All-caps Futura Extra Bold Condensed was a staple in 1970s and 80s advertising. Here it’s used for a Campari & Soda ad from 1979.

Kenny Stabler, notable for his 10-year career with the NFL’s Oakland Raiders, is featured here with his Houston Oilers team helmet – placing the date of this ad in 1980 or 1981 – when Stabler was with the Houston team.

Starting in 1979 (and continuing throughout the 1980s) the Motorcycle Industry Council launched their “Ride Aware. Show You Care.” public relations campaign [source]. Print media ads featured celebrities, sports figures, and motorcycle enthusiasts of the day, including Charles Bronson, Caitlyn Jenner, Lorenzo Lamas, Kent Howerton, Bobby and Al Unser, and American NFL quarterback Kenny Stabler.

Some of those ads, like this example from 1980/81, shouted “WHO CARES?” in large print across the top third of the page followed by a quote from the featured spokesperson warning the reader about the dangers of riding a motorcycle without protective gear. To quote Kenny Stabler from the ad:

I’d be laughed out of the stadium. Or carried out. Yet I see a lot of cyclists riding without even a helmet.

“Who Cares?” and “Ride Aware. Show You Care.” feature Futura Extra Bold Condensed Oblique. The body copy is set in Century Oldstyle Regular and Italic. The wordmark of the Motorcycle Industry Council uses Microgramma Bold Extended.

LSC Caslon (later known as ITC Caslon No. 223) by Tom Carnase (b. 1939), put to early use in a single size for an ad for Ford’s Quality Car Care from 1969.

To assure smooth, precise power steering, Ford Motor Company engineers design important parts to tolerances 100 times thinner than a human hair.

A car so precisely engineered can be cared for best by the specialist – your Ford or Lincoln-Mercury dealer.

See him and be sure.

Kind of sad that ad copy writers in the Mad Men era could feel sure that the car dealer was a “him”. In their view, the role of girls was limited to clinging to the fish bowl.

LISP on the BBC Microcomputer, Arthur Norman and Gillian Cattell.

The BBC Microcomputer was a 8-bit 6502 based microcomputer made in the UK in the 1980s. It was designed and built by Acorn, and due to partnership with the BBC it became immensely popular in schools.

Acornsoft was Acorn's in-house software division and produced, among other things, professional quality programming language implementations accompanied with good quality manuals. A selection of which is shown here.

Typography is consistent across the series of manuals: Titles, subtitles, and authors on the covers are in Formula (quite possibly Formula One by Letraset, which would have been popular at the time). Acornsoft's wordmark on the spine appears to be in ITC Avant Garde Gothic Condensed, with an O that has been replaced by an acorn.

The programming source code on the cover of LISP is in Courier.

BCPL for the BBC Microcomputer, Chris Jobson and John Richards.

FORTH on the BBC Microcomputer, Richard De Grandis-Harrison. The “curve” on the cover shows two levels of the space-filling Hilbert Curve.

The Acornsoft wordmark which features on the spines of all the books.

This invoice from Typefounders of Phoenix was tucked inside a type case of metal handset 14 point Fargo caps.

The “typefounders” logotype uses lowercase letters from Filmotype Army. The invoice appears to be set in Twentieth Century or other Futura variant. Interestingly, the invoice details appear to be typed in a matching Futura variant which appears to be IBM’s Mid-Century. The IBM Selectric was introduced just the previous year to this invoice in 1961. IBM Mid-Century is shown in a 1964 NOMDA catalog.

The 1962 purchaser of this font was located in Los Gatos, CA. The same Fargo metal font is now in a print shop about five miles away in Saratoga, CA.

Grotesque No. 9 in use for an ad for Colgate toothpaste by the Colgate-Palmolive Company from 1964. See also this other ad from 1972.

A great dinner wine doesn’t have to be served at room temperature.

Baker Signet (1965?) in use for an ad by the Taylor Wine Company, Inc. from 1969. While the headline shows a bold weight, the tag line “We uncomplicate wine” uses a lighter one. The copy is set in two columns of Optima (1958).

Caps from Lydian (“Madame Butterfly”) and Vogue Extra Bold (“Puccini”), paired with Stymie Extrabold Condensed and a Steinweissian script, for the cover of an album with “operatic highlights” recorded by the Vienna Opera Company and released by Plymouth Records (P12-103) probably sometimes in the early 1950s. Design by Einhorn.

[More info on Discogs]

“Makes a fine second car” – ad for Ford pickups (1966) ft. two weights of Futura.

Volkswagen was not the only car manufacturer using Futura for their adverts. A few years after the launch of the famous campaign by Volkswagen of America, competitor Ford relied on Paul Renner’s groundbreaking geometric sans serif, too. Unlike Volkswagen’s, though, their use was hardly consistent. This sample of magazine ads from the mid-1960s shows that Ford had no recognizable visual identity beyond the Blue Oval logo (with script lettering credited to Childe Harold Wills). Almost every model was advertised in a different, at times seemingly random typeface.

“Announcing: Mercury Discovery Special!” – ad for Ford Mercury (1966), also set in Futura, here in three of its weights.

“If you fly ‘Economy’ to have a longer and better vacation, you’ll understand all about our Falcon” – ad for Ford Falcon (1966), pairing Artcraft with Helvetica for the copy.

“Sweetheart of the Supermarket Set” – ad for the Ford Mustang (1966), with Akzidenz-Grotesk AKA Standard for display type and the similar Helvetica for the copy.

“Jekyll & Hyde” – ad for Ford Cortina from the English Ford Line (1965), combining big Optima with text in Times New Roman.

“My Daddy gets a big charge out of our Fairlane” – ad for the Ford Fairlane (1964) in Baskerville Old Face, striking a macho and anthophobic tone.

“You can’t get any closer” – that’s also true for the letterforms from Times New Roman Bold. In this 1968 ad by Norelco (the American brand name for electric shavers and other personal care products made by the Consumer Lifestyle division of Philips), they were spaced tight-not-touching, as it was popular at the time.

Lucky Strike introduces the Lucky Strike that doesn’t taste like a Lucky Strike.

One of the phototype versions of Perpetua, tightly spaced and more condensed than the original, paired with indented copy in Helvetica, for a magazine ad by the American Tobacco Company.

Sears Fine Food is a San Francisco restaurant that has served Swedish pancakes on Powell Street since 1938. This newspaper ad appeared in 1960. “Nationally famous for our 18 little pancakes…” was part of their ad copy for decades (e.g. 1949, 1990).

This debut album (1989) by pop duo Flipper’s Guitar had a great influence on the Japanese music scene in the 1990s. After releasing three albums, the band broke up, and two of the members continued their music careers as producers and solo artists: Keigo Oyamada (Cornelius) and Kenji Ozawa.

The sleeve typography clearly refers to Helen Merrill's 1960s jazz album Parole e Musica.

“The ideal christmas gift for the motorist”. Magazine ad by WSW (Wiener Schwachstrom Werke), a brand of Siemens-Austria. Prices in Schilling.

Gorgeous gothics ring in the new year. Timeless! Make America print again, shall we?

Here’s another invoice from the 1940s featuring Erbar-Grotesk. In her article about Erbar and early geometric sans Serifs, Indra Kupferschmid quotes Swiss archivist Philipp Messner, who notes that …

Erbar-Grotesk was quite popular in Switzerland in the 1940s and 1950s, e.g. used on many forms and documents, but fell out of favor in the 1960s and was replaced by Helvetica.

This invoice by Rich(ard) Filsinger, Ingenieur & C(ompagn)ie, Aarau, Switzerland, is particularly interesting when compared to the one from my previous post that was used around the same time less than 100 km to the north, across the German border. Both letterheads depict the company’s building as the only means of decoration, and can be described as modern insofar as they are typographic, not lettered. And yet the Swiss one looks so much more recent. It uses the DIN A4 paper size (adopted by Switzerland in 1929), as opposed to a non-standard 19.5×19.5 cm format. There’s no blackletter. The typography relies solely on a few weights of Erbar-Grotesk. Overall it is cleaner, with a clear hierarchy, fewer type sizes, fewer alignment axes, lighter borders, no rotated type, less forced justification, … This tidiness is all the more remarkable given that the information is provided in two languages, German and French.

In all-caps, Erbar-Grotesk can look a lot like Futura, or any geometric sans, for that matter. Among the details that help telling it apart are the ‘S’ with the steep straight segment, and the ‘C’ with terminals perpendicular to the stroke. In the fett, the ampersand is more squat than in other weights. Another peculiarity that can be observed here is the use of ‘ch’ and ‘ck’ ligatures, a German convention at that time, with roots in blackletter typesetting. In this bilingual document, these digraphs were applied to the French text, too.

Metro and Helvetica make an unusual combination of two Linotype faces. Interesting that Metro is in a version without a Futura-style 'M'. No further details known.

Wycombe Wanderers were, and are, quite a minor club so might not have been able to afford state-of-the-art printing.

Advert for ON TV, a former American subscription television service.

IBM Typewriter advertisements (in Dutch) found in an old schoolbook from my mother.

“The Sega Master System is a third-generation home video game console that was manufactured by Sega. It was originally released in 1985 as the Sega Mark III in Japan. After being redesigned prior to its North American launch, the console was renamed Master System and released in 1986 in North America, 1987 in Europe, and 1989 in Brazil.” — Wikipedia

The Light weight of Ed Benguiat’s ITC Modern No. 216 was used for the system’s logo and packaging of the console. Most of the initial game packaging also used the typeface, creating a cohesive identity for the brand. To our contemporary eyes it seems odd to see a bookish serif promoting video games, but tightly spaced, large x-height serifs were commonly used in the ’80s for every kind of high-tech product. (See Apple.)

Later, the type in the logo switched to a wider, small-size-optimized version of Century and the game titles replaced ITC Modern 216 with the much bolder Pistilli Roman or their own branding.

For more on the main Sega logo, see Sega logo (1976–present).