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The New Alphabet was created in 1967 by Wim Crouwel. Like the Bauhaus, Crouwel was trying to simplify the letters to basic geometric shapes. But Crouwel went further, eliminating all curves and diagonals, reducing the letters to only vertical and horizontal lines. He also required each letter to take up the same amount of horizontal space -- no wide letters like W or M, nor narrow letters like I. And there would be no distinction between uppercase and lowercase.

This meant that some letters ended up looking very different from their traditional forms. It also meant that some letters ended up being indistinguishable from each other, so Crouwel had to add new features to make them distinct. For example, if you remove the hook from g, it looks identical to q; so Crouwel compensated by adding an ascender to g, resulting in a shape like a backwards þ.

The New Alphabet was really just an art piece, and never meant to be seriously used. But in 1988, it was used on the cover of the Joy Division compilation album Substance.

According to Crouwel's original design, it actually says "SUBST1MCE" rather than "SUBSTANCE". Brett Wickens, who designed the cover, just thought it looked better that way. It's not like anybody noticed, since nobody can read the New Alphabet.

The use of the New Alphabet on Substance may have inspired the use of weird, illegible lettering on various subsequent releases in the late 80s and 90s.

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Glaser Stencil was designed by Milton Glaser and released by PLINC in 1969.

Unlike conventional stencil fonts, which are based on physical stencils with cutouts for practical purposes, the cutouts in Glaser Stencil seem to have been chosen more for aesthetics.

Which is not to say that Glaser Stencil can't be used as an actual stencil:

Fonts In Use has more.

1984

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Variex was created in 1988 by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. It's an example of the "nonconformist" trend that was popular in the 1990s, like Keedy Sans and Fandango.

The design of Variex was a direct result of experiments with creating fonts that made efficient use of computer memory space, a serious consideration in 1988. Two separate outlines are usually needed to describe the delicate shapes of traditional letterforms. Single line “stroke” designs, on the other hand, required far fewer data points. So Licko conceived Variex as a “stroke” design, where each character is defined by a center-line of uniform weight from which the three weights were derived.

In most fonts, horizontal alignment of the x-height is sacred and is usually accomplished with a great deal of adjustments and optical corrections to the individual characters. Variex ignores this idea and emphasizes the opposite in the service of its overall concept. Varying the weight of a stroke typeface changes the thickness around the center line and thus alters the alignment of characters. Variex incorporates these variations of alignment as a distinguishing design element, making adjustments to the center lines unnecessary when changing the weight. As a result, the x-height varies among the three different weights and among the individual characters. This generates a unusual rhythm along the x-height that lends Variex its unique quality.

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Motter Tektura was designed by Othmar Motter and released by Berthold in 1974.

Although it's a modern sans serif font, some of the letter shapes are inspired by blackletter (or "textura").

Motter Tektura was pretty popular in the 1970s and 1980s.

Fonts In Use has more examples of Motter Tektura.

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Clarendon Light Face XX Condensed was released in 1859 by William H. Page & Co. as wood type for use in advertising, which had become a big thing in the mid-1800s.

"Clarendon Light Face XX Condensed" is more of a description than a name, as the idea of individual fonts being artistic creations worthy of their own unique names hadn't developed yet. The "XX" stands for "double extra".

In 1990, it was revived in digital form by Joy Redick for Adobe under the name Willow. (Redick named all her fonts after trees.)

Willow was part of the 90s trend of condensed fonts. In the example below from 1996, in addition to using a condensed font, uppercase and lowercase are mixed, following another 90s trend of "nonconformist" typography.

MTV (1998)  

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Lots of Art Nouveau fonts here.

Victorian (1976), based on a 19th century font called Victoria:

Eckmann (1900):

I can't identify the font used for "THE SOUL". It's very similar to FT Pan (2023, shown below), but slightly different. Probably they're both inspired by the same source.

Arnold Böcklin (1904):

Ringlet (1882):

“The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic” by Alan Moore and Steve Moore (2024).

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E-13B is a set of characters designed in the mid-1950s to be readable by both humans and computers (using magnetic ink), so that banks could process cheques more efficiently. It consists of only 14 characters: 10 numbers, plus special symbols for "transit", "onus", "amount" and "dash".

In the mid-1960s, Leo Maggs created a font inspired by E-13B, which was given the name Westminster. The font was rejected by Letraset before being accepted by Photoscript.

After rejecting Westminster, in 1970 Letraset released their own very similar font, designed by Bob Newman and named Data 70.

Fonts like Westminster and Data 70, and other fonts in the same genre like Gemini and Moore Computer, are what people in the 1960s and 1970s thought the future would look like.

Fonts In Use has more examples of Data 70.

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"MIAMI" is in Broadway.

"VICE" is in the variant Broadway Stencil. I can't find much information about Broadway Stencil. Identifont says it was created in 1928, but I can't find any evidence of it existing back then. I think it was probably actually created by URW in the early 80s.

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Marschall was created by an unknown designer and released by Wilhelm Woellmer in 1905.

Like other Art Nouveau fonts (such as Thalia and Bradley), it had a revival in the 1960s and 1970s. Here it is being used for the tagline of the 1970 horror movie Scream of the Demon Lover:

Here it is on an astrology chart sold by Mattel in 1969:

Fonts In Use has more about Marschall.

70s Witchcraft Magazine (Grasham Edition) Covers

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ITC Benguiat (pronounced "ben-gat") was created in 1977 by Ed Benguiat, presumably while chainsmoking.

Reddit user ChunkArcade said of Benguiat:

I had Ed Benguiat as a teacher in college. Absolute legend. He used to smoke in class (looonggg past when smoking indoors was illegal in NY), tell us stories for 75% of the class, then randomly drop gems of typographic genius that I still use on a daily basis at work. Such a good soul and a fucking REBEL.

Originally the letters were intended to form part of a logo for a friend's business, but when the logo was rejected, Benguiat decided to continue working on it and turned it into a font. It was one of approximately ten billion fonts Benguiat designed.

ITC Benguiat is often described as an "Art Nouveau" font, but Benguiat denied this:

When I designed this font I was not thinking “Art Nouveau” style. My thought was just to create a beautiful font that would fit the need for a highly readable serifed font.

The font includes a number of ligatures, like AR, LA, SS, and TT, which are rarely used in practice.

One of the many places ITC Benguiat ended up being used was on book covers in the late 70s and 80s:

A well-known recent use of ITC Benguiat is in the Stranger Things logo, which is widely claimed to be based on the covers of Stephen King novels.

But... I can't actually find any Stephen King novels with ITC Benguiat on the cover? Classic Stephen King novels actually used a modified version of Pacella Latina for his name and the title, and Korinna for smaller text. (Image below from avperth on Flickr.)

Korinna and ITC Benguiat do look kind of similar, but Korinna was never used for titles. The only real similarity between Stranger Things and (some of) these covers is the way that the first and last letters of "StepheN" and "StrangeR" are bigger than the others.

I mean look at this shit:

Are people blind? That's not the same font! Look at the E, look at the G! Look how thin the verticals of the N are! Just because they're both red doesn't mean they're the same font.

"It graced the cover of countless Stephen King novels", but they couldn't find a single example because none of these covers actually used ITC Benguiat (nor do they all use the same fonts as each other). They are right about Choose Your Own Adventure books using it, though:

Fonts In Use has more examples of ITC Benguiat, as well as higher standards than slop factories like Screen Rant and Collider.

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Grock is an Art Deco font created by an unknown designer and released by Monotype in 1935. This was at the end of the Art Deco period, when fonts like these were falling out of use. Grock doesn't seem to have been used much, and remains obscure today.

Grock is essentially a slightly fancier version of Broadway. It was probably named after Grock the clown, who appeared in a film called Grock in 1931.

In 1973, Collis Clements created a modified version of Grock called Roco, which was selected as one of 20 winners of the Letraset International Typeface Competition.

Looking at the two fonts side by side, I think Roco is an improvement over Grock. (The Q is a bit weird though.)

Roco seems to have been more successful than Grock, and saw some use in the 1970s.

But the best-known example of Roco today is probably in the 1992 game Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (as mentioned in a previous post about Sonic fonts).

It was also, apparently, used in at least one 1980s gay porn magazine.

Fonts In Use has more examples of Roco, but none of Grock.

Mandate (1980) - Vol.5 N59

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Things turn in your favor despite a recent tragedy. Things will fade in their own time, but any opportunity is an opportunity.

Back by popular demand: If you want a reading, you can support me here.

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Yagi is a set of Bauhaus-style fonts designed by Teruoki Yagi (八木 昭興) and released in 1968 by FotoStar, with several variants. Below is the variant Yagi Bold.

The NASA logo used from 1975 to 1992, nicknamed "the worm", is based on Yagi Universal.

But the most well-known version of Yagi is Yagi Double.

That's because the SEGA logo (adopted in 1976) and the CNN logo (adopted in 1980) are both based on Yagi Double:

Fonts In Use has more examples of Yagi.

Sega CD BIOS Screen Sega CD 1992

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I just wanna let you know that me and a few friends have a group chat dedicated to posting instances of ITC Benguiat that we see + a few other fonts that are similar in our brains (windsor, korinna, friz quadrata). Idk if you have a benguiat post but if you do the search function isn’t showing me it

Not yet. But here's a big ITC Benguiat Q on a vinyl record cover:

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The font used for Something For Thee Hotties was custom-made by Luca Devinu (a.k.a. blssnd). It's unfortunately not available to the public.

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