The title sequence used in Gaspar Noé’s Cannes-selected movie Enter the Void has amazed me over the years in terms of typography and graphic design, and thanks to a friend of mine, Puz, (some of) these fonts have been identified.

It was created by Tom Kan, a Japanese designer based in Paris. From Ian Albinson’s interview with Kan for Art of the Title:

The sequence is a typographer’s wet dream (or alternatively their nightmare). How were the various fonts and characters chosen?

The choice of typefaces came rather naturally. After coming up with a large selection in line with the film’s mood, we simply chose the ones that best suited the characters and the personalities of those in the team. Gaspar wanted each title to reflect the person it concerned. It was a beautiful homage and proof of his respect for the members of the team — a way to thank them.

Many typefaces and designs did not get used because the time limit was set — the sound mix was already done and it was impossible to extend. I think we used only 60% of the designs, all in all.

Every typeface used in the sequence seems to be a reference to other famous film title or poster fonts. What was the typeface you selected for your own credit and why?

We appropriated different typefaces, but we never wanted to copy the titles from other films in an obvious way since I thought that would be misleading. For my own credit, I went in many different directions: aged typefaces in metal, Kanji and Japanese calligraphy, techno typography… In the end, I let Gaspar choose and he went with the biggest, most legible type!

Watch the title sequence on YouTube, or right below (epilepsy/flashing lights warning):

Futura Extra Bold Condensed in all caps is the primary typeface for the credits. Here it’s used in combination with Kozuka Gothic for Japanese, alongside some logos.

Music credits include Egyptienne Medium Condensed, Garamond, Eurostile, Bodoni Condensed, Neue Helvetica 93, Futura, and Helvetica Condensed. It’s unclear if the LFO logo uses a font (Disco Deck is similar) or whether it’s custom drawn.

In addition to Futura Extra Bold Condensed, the logos of the production and distribution companies feature Euphoric (Wild Bunch) and Futura Extra Bold (Fidelité).

Producer credits feature FB Agency, Kozuka Gothic, ITC Machine, Futura Display, stretched and slanted Woodblock, and Antique Olive Nord

The names of the co-producers are set in Egyptienne Medium Condensed, Univers Ultra Condensed, Futura, an unidentified font similar to Crown Title, two unidentified stencil(ed) fonts, and Trajan.

More Egyptienne Medium Condensed for Suzanne Girard

Manager credits feature Haettenschweiler, Council, Neue Helvetica Extended (?), Clarendon, Pump Triline, Fiorello, Eurostile, Thorowgood Sans Shaded, and Futura Condensed.

The name of location manager Masahiro Hondo in Glaser Stencil serves as a mask.

Bank Gothic with rainbow glow effect for Lucio Tomaro

Photography credits with slanted Bank Gothic (Benoît Debie), bold italic City with added and extended top and baseline serifs (Gaspar Noé), TFAvian (Akira Kanno), outlined Futura (Yasushi Miyata), Bell Gothic (Jacques Bernier), and Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed (Yves Le Peillet)

Art credits featuring an unidentified blocky unicase face with 3D bevel effect similar to Mark (Marc Caro), FF Vortex (Kikuo Ohta), another unidentified blocky sans (Jean Carrière), and Zeppelin (Nicoletta Massone)

The dripping letters for Tony Crosbie appear to be custom(ized) – Shlop is a similar ready-made font.

Sound and editor credits with Eurostile (Ken Yasumoto), stretched Ironwood (Ryotaro Harada), contoured Nasalization (Claude Lahaye), an upright LCD typeface, probably Digital (Thomas Bangalter), a heavily modified Sonic or another font inspired by the Star Trek TNG logo (Lars Ginzel), Galledis with hyperextended lines (Gaspar Noé), modified SF Archery Black (Marc Boucrot), Zaius, a typeface family emulating the Planet of the Apes movie series logo (Jerome Pesnel), and ITC Machine (Pierre Buffin).

The fonts used for these cards include an unidentified inline face similar to Rubaiyat and Gothicum (Geoffroy Niquet), SF Archery Black (Yann de Cadoudal), OCR-A (Nicolas Delval), Mexcellent (Xavier Allard), fractured caps from a bold sans, possibly Compacta Black (Julien Aullas), Synchro (Bastien Laurent), Helvetica Rounded Bold Condensed (Anne-Sophie Bertrand), and an unidentified squarish sans similar to SB Carbon, Resistance Is Lowered or Apollo Rocket (Loris Paillier).

City Bold, slanted, with double contour and extended baseline serifs, for Tom Kan, Director of Typography

Gaspar Noé in outlined caps from Futura Extra Bold Condensed, without accent on the E

The blackletter typeface chosen for Lucile Hadžihalilović is Linotext (or Mariage, Wedding Text) with some modifications: e and c got bottom serifs and the swash in v was moved from the left to the right stem,

Paz de la Huerta gets various typographic treatments, including Eagle (in a weight between Bold and Black), Futura Dot with Citadel Script, outlined Egyptienne Bold Extended, and ITC Neon.

The Japanese transcription of Paz dela Huerta’s name (パス・デ・ラ・ウエルタ) appears to be Hiragino Maru Gothic or similar, with added contour.

Nathaniel Brown’s name is shown in Pump, ITC Bolt, Aachen, West Barnum Block filled with stars and stripes, and ITC Lubalin Graph Demi.

The fonts chosen for Cyril Roy include Aachen, American Text, Monotype Garamond, and at least two Japanese ones.

The MICR-inspired face used for Olly Alexander is handmade, as confirmed byo Tom Kan. Other fonts include Compacta and all-caps ITC Bolt.

The fonts used for Masato Tanno are Akzidenz-Grotesk Stencil and Ainsdale. The others are yet unidentified.

Gothicum and a (custom?) stencil version of Aachen for Ed Spear, Helvetica Rounded and Neue Helvetica 95 for Emily Alyn Lind, more Helvetica Rounded, an unidentified Japanese font, and Eagle for Jesse Kuhn and Nobu Imai

More ITC Neon and Helvetica Rounded for Sakiko Fukuhara. The bitmap font is 04b_08.

Sarah Stockbridge is set in Haettenschweiler with hyper-extended glyphs).

The names of Janice Sicotte-Beliveau and Stuart Miller are shown in Cooper Black, Impact Wide, Monterey and ITC Officina Serif, Braggadocio, Fiedler Gothic, and Blackoak.

Yemi Carol is presented in Impact Wide, Helvetica Rounded, and a Japanese Maru Gothic. The font shown at the bottom right is unidentified.

Several of the fonts used for Gaspar Noé’s name are yet unidentified. This includes alll fonts in the top row and the left one in the second row, which is similar to Moore Computer and Data 70. Other fonts include ITC Lubalin Graph, Futura Extra Bold Condensed, and Eagle.

Merchandise designed by Doron Studio for Puffco, a brand for cannabis accesories. The designs utilize the futuristic ARP3, together with Neue Helvetica and graphics to celebrate the launch of Peak Pro, a new product by Puffco.

Cortamambo is an album from the Uruguayan rock group El Cuarteto de Nos, one of my favourite bands, released in 2000. The album cover features a blue background with someone’s boobs in it (the band had that type of humor back then) and a rectangle in inverted colors that has the title, which translates to “Killjoy”.

In the upper part, there’s the band name and the text “4.TETO”, which sounds similar to “cuarteto“ (quartet in Spanish), set in what appears to be italicized caps from Impact. The title is written in Techno, which is a very cool font ngl. If you know Spanish and you like humor, I highly recommend this album. If you don’t know Spanish, I highly recommend this album, too – because of the instrumentals.

The image below shows the censored Argentinian version of the album cover, in which the bar with the negative colors is replaced with a black rectangle – it’s censored for obvious reasons.

[More info on Discogs]

Merlin’s Millennium Edition Sticker Collection, published by Topps Europe in 2000, is a special offer Merlin made to football fans to collect and swap their stickers with other collectors in a special event named “Merlin Swop Shop Tour”, which is sponsored by Caprisun.

The main fonts used in the booklet and on the stickers are Grant Hutchinson’s Badloc and David Berlow’s Techno. The former is used for titles, with EndcapS and plenty of effects. The latter appears in team and player descriptions, among other places. The boxes with Premier League records and club facts use Blake Springer’s Digital.

Steven Gerrard, Liverpool F.C.

Alan Shearer, Newcastle United

David Beckham, Manchester United

ASUS A7N266 VM/LAN/AA Motherboard box

In the early 2000s, Taiwanese electronics manufacturer ASUS used David Berlow’s Techno as the primary font for the packaging and install CDs of their motherboards.

ASUS P4G8X Motherboard box

VIA KT400 Chipset Series Support CD, 2002

P4R8L Support CD, 2004

Shadowrun is a roleplaying game that was first released in 1989 by FASA Corporation, and is still published today in its current, sixth edition. For most of those editions, the primary typeface for body text has been Friz Quadrata (1966), which was also used for the game’s logo for the first and second editions (the latter from 1992), shown above.

Page from the main rulebook for the first edition of Shadowrun, from 1989, showing Friz Quadrata in both regular and bold varieties, as well as faux bold italics for the quote below the chapter title, as no true italics were available at the time.

Note the straight quote marks. FASA Corporation is known to have used Apple Macintoshes at their office, so the text was most likely laid out in columns on a computer but then pasted up for printing. (Early books often include a “Paste Up” credit; this particular one doesn’t.)

Page from the Street Samurai Catalog (1989, though this one is actually from the revised edition from 1992), a supplement for Shadowrun. Body text is Futura, with the page title in Helvetica Compressed and some small bits in Aachen.

Revised game logo for the third edition (1998), using a modified Friz Quadrata.

Front cover of New Seattle by Stephen Kenson. Originally published by FASA in 1999, this is a later edition by FanPro. All text on the cover, except for the stock number, is Tribe (1997); the stock number is Bronzo (1992). The latter was also used for the titles on the spines of most of the later third-edition books (though not on this one).

Page from New Seattle, showing the chapter title and drop capital in Badloc (1989). Body text of third-edition books was still Friz Quadrata, and even though by this time true italics of this existed, Shadowrun books kept using faux versions instead.

The statistics block below the map is in Futura Condensed, while the fictional “comments” in the text are ITC Avant Garde Gothic, as are some of the captions on the map. The circled arrow that starts off each comment is the greater-than symbol from Badloc, though set larger and lower than it would be if set at the same point size as the text itself.

Page header in New Seattle, in Tribe.

Typical page header for a third-edition Shadowrun book, also using Tribe.

Magazine ad for Toxic Waste Hi-Voltage Bubble Gum from ca. 2008

Toxic Waste is a line of sour candies by Candy Dynamics from Indianapolis.

The advertisement for their Hi-Voltage Bubble Gum shown above features Ad Lib for “Torment your Taste Buds!” and “New!”, mostly in all caps, AG Book Stencil, a style unique to the AG Book Family, is used for “Shockingly Sour BUBBLE GUM!”, and “Over 2 Feet of Gum!” uses Techno. Secondary fonts include Akzidenz-Grotesk (plus Condensed) and Univers Ultra Condensed.

The packaging combines Kaffeehaus (an interpretation of Kaufmann with rounded terminals) for “Hi-Voltage” with Stencil (ATF) for “Toxic Waste”, supported by more Techno. The typeface chosen for the “Nuclear Sludge” packaging is Stop. The Candy Dynamics logo is based on Mister Earl, with stretched letterforms.

Toxic Waste Candy Special Edition Drums

Toxic Waste Nuclear Sludge candy display, 2008

Candy Dynamics logo

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.

First published by Rizzoli in 1992, Lewis Blackwell’s 20th Century Type was re-issued by Gingko Press at nearly the end of the twentieth century in a remix edition which also featured this new cover, designed by Angus Hyland and assisted by Simon Piehl.

The cover design including the letterforms revives Wim Crouwel’s original work created for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, see especially the Vormgevers exhibition poster from 1968. The typeface is Architype Stedelijk, a digital font based on Crouwel’s experimental alphabets, created by The Foundry in close collaboration with the Dutch graphic designer. Architype Stedelijk was first released in April 1997. David Quay and Freda Sack (The Foundry) kindly donated the Architype fonts to Angus for the design of the book.

Law & Order is a US television series set in New York City that first aired 30 years ago today, on September 13, 1990, and ran for 20 seasons until its final episode in 2010. Each episode is split into two segments: an investigation by the police (Law) and subsequent prosecution by the district attorney’s office (Order). The series has been spun off into a larger franchise of shows, including Law & Order: SVU which is the longest running primetime live-action series in US television history.

Starting with the very first season, and continuing across the franchise, Law & Order has made prominent use of Friz Quadrata for its titling and branding. Along with the show’s trademark dun-dun sound, the simple but consistent use of the typeface has cemented the brand among the most iconic in US television. As Art of the Title explains it:

It’s a testament to the power and ubiquity of the series that 30 years later one glimpse of that typeface and two bits of sound can immediately transport audiences back to a world of perilous but soothing procedure, where process and justice are the only things worth a damn.

The original title sequence was created by Betty Green with the Howard Anderson Company, and though some details have changed with new seasons (most notably between seasons 3 and 4) and rotations with the cast, the overall design remained more or less the same over the years.

The episodes start with the main title in all caps while a stiff voiceover sets the stage for the show. “LAW & ORDER” is shown at first as just the shade of the letters, gradually fading into the rendering of white letters with a dark shadow and outer glow of blue for the top line and red for the bottom. The short pre-intro concludes with the now-famous dun-dun sound.

Following a short teaser scene, the full title sequence continues, accompanied by a synth-jazzy soundtrack. Dramatic zoom-ins on “LAW” and “ORDER”, interspersed with stark imagery, continue the blue and red color coding to introduce the cast of police and attorneys, respectively. The actors’ portraits fade in from halftone renderings, with a few minor appearances of Eurostile for “STARRING” and “DIRECTED BY”.

In addition to the title sequence, Friz Quadrata also features prominently in the show’s intertitles, used to help move the storyline along quickly, giving the show a distinctive fast-paced editing style. According to the show’s creator, Dick Wolf:

The title cards take the place of a lot of the garbage time in most shows of people driving up to buildings, getting out of cars, walking in, going up in elevators, walking out … There are no establishing shots. There are no transition shots.

The final episode of the original Law & Order series aired on May 24, 2010, but subsequent spin-off series have continued to make prominent use of Friz Quadrata. After 30 years, it’s one of the longest and most consistent uses of a typeface for any TV franchise ever.