It may be Thorne Shaded, but we called it Thorowgood Shaded. At least that's how it was listed in the VGC catalog.

Art director: Roger Black. Illustration: Bruce Wolfe (1941–2023).

Fifty years ago LA, a weekly newspaper, published its first issue with this story about a charismatic ex-gang leader. The big headline is set in Stephenson Blake’s Condensed Sans Serifs No. 1, set on a Photo Typositor.

The sidebar lede is set in Ionic No. 5. The text is Corona, with Clarendon bold for subheads, and Franklin Gothic for the names in the captions. Text was set on a Mergenthaler VIP phototypesetter.

Photo: Terry McDonell

Dattilo in the 70s

Dattilo was the last great Nebiolo typeface by Aldo Novarese. I first saw it in brochures and a specimen book at the Drupa trade fair in 1977. Delighted to find a 20th century Egiziano, I tried to order fonts, but Nebiolo did not respond. So, Jim Parkinson made a quick display font—a two-inch film strip for the Photo Typositor.

That was for a cover story in Rolling Stone, with an Annie Leibovitz pictures of Mark Fidrych, baseball’s young star.

When I tried to visit the foundry in Torino later that year, the company was still in business, but the design studio was closed, and Aldo and his team were gone.

With the sans serif companion typeface, Forma, now revived in five sizes and five weights by David Jonathan Ross, it’s only a matter of time before we see a digital Dattilo.

A typeface for the smart set

Terry McDonell, the now legendary magazine editor, was starting his own magazine, Smart, in 1989. When he said he wanted to evoke The Smart Set, the stylish, literary monthly edited by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan in the Roaring Twenties, I thought of Lucian Bernhard’s Bauer typeface from 1929, Lucian. That resulted in another early Font Bureau digitzation of a vintage foundry type, Belucian. At that point David Berlow was thinking of a adding a “Be-” to the names of all his revivals (cf. Belizio), but we talked him out of that later.

The real Times Roman

Starling, the revival by Mike Parker of a Lanston Monotype typeface which Parker argued was the real Times Roman. The design from the early 1900s was by the American designer and sailor William Starling Burgess and grabbed by Stanley Morison for the Times of London font in 1930. Font Bureau produced the font in 2009 for Parker.

It was the obvious choice for the cover of a Hunter Thompson memorial book. Why? Well, Hunter became famous for “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” published by Rolling Stone in 1971. The magazine’s typeface in those early days was Times Roman. (Specified by the magazine’s first art director, John Williams, who was moonlighting from his production job at Ramparts, which used Times beautifully. But the digital fonts for Times still don’t have a good optical size for display. Starling does, as well as a full range of weights.

The book, Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson? is published this week by Last Gasp. Illustration by Ralph Steadman, who illustrated “Fear and Loathing,” and ever since linked with Hunter.

More on Starling on the Font Bureau website: Mike. A Tribute to Mike Parker 1929–2014.

Starling is available at Type Network.

Illustration by Philip Hays

At New York (1980–1981), I had the idea the of reviving the Silk Stocking style. I did a search for available versions of the De Vinne, aka Elzevir, aka French Oldstyle of the late nineteenth century. Settled on Romana, which we had set on the VGC Phototypositor or the Mergenthaler Linotype VGC. This seemed to evoke the era.

Today, for small sizes, I would say the Bitstream version is the best.

Rough scans of the magazine showing Romana on a series of covers and inside stories can be found on Google Books.

As a partner at Font Bureau, I welcome the use of Antenna as the basis of the new logo of The New Republic. We haven’t seen the magazine yet, but they sent out an e-mail with a sneak peek of the logo and a link to an offer for a free copy of the first redesigned issue.

Politico talked to Dirk Barnett, the Newsweek evacuee and new creative director of TNR. “We decided to break out of The New Republic’s heritage and create something fresh and new,” Barnett said.

He was referring to a long history of new logos with serifs, including one that I did back in the ’90s in UBEC, Ultra Bodoni Extra Condensed. That one didn’t last long.

The New Republic in 2000 with a logo designed by Roger Black. The illustration of Al Gore is by Mark Hess.

Perhaps the longest-running logo in the magazine’s history was a superb flag in Zapf’s Sistina, with startling black ears bleeding to the sides. Forgotten the name of the designer, but still love that spacing. (Note, the magazine was printed newsprint on off-white, uncoated book paper in those days—with Palatino text and headlines (then an unfamiliar typeface in the United States!)

The New Republic in 1967.

The New Republic’s new logo compared with different settings of Antenna.

Speaking of spacing, that is one potential quibble (if you ignore the odd “New” and the chopped right side of the “C”) an old typographer might have with this design. Note the way the “NE” smashed together. That just blurs together in small sizes. I ran up some alternatives in InDesign, starting with the spacing Cyrus Highsmith designed into the font.

Oh, well. When I retire, I will go around fixing letterspacing to my own preferences, and hacking into web sites to replace them, like Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson who go around correcting typos on signs. In the meantime, I wish TNR the best. The magazine has been quickly improving since Chris Hughes (the Facebook founder who managed the social network campaign for Obama in ’08) took over. Let’s hope Barnett’s logo has a long a run and builds a place in our hearts for Antenna like that ’60s logo did for Sistena in mine.

Update: The New Republic’s blog has more about the new logo in an interview with Creative Director Dick Barnett.