A T-shirt by an unknown designer commemorating the 1990 Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania 4 Wheel & Offroad Jamboree Summer Nationals. The Jamboree, held every July in rural Pennsylvania, is now in its 36th year and still attracts off-road vehicle enthusiasts from around the country.

Dated 1990, this design is a celebration of 60s and 70s type filtered through 90s neon colors and all-out radical design sensibilities. Arched pink-and-black Buxom crests the hood of a monster truck seemingly bearing down on the viewer over a backdrop of Memphis-style bacterio texture. Its massive tires leap over “4 WHEEL &” in hyper-saturated neon tones.

After substantial research I can't find anything that matches the closed 4, all-square W and blocky ampersand. As far as I can tell it's either a font lost to time, a mishmash of several, or somebody drew it from scratch with a ruler.

“OFF ROAD” is the typographic foundation of the design, with a gorgeous chrome effect and bright-orange shadow applied to what I think is VGC’s Shotgun—either modified by hand or using some alternate glyphs I can’t find online. “JAMBOREE” ties it all up with some magenta-flocked Dynamo over a line of handwritten script.

Even more 70s energy peeks out in the details: the Ford logo rests atop “TRUCKS” in good old Avant Garde Gothic. On the right, the “General Tire Special Events Performance Series” mark is a sandwich of Futura and a futuristic bold slab-serif, which has been smudged by time and wear but looks a lot like City.

I found some footage of the 1990 Bloomsburg Nationals to see if I could grab a screenshot of anybody wearing this shirt in its natural habitat. No luck, but it looks like it was a fun time.

The shirt itself is in rough shape. If I can't get the stains out I'll probably just hang it up in a frame.

Detail of the sponsor logos, featuring some sneaky Avant Garde and a fun ampersand I haven't been able to ID yet. Feels like something in the vague area of Bookman?

Detail of the sponsor logos, featuring Futura and (probably) City.

The classic orange-and-brown 4-pack, with “Bermuda's Favourite” in ITC Serif Gothic and “GINGER BEER” in diagonal, outlined Davida.

Barritt's is a Bermudan ginger beer that’s been made there since 1874 and is now widely sold in the United States. It’s a good ginger beer, but I also probably buy it for the wonderfully unchanged packaging, which center-stages Davida in all its wacky art-nouveau beauty and flanks it with ITC Serif Gothic. Hard to imagine a more early-70s pairing.

The can employs regular old Helvetica for smaller spots where something ornamental would get chewed up.

The sugar-free variety uses the same design in a cool blue colorway.

The logo from the can, on a T-shirt sold on the Barritt's website.

Via the excellent Twitter account Video Game Art & Tidbits, a set of Super Mario Christmas cards printed by Nintendo in 1989. Our beloved plumber, strangely alone but nonetheless cheerful, is depicted prepping for the holidays. Some shaded Capone Bold rings in the season with festive deco flair while Mario packs some snowballs and trims a tree. Tabasco’s funky descenders feel slightly less festive but make a fun impact (especially on the confusingly punctuated “Merry, Mario Christmas”).

An empty wrapper, seen in detail towards the end of the film.

Label on a plot-pivotal prop from the 2001 Robert Rodriguez movie Spy Kids. The official Spy Kids wiki gives this description:

The Machete Electroshock Gumballs are spy gadgets created by Isador “Machete” Cortez. They are green gumballs that, once chewed up and spat out, can electrocute anything and short-circuit anything electric. According to the wrapper, they’re long-lasting, but Carmen doesn’t really trust wrappers.

I paused the movie to grab a screenshot after recognizing Eckmann-Schrift, a very strangely old-fashioned detail in a movie with such an otherwise futuristic, Y2K-flavored aesthetic, and then spent a couple hours hunting for a match on “GUMBALLS,” which turned out to be the much more period-appropriate Techno. (Thanks, FIU staff!)

Ed Vega is credited as the film’s art director, but it’s more likely that someone else in the prop department made this honestly inconsequential typographic choice.

A slightly wider shot of a gumball still in its wrapper, courtesy of the wiki article.

Sign outside the U.S. Gas station in Dillsburg, PA with such a charming stack of 1970s display faces I’m more than willing to overlook the redundancy of “ATM Machine”.

The most important letters get a fancy Onyx treatment, with “MACHINE” boasting such wonderful Lack of Typographic Inspiration that I laughed walking by before snapping a photo. “Available Inside” is dressed in the always-classy ITC Tiffany.

Something is really sweet about this sign’s use of urbane, high-contrast serifs to dress up a pretty mundane message, even if its more recent unfashionability has relegated it to be stuck around the corner out of view.

How Bad Is Your Spotify? is an allegedly artificially-intelligent tool built by Mike Lacher & Matt Daniels for The Pudding – “a digital publication that explains ideas debated in culture with visual essays”. It uses your Spotify listening data to make fun of you. Its landing-page title is set in Recoleta, which gets a lot of web use considering its very analog 1970s flair. The Spotify-style album covers are set in their brand font LL Circular.

> Initializing neural net...
> Training on 79,032 indicators of objectively good music...

The webpage is visually minimal, putting type front and center – the “AI” script is typed out for you in Inconsolata over a sprawling white background, keeping the focus on the embarrassing content in a way reminiscent of ancient text-based computer games as it occasionally stops to ask the user for confirmation (“do you really listen to this?”). The buttons, which typically present options that already sound like you’re ashamed, are set in Atlas Grotesk.

It seems more like a regular data tool than a real AI, but the writing is dripping with lowercase contempt in a way that feels alarmingly like a smug friend or music reviewer dressing down one's taste, or reads alarmingly like one of Jon Bois’ anthropomorphized space probes from 17776.

I’ve bravely submitted my own Spotify data to be roasted for these screenshots.

I’m not convinced this thing is truly an AI in any meaningful way, but it is rude.

I refuse to be shamed by a robot. Moon Crystal rocks. (I do appreciate the “I share this account” option to worm your way out, though.)

Come on, those aren’t just comedy bands!

Cover art for I Like Fun, the twentieth (!) studio album from alt-rock band They Might Be Giants. This cover was designer Paul Sahre’s fifth collaboration with the band, having also designed covers for Phone Power (2016), Glean (2015), Nanobots (2013) and Join Us (2011).

TMBG has a long history of type-centric album covers (see Barbara Glauber's work on Factory Showroom), but I Like Fun is perhaps the most typographically daring. Cyrus Highsmith's Prensa is joyfully sliced and diced in a strange staggered style reminiscent of both the handcut pasteboard design techniques of old and digital glitch effects. Sahre's process (albeit not the creation of the final cover) is shown in this short promotional clip.

This jittery treatment appears random at first glance but is actually very smart about its treatment of letterforms, strategically making cuts across counters and crossbars to push the envelope of readability on each individual glyph while maintaining an overall composition that, as all good album covers of the 21st century must, reads even at small scale.

The album peaked at #108 on the U.S. Billboard charts.

[More info on Discogs]

The apron and rag seem to suggest an alternate ending where E.T. gives up on trying to leave Earth and gets into bartending.

A 1982 bar poster produced by Coors, in which lovable alien E.T. The Extraterrestrial leverages his famous catchphrase to encourage patrons not to drive home drunk.

While information about this poster's designer (or design process) is hard to come by, it's worth noting that Coors beer is featured in the film; specifically in the pivotal scene where E.T.—blasted in the middle of the day after finding a pack of Banquets in the fridge—has the idea to "phone home" that drives the rest of the movie.

ITC's Italia Bold is used for the entire poster, including the tiny copyright info at the bottom. It's a very classy early-80s pick that somehow seems perfect for a poster featuring both a cozy-looking wood-paneled bar interior and a space alien.

This 2018 article by Kyle Kastranec makes no guesses as to the poster's designer or origins, but does contain a highly enjoyable recap of the movie scene.

If you have to stay in the house to avoid capture by scary government agents, there's nothing wrong with knocking back some cold ones.

The pentagram of foliage is an homage to both Black Mass Lucifer (1971) and Garson’s most famous album, Plantasia (1976).

Cover art by Robert Beatty for Music From Patch Cord Productions, an upcoming compilation of unreleased tracks by the late synthesizer pioneer and composer Mort Garson. The album is set to be released by Sacred Bones Records later this year.

A cozy sandwich of all-caps type puts Garson’s name up top in Eckmann-Schrift, balanced on some of the smallest ITC Busorama I've ever seen on a foundation of Gemini Computer, one of the earliest “cyber” typefaces. This wild combination gives the fairly-small text block the intrigue and contrast it needs to balance out the elaborate, psychedelic illustration, which combines motifs from some of Garson’s better-known records.

The label on the record itself reuses Eckmann & Gemini, along with some much smaller text I can't identify from this image. I may come back and update this post to include it when my copy arrives.

An appropriately psychedelic purple-and-green disc.

WindowSwap is a website developed by Sonali Ranjit and Vaishnav Balasubramaniam that allows individuals to remotely share the view from their windows. From their about page:

Let's face it. We are all stuck indoors.
And it's going to be a while till we travel again.
Window Swap is here to fill that deep void in our wanderlust hearts by allowing us to look through someone else's window, somewhere in the world, for a while.
A place on the internet where all we travel hungry fools share our 'window views' to help each other feel a little bit better till we can (responsibly) explore our beautiful planet again.

Users can log on at any time to virtually see out a window somewhere in the world. People are also encouraged to submit their views in the form of a ten-minute video.

The site uses Recoleta Light and Bold for all its typography; both a great choice to match the project's warm-and-cozy attitude and to lend some charming personality to an interface minimal enough to let the videos shine through.

Shoutout to Antara Aneja for her help, Maryam Touimi Benjelloun for the code, and to all our wonderful friends who sent us their views.

“Never before published” and “best-selling author of The Bermuda Triangle” are both provable, but everything between them is a little shaky.

The Roswell Incident is a 1980 book by Charles Berlitz and William L. Moore published by Grosset & Dunlap.

The book purports to contain recently-discovered and never-before-published information on the famed UFO crash that allegedly took place in New Mexico in 1947. While he is not credited, it largely references interviews carried out in 1978 by the late physicist and ufologist Stanton Friedman. From the inside jacket flap:

Despite the numerous UFO sightings throughout the world, there is still a healthy skepticism that UFOs are merely the product of some overworked imaginations. Just suppose, however, that one of these “imaginary” UFOs made a crash landing at a place that could be Air Force or other investigative teams. Suppose, further, that the ship was made from a metal unknown to man, and had a definite control panel with writing in no earthly language. Finally, suppose that humanoid extraterrestrial beings were discovered within the UFO capsule, and that at least one of these beings was still alive when discovered.

Berlitz, a linguist and fringe researcher known for his writing on paranormal topics such as the Bermuda Triangle and Atlantis, had collaborated with Moore on The Philadelphia Experiment - Project Invisibility the previous year.

The Roswell Incident is notable for essentially creating the present pop-culture narrative of the alleged UFO crash, military recovery operation and subsequent government coverup. Despite a lack of concrete evidence, Berlitz and Moore explain that the debris found on a Roswell ranch in July 1947 was not a secret balloon-based radar experiment but in fact the wreckage of an alien spacecraft which had been struck by lighting the night before while attempting to observe U.S. nuclear activity.

Several chapters are also dedicated to addressing the UFO phenomenon in general, citing rumored sightings by Apollo astronauts and presenting several related theories (including the existence of pyramids and other ancient ruins on the Moon) as unquestioned facts. Like much of the 1970s-and-80s paranormal literature boom, it makes a deeply entertaining though factually questionable read.

The wonderfully eye-catching front cover uses Neil Bold for maximum impact on the title & authors, followed up by a justified blurb in Helvetica. This shape is repeated on the title page opposite a map of Roswell and the surrounding area borrowed from the Champion Map Corporation (with text set in various styles from Univers).

The interior uses Baskerville for body text, News Gothic for image captions, and occasionally Futura for lists and tables. Sadly, a designer is not credited anywhere in the “acknowledgements” section.

For some reason the foil-stamped spine under the book jacket uses Eurostile, which isn’t seen anywhere else on or in the book.

Curious who decided that “BY” needed more lines next to it here as opposed to the cover.

Now that’s what I call a table of contents.

News Gothic is used to differentiate image captions from normal body text.

An interior spread with a table of UFO sightings by astronauts, neatly set in Futura.

My suspicion is that Eurostile is just what the printer had access to for foil-stamping.

Couldn’t see this thing at the flea market and not pick it up.

A VHS tape distributed by the Yomega company in 1998 showcasing various yo-yo tricks, ranging from “basic” to “advanced”. In line with Yomega’s intended target audience of kids and teens, the packaging is a radical extravaganza of “xtreme” ’90s typography.

For the title, two lines of Stencil sandwich a wild combination of Letraset's Quicksilver and Caslon Antique (only Quicksilver escapes this pileup un-stretched), with everything coated in hot-dog colors to jump off the faux-paint-splattered background. While I have no solid evidence of this, I have to believe that the choice of Caslon Antique (with added cross hairs) for “ZONE” is inspired by its use in the 1985 Twilight Zone series.

The yo-yo itself features livery in Serpentine & ITC Souvenir—although it appears based on Yomega’s website that the Fireball has since been redesigned.

After some relatively dull center-aligned Helvetica the front cover goes all-in on the bottom-left bubble, skewing “FUN” (set in an unidentified sans; my best guess is slightly-stretched Helvetica Compressed or maybe Haettenschweiler?) into a zany trapezoid and committing a virtual typographic felony by smushing that poor Benguiat “37” almost beyond recognition to fit a shape that’ll fit beside the “cool kid” mascot.

The side panel reuses the same assets in a new arrangement (The repeated emphasis on “OFFICIAL” leads one to wonder if there was a wave of bootleg yo-yo training tapes they were trying to undermine). The back is, somewhat disappointingly, just a lot of Helvetica, although I appreciate the included timestamps for if you'd like to skip the baby stuff and get right to the "advanced" tricks.

The label on the tape can’t resist adding one more font to the mix by using Tekton Bold to remind us again that this video features yo-yo-trick champions Jennifer Baybrook and Chris Ciosek. The Yo-Yo Wiki tells me that Baybrook was the first female world champion, and a local news article claims Ciosek, apparently a Yomega employee, performed 31 tricks in 60 seconds at a 1999 competition in Hawaii. He seems pretty cool about it:

“Not only did I get to retain my Guinness Book title,” he said with a smile, “I had a nice vacation to boot.”

While I lack a working VCR, I’ve found the video in full online and its highly late-90s “corporate grunge” graphics use a distressed typewriter font that I’ve searched extensively for a match to but haven't identified yet. It's also worth watching for the opening segment explaining the yo-yo’s inner mechanisms if you’re a fan of primitive CGI.

Somewhat clunky reading order on the spine.

Very dramatic split in this list between names where you can sort of guess what the trick looks like and names that clearly just sounded cool.

I did the math on that runtime—it's a little over one trick per minute. What a value!

The graphics in the video itself use some kind of grunge typewriter face, although the shifting glyph sizes, bevel effect and VHS fuzz make it tough to identify.

The game's logo, seen here at the top of the official website.

Knuckle Sandwich is an upcoming action-adventure role playing game in development by Australian game designer Andrew Brophy. From the game’s presskit:

Knuckle Sandwich is an RPG about a boy who moves out of home and starts looking for work in a new city. After landing a job at a run-down diner, he accidentally gets wrapped up in a missing persons mystery that involves a ludicrous gang and a fanatical cult.

Features lively city locations to explore, a turn-based battle system that revolves around eccentric minigames, a macabre storyline and a ridiculously hip soundtrack.

The game’s wordmark is set in Typodermic’s Shlop, a nod to both Knuckle Sandwich’s horror undertones and radical 1990s attitude.

The in-game dialogue and menus use Apple ][, a freeware recreation of the iconic Apple II system font by Laz Ilong. Some in-game text is also set in Listen Here, Miss, designed by Anna Anthropy.

The game website uses Majör Mono Display by Emre Parlak, Montserrat by Julieta Ulanovsky, PT Mono by Alexandra Korolkova, and a tiny bit of Steve Matteson’s Open Sans.

In-game screenshot. Dialogue set in Apple ][.

Another in-game screenshot featuring more Apple ][.

Official Knuckle Sandwich T-shirt, featuring an unpixelated version of the logo.

Listen Here Miss featured on in-game graphics alongside some custom lettering.

Montserrat for the footer of the website.

PT Mono with headings in Open Sans in the presskit section.

1977’s cover makes impactful use of Helvetica Black atop a column of six illustrations of common UFO shapes.

MUFON (The Mutual UFO Network) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to cataloging and investigating unexplained aerial phenomenon. Founded in 1969, it currently boasts "more than 4,000 members worldwide with chapters and representatives in more than 43 countries and all 50 states," according to Wikipedia.

These covers, uploaded to Twitter by the wonderful ephemera-conservation group We Are The Mutants, adorned an itinerary/annual research journal provided to attendees of MUFON's annual symposium. Their typography is both delightfully 1970s and startlingly professional for a then- (and maybe still-) fledgling organization dedicated to "fringe" science, showcasing some very slick type-image combinations.

I was only able to find an interior scan of the 1978 booklet (although a few copies of the adjoining years are available on Ebay) and the interior typesetting is somewhat less careful, doing its best with pre-digital tools and ending up with page-sized blocks of Courier with almost no leading.

1978’s cover, pairing display-heavy-hitter Carousel with ITC Avant Garde Gothic, features a wonderful series of illustrations depicting the four types of close encounter as defined by Air Force ufology advisor J. Allen Hynek.

1979 gets a little more conceptual, merging a dense wall of Avant Garde with a photocopied magnifying glass (maybe to represent the practice of combing through spacebound radio signals for anomalies?). The display typeface is Stop.

An interior scan of the 1978 booklet, the only one I could find digitized. Headings set in Helvetica Condensed and body text set in Courier. The MUFON logo typeface remains unidentified (but does not appear to be flying).

Cheee and Cooper, together at last.

Music video for the single "Weather" by the self-described "aggressive elevator soul" band Ginger Root. Directed by Cameron Lew and production-designed by Ashley Kron, the video is framed like the experience of flipping through TV channels and alternates between very fun retro-styled graphics shot off an antique CRT and a family on the couch trying to settle on something to watch.

We open on a tightly-tracked title in James Edmondson's psychedelic Cheee and some wide-set Cooper Black Italic in front of a close-up of a corduroy couch. It's a perfect hat trick of a mood-setter; the video (and Ginger Root's overall sound and brand) fuse funky 1970s influences with more contemporary cues.

The first TV shot introduces Phosphate Solid, an extremely good “local news station identity” choice that's also chunky enough to hold up to some analog distressing. (The serif it's paired with – probably Caslon – gets distressed a lot more, but the effect is neat.)

The other big graphic identity for this video is the “Late Night!” card, which only appears for a second but makes excellent use of Mark Simonson's slick, fluid script Kinescope to nail the "cheesy early-80s talk show" vibe with very few moving parts.

A lot of people are credited as working on this video & even OH no Type Co. is listed in the “Special Thanks” section, so I don't really know who did the typography, but they did a great job.

The rest of the credits are all Cooper, flexing some extreme tracking in both directions.

Phosphate Solid adds some impact while matching the retro attitude (and staying legible even when packed in super-tight and blurred by the TV). The smaller text here is tough to get a good look at through the CRT but appears to be some version of Caslon.

With a whopping three at once, I think this shot is the most fonts on the screen at any point in the video.

The sans on these weather-forecast graphics is the one font here I can’t identify – seems likely it’s just Helvetica but the CRT makes it tough to get clear outlines.

Track cover art for the 2020 album SATELLITE etc by Baltimore-based rapper and producer beardy. The art direction is inspired by ’90s Generation-X CD covers, experiences on the early Internet, and y2k techno-optimism.

Space Grotesk and its older monospaced cousin (used in the little “BEARDY” logo) provide a dose of modernity to clarify that the work is looking back on the 2000s from the present and not simply emulating them whole cloth. We discussed a lot of directions, all balancing the vibes of growing up online, dealing with broken connections both digital and personal and the twin lost arts of physical music media and software packaging.

FF Screen Matrix works double duty conceptually. Sure, it evokes ideas of “cyberspace” and technology, but it also evokes memories of a time when those were new ideas.

When reviewing the finals for these we realized they look “small”; almost like Minidiscs or some other proprietary music format that kids would be encouraged to collect and trade.

The covers are based on a simple two-column layout; elements can move up or down but not horizontally. The stickers, like a real sticker, are slapped on in “random” locations not constrained by the grid.

Cover art for Shawn Wasabi's single Spicy Boyfriend. I was a little worried my goofy smiley-face idea wouldn't be a huge hit with Shawn, but he loved it right away. Great dude.

Looking for something simple enough to fit the utilitarian/neu-grunge/industrial look I had in mind, but not Helvetica or a more conventional sans, I decided on the brand-new Apfel Grotezk, designed by Luigi Gorlero for Collletttivo (I added serifs to the I’s on the title, and of course rounded & distressed the type all over).

Apfel has a great sense of geometric-sans readability but avoids the sort of tech-startup soullessness so many modern geometric sans end up sharing. It's definitely going to be a regular player in my future work.

Detail shots. Very happy with the grain here.

Truck belonging to a local pawn shop spotted in Boone, NC. Letters might be paint-stenciled but look very much like vinyl. A great example of "dollar-store vernacular" amateur design, here at an especially large scale.

A pretty freeform and not especially grid-bound layout was clearly designed, possibly on the fly, with the single purpose of creating an eye-catching truck, and I respect that simplicity of purpose. The type is mostly confined by where the structure of the trailer make it possible to put it, and I count ten different styles to communicate two or three tiers if information. It's fun in a way a lot of expensive, polished design can't be.

A handful of vernacular typography all-stars appear here, with Helvetica Condensed doing most of the heavy lifting, but Dom lightening things up and Revue filling the “cool font for our logo” niche. The ampersand and dollar signs (strictly used for ornamentation) seem to be set in some form of Bookman.

As a fan of cheap, weird, vernacular design, I’m a big fan of this, with its unapologetic loudness and amateur charm.

A tray liner distributed in restaurants in 1988 comparing the nutritional value of a Quarter Pounder combo with several other uncanny-looking American dinners, which might be technically true based on calories-by-volume, but come on (look at those fries!). I'm reminded of that Calvin and Hobbes strip about sugary cereal:

CALVIN: Look, it says right on the box, "Part of a wholesome, nutritious, balanced breakfast."

HOBBES: And they show a guy eating five grapefruits, a dozen bran muffins...

Really nice use of ITC Kabel here that flexes its personality as a display face and its 1980s goofiness, bouncing off those glossy food photos with classic corporate flair. While this scan isn’t the highest resolution, it looks like Kabel is also being used to set the body text.

Longsleeve shirt released by Mythical Entertainment, web-content company owned by YouTube music and comedy duo Rhett & Link, who gained mainstream fame mostly for their weekday-morning unscripted talk show Good Mythical Morning.

It's been interesting to see them branch out into merchandise not directly related to their content and experiment with more streetwear-style clothing, and it's also been interesting to see more and more typography creep in as it has throughout cutting-edge fashion.

Le Murmure, from Velvetyne, makes a nice appearance here and the word “Mythical” lets it show off its distinctive terminals. The forced variable width applied to the side text (now identified as Syne Extra by the desiger, thanks Caleb!) is … an interesting choice that works a lot better on the R than the W. The small green serif (in which “Creativity Through Curiosity Since” is set) appears to be Avara, another nice Velvetyne pick. Fit lives up to its name and gives this highly neu-grunge design the requisite outlined bold type.

Overall, pretty fun design, and sleeve prints are especially hot right now. I’d love to know where they sourced the central illustration.

The shirt in action, from a recent episode of Good Mythical Morning.

Pretty good bit.