Fonts In Use – Major League (In a Minor Way)

Recently Andy Heckathorne brought to my attention that Major League Baseball had used Metroscript in their logo for this years World Series logo. Admittedly it’s not a major part of the design, but as Andy pointed out “It’s the WORLD Series!”.

In the Metroscript Manual I wrote that “You can change the proportion of the set type by scaling it either horizontally or vertically.” The designer here has really pushed the reproportioning by scaling the type vertically at 72%. Below the sample is the un-reproportioned type. I don’t know who the designer is who worked on this logo, but if anyone out there knows and wants to send me that info I’d like to properly credit him or her.

Actually I’m no stranger to the World Series logo, having actually designed it once some years back. I wasn’t terribly thrilled with this design (below) so I tweaked it a bit a few years later, and that newer version is the one I now show on my website.

It was interesting for me to notice that the letterforms I used in this logo were in some ways precursors to the forms in both Metroscript and Deliscript.

I’d been using script letters similar to these in my assignment work for years before creating those fonts.

While I’m on the subject of the World Series, as a side note I thought that it might be worth mentioning that my wife, illustrator/designer extraordinaire Laura Smith, did a series of illustrated scorebook covers for Major League Baseball for what became known as the “Subway Series” in 2000.

Alphabet Soup Fonts In Use

From time to time people send me (or I find on my own) examples of how other designers have used my fonts. Sometimes these samples are really wonderful. So when I come across examples that I feel are unusual, different or extremely well-done, I’d like to post them here. Recently I posted an example of how Metroscript was used in the movie “The Hulk“. I would welcome submissions from anyone who would like to email them to me.

My first posting in this series comes from Switzerland and was sent to me by its designer. The font is again Metroscript. Usually I’m not a big fan of extruding type dimensionally—I’m kind of a type “purist”. But I thought that this one was done really well, keeping it simple and avoiding the temptation to just keep going and going. I love its simple colors and clean lines. Somehow the designer has taken what I feel is a very “American” font and imbued the design with a very European flavor.

It was sent to me by Bernhard Huber who asked that the credit read as follows— Design: Medienbau, Agentur für Konzept und Design, Switzerland

Announcing Grafika: It’s a New “Old” Font . . . (or is it an Old “New” Font?)

I’m very pleased to announce the release of Grafika, a font design that has been “in the making” for many more years than I’d care to remember! It can now be purchased from Alphabet Soup Type Founders.

Grafika began its genesis when I received a call to work on a feature film. That phone call came from Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, the reknowned team who have given us such films as “A Room With a View”, “Howard’s End” and “Remains of the Day”. The assignment was to create a title treatment for their upcoming film “Savages“.

The title treatment (above) that I created to reflect the Art Deco sensibility of the film was so well received that it was decided that we would emulate its elegant, elongated look in all the typographic elements of the film. To do that I needed to create what would be my first complete font design. So taking my design cues from the logo I had created, I put pencil to paper and came up with a basic character set. Then I inked it on vellum (which was as hi-tech as it got at that time), and had it photographed and positioned on a roll of Typositor film.

Over the years I had forgotten about this font design. My career became totally about assignment work. I hadn’t gone back to designing fonts until recently when I started doing it again under my foundry name Alphabet Soup. Recently I unearthed a poster for Savages which contained all the credits set in that nameless font I had designed for the film. Looking at it again after all these years I realized that for a young designer this hadn’t been bad. So I decided to revisit it, and to add Grafika to my collection at Alphabet Soup.

To see Grafika in more detail, you can download the PDF brochure I’ve created (3.5 MB). As always, I welcome your comments!