 3D, possibly from a Laurel and Hardy film, but one UPPERCASE was kind enough to feature in its second issue.

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Posted at 12:01am and tagged with: shadow, sans, movie, caps, lettering,.

From a long-since-forgotten (by me) nautical film? A jaunty travel adventure? I leave just the block shadow, allowing the negative spaces to define the letters and to let all the smart young things figure out what sort of textured background breaks its slab seriffy legibility in use.

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Posted at 12:54am and tagged with: shadow, movie, slab, caps, lettering,.