They set the mood and can effect the readability of your text. The typefaces we have chosen are all hopefully ones you can still use today to give you project a retro flair-whether it’s body copy or a logo you’re designing.Īre you a budding type designer or want to learn more about typography? Take a look at our innovative graphic design course and become a graphic designer in 3 months full-time or 9 months part-time in New York, London, Manchester, Sydney, Brisbane or Melbourne.Fonts are an important part of your book. There we have it! Vintage typography is a very wide field and there is countless amazing examples, but we wanted to give a short overview of the kind of things you can find digging through vintage record collections, from dusty old books, retro advertisements and anywhere else you can think of. Eames Century is great for giving a design a mid-century modern feel, despite it only being released a decade ago. Designer Erik van Blokland wanted to capture the Eames’ modernist aesthetic while producing a functional typeface, across the entire typeface family. Named after Charles and Ray Eames, Eames Century is House Industries’ typographic tribute to the legendary designer couple-who worked across architecture, furniture design, graphic design, art and film. It’s the ideal piece of vintage typography for recalling the glitz, glamour and raunchiness of the Atomic City and, like Ed Interlock, for harking back to America’s Golden Age. It also nods to the neon lights of the city’s Fremont Street in its ’60s heyday. FabulousĪnother House Industries typeface that immediately screams one thing: Viva Las Vegas! Released in 2001 as part of House’s Las Vegas collection, Fabulous is inspired by the word ‘Fabulous’ on the famous Welcome to the Fabulous Las Vegas sign erected in 1959. Koloss is the best vintage typography for bringing a sense of Weimar Germany to your designs-striking but classy. Designed by Jakob Erbar of Frankfurt-based foundry Ludwig & Mayer, the typeface uses high contrasts-thick stems, ascenders and bowls combined with thin descenders and terminals (Confused? Check out our foolproof guide to all things typography). Koloss, the 1923 extra bold alternative to Feder-Grotesk, is a headline typeface ideal for posters, book covers, etc. Here’s a list of the best vintage typography that we think you need to see, some undoubtedly you’ll know already but there’s some surprises in there too. Of course nowadays a huge percentage of typefaces are produced digitally but, to look for the best retro and vintage typography we can find, its best to look to the days before computers ruled over the graphic design world. This industrialisation lead to a boom in the production of typefaces and a majority of the vintage typography in this list (and indeed the world) are designs from this period. Typography truly became an industry, especially with the invention of the Linotype machine in 1886, the Monotype system the following year and Phototypesetting in the 1950s. Skip forward again to 1890 when things start up again and typography started to become what we know of today.
These were then sold on to print shops, where a typesetter (yep, there were even typesetting back in the 1800s) who would set the fonts to allow for maximum legibility. These blocks are the beginnings of what we know as typefaces today-with a block being produced for each character. (That’s right-the long held belief that Gutenberg invented the printing press isn’t true!).įast forward 350 years and letters are being turned into metal or wooden blocks (see Antique below for an example of a woodblock typeface). Though, typographers tend to define the printing press as an East Asian invention in the 11th Century, which was introduced to the Western world by Johannes Gutenberg from Mainz in Germany in the 1440s. It’s hard to define where typography as we know it began-early versions of what we would now call a printing press have supposedly been discovered in Ancient Mesopotamia, dating around the 2nd Century BC. Here, we’re going to delve deep and dig out some of the most interesting vintage typography, all of which can inspire designers or even be used in your designs today. This means looking toward the future to predict what is coming, but just as importantly looking back to the past for reference and for inspiration. 35 Examples of Vintage and Retro Typography You Need to SeeĪ good designer knows that you’ve got to look beyond the now to produce the best designs.
0 kommentar(er)
