Mittwoch, 28. Oktober 2009

Retro Super Skinny/Stark Debonair (subflux)


Original designer: Robert Stark, 1975, VGC.

Digital substitute: Retro Super Skinny from subflux

Dienstag, 27. Oktober 2009

McLane (The Cartoonist)

The Cartoonist (Ralf Zeigermann) made a typeface out of the titles of the science fiction TV series »Raumschiff Orion«: Mc Lane

Here the words from Ralf Zeigermann:
The Raumpatrouille Titles. I still think this is a rather modern looking typeface, even by today's standards. It's slightly reminiscent of the wide-running Eurostile typeface, but it's certainly not any known font. Hand-drawn, perhaps?
According to Josef Hilger, long-time fan and curator of the Raumpatrouille Museum, the titles were indeed drawn by hand. In the mid-sixties, this was probably done with a ruling pen on thick cardboard, then filled in with a brush.
Another version of the typeface surfaced many years ago, probably on Compuserve, which was created by someone unknown and was called »Star Patrol«.
After a discussion in the Frog Mailing List, I decided to give it a go myself. Anyone who wants to recreate the 'Raumpatrouille Font' is faced with the above problems — which version to go with? Also, there are a few characters missing in the titles. For example, I couldn't find an "x" anywhere, so I had to make it up, along with other 'missing' characters. Since there are so many different versions of the various letters in the original, I opted for the square version: a 5x5 matrix for the x-height.
I had to compromise. And I cheated too. Graphic designers always cheat.
I started off in fontstruct (which is great, but also rather limited) for the basic letter shapes, then downloaded the font to open it up again in FontLab, which a friend kindly lent me for the purpose of creating this darn Orion-Typeface.
And now it's all done and from my point of view the best Raumpatrouille font you can get for your computer. And that's simply because there is no other one. Enjoy.
I designed it as an Open Type .ttf and it's got got the basic Latin and some extended Latin, published under Creative Commons License 3.0, which means you can do whatever you like with the typeface; extend it, change it, or even mess it up completely. I don't care.
Final copyright is probably still with Bavaria Film.
Enjoy; grab the font and improve it. And if there are any problems, I really don't want to know. And don't get me started on the italics.