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18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica

Contributed by Chris Purcell on Jun 7th, 2015. Artwork published in .
18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica 1
© Letraset International Ltd. License: All Rights Reserved.

Did Letraset sponsor a contest any other year besides 1973?

The numbers on the cover are from Tonal, by Christopher K. Lee. Very hard to get those Benday dots in the background to line up perfectly with transfer lettering …

Bombere, the top choice of the judges, is based on Grotesque No. 9. Second-prize-winner Magnificat is by Friedrich Peter, who also did Vivaldi.

Of all the faces shown here, I think I’ve only seen Shatter and Le Griffe used. I’ll look through FIU to see if any of the others are represented. See also my follow-up with a complete list of all twenty winners.

18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica 2
© Letraset International Ltd. License: All Rights Reserved.
18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica 3
© Letraset International Ltd. License: All Rights Reserved.
18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica 4
© Letraset International Ltd. License: All Rights Reserved.
18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica 5
© Letraset International Ltd. License: All Rights Reserved.
18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica 6
© Letraset International Ltd. License: All Rights Reserved.

Typefaces

  • Tonal
  • Beans
  • Premier Lightline
  • ITC Avant Garde Gothic
  • Astra

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8 Comments on “18 New Type Faces – Letraset Letragraphica”

  1. I got a copy of this brochure when I was in college (still have it). I recall that some of these typefaces (Beans, Yarra, Joe Line, possibly Tangui) were dropped within a few years, other hung on well into the DTP era.

    You can see Magnificat (and a bunch of other Letraset faces) in use in something I wrote and designed in 1977: http://www.marksimonson.com/notebook/view/LetsTalkType1977 

  2. That is a delight, Mark. It should be on Fonts In Use.

  3. Very witty, Mark!

  4. I’ll take you up on that.

  5. How weird… a closer look at Bombere indicates that it was more inspired by Franklin Gothic 1904 than anything Grotesque.

    I’ve seen Piccadilly in use as late as the first Card Sharks (Goodson / Todman, aka the Sultans of game shows in the 70s and 80s), Roco as late as the Canadian take on Split Second, and Magnificat in the title card for CTV’s Academy Performance in the latter half of the 70s — which must have been seen to be believed.

    How Yarra or Joe Line got off the drafting table is one of the great mysteries of life. But as we’ve clearly seen on this site, Beans ended up getting boatloads of mileage out of its run.

  6. Salut Robert, you are correct: Bombere appears to based on letterforms similar to Franklin Gothic. I’ve corrected the description in this post, and added a comparison of Bombere and the digital interpretation Wireframe. Merci beaucoup!

    I’d be pleased if you could dig up an image of the title card featuring Magnificat.

  7. There was another contest for users called The Liberated Letter. Some of the winners were announced in the first edition of Baseline magazine and the contest was also advertised on U&lc magazine.

  8. Thanks, Iván! “The Liberated Letter” from 1981/1982 was a contest directed at graphic designers, or font users. It wasn’t about typeface designs. Still interesting, of course!

    To my knowledge, the 1973 contest was Letraset’s only foray into crowdsourcing new alphabet designs for their library. The results were rather disappointing, from a commercial perspective. While the winning entry Bombere was remarkable on a conceptual level, it was difficult to use and hard to read. With its fine lines, it had no punch. Letraset didn’t sell a lot of sheets. They retired the face in the mid 1980s and didn’t bother to convert it to digital format.

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