Ludwig is a BBC detective dramedy series starring David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin. Wikipedia:

John Taylor (David Mitchell) is a reclusive puzzle maker who publishes puzzle books under the pen name “Ludwig”. His identical twin brother, James Taylor, is a successful detective chief inspector in the Cambridge police force. James has gone missing, and his wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), a childhood friend of both brothers, enlists John’s help to solve the mystery. Pretending to be his brother, John infiltrates the local police station to investigate; inadvertently, he becomes embroiled in solving other cases.

John’s signature serves as both his pen name’s trademark and as the logo for the show. The font is Hummingbird Bold. The opening credits use various weights of Gravesend Sans.

Opening credits

Opening credits

A loose handwritten recreation of the signature in the first episode

Ludwig’s signature on one of his puzzle collections, as seen in episode 4, with an unidentified sans used for the cover title

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License: All Rights Reserved.

The “Pussy Wagon” is a Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck that features in Quentin Tarantino’s 2003 film Kill Bill: Volume 1. The pink lettering on its rear – replicated in the keyring pendant – is in a groovy 1960s style that, among other things, was used for cheesy pulp fiction with sexist tropes.

In an act of reframing through affirmation that’s typical of Tarantino, the bright yellow vehicle with the tacky name (and matching license plate) serves Uma Thurman as Beatrix “the Bride” Kiddo to launch her “roaring rampage of revenge” against the men (and women) who did her wrong.

The font in use probably is Action Is, an all-caps freebie from 1998. It was drawn by Jeff Levine based on an application of either Caruso Roxy or its close follower Holiday. The Identifont blog has the font’s origin story:

While working in the recording industry for Steve Alaimo, former singer and co-host of the 1960s TV show Where the Action Is, Jeff noticed an interesting typeface spelling out the show’s title on a photo album Steve kept from those years. Tracing the letters which existed on that page, and creating his own characters for those that were missing, the font was digitized by Brad Nelson of Brain Eaters Fonts and released as freeware under the name Action Is.

The iconic prop was subsequently produced as fan item, in the form of stickers, patches, keyring pendant, model cars, and more.

It has also been quoted more than once: in Tarantino’s Death Proof from 2007, a 1972 Ford Mustang is labeled “Lil’ Pussy Wagon”. The car again serves women to take revenge on a misogynistic murderer. And in 2009, the original Pussy Wagon made a cameo in the music video for Lady Gaga’s 2009 song “Telephone” featuring Beyoncé.

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Quentin Tarantino used to drive the Pussy Wagon himself. Via the Quentin Tarantino Fan Club: “The thing about the Pussy Wagon is, whenever I drove it on the freeway, everyone recognized it’s me. Everyone recognized the Pussy Wagon. And then it would be a chain, because people would drive alongside me and try to talk to me.”

Source: www.etsy.com PatchEire. License: All Rights Reserved.

Embroidered iron-on/sew-on patch

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Box for a Pussy Wagon truck replica in the scale of 1:32

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Mary Elizabeth Winstead in her role as Lee Montgomery, sitting on the “Lil’ Pussy Wagon” in the second segment of Death Proof (2007)

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Stills from the music video to “Telephone”: Lady Gaga leaves prison …

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… and dances with Beyoncé in front of the Pussy Wagon.

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Prop license plate S99821

Prop license plates designed for the 2017 science fiction film Blade Runner 2049, directed by Canadian film director Denis Villeneuve, starring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford.

The Japanese (Katakana) text “ロサンゼルス” (“Los Angeles”) uses Checkpoint Font, a retro heavy-duty industrial Japanese typeface inspired from 1930s Japanese poster typefaces made by Yoku Tobanai Tori. The alphanumeric codes placed above on each plate are set in an unidentified sans with similarities to Alternate Gothic and Wearetrippin.

Merriweather is used in the Netflix feature Glass Onion – A Knives Out Mystery in scene in which a web-based news headline is used to advance the plot. The website typography pairs Merriweather with Work Sans.

[More info on IMDb]

I caught you is an editorial work inspired by Steven Spielberg's film Catch Me If You Can, which recounts the life of the famous fraudster Frank Jr. Abagnale.

Putting myself in the shoes of an investigator and a forger, I catalogued the various documents forged by F. Abagnale that appear in the film. I then recreated them as facsimiles and incorporated them into the edition.

These documents interact with scenes from the film in which they appear, the text of Frank Abagnale’s autobiography (which inspired the film), as well as excerpts and images from the book The Art of the Steal, in which the forger shares his knowledge of forgery and explains how to protect oneself from fraud.

Printed in March 2023 at isdaT, Toulouse.

Işıl Gün is a Turkish stylist and set designer based in Milan. Each of her projects reflects a sophisticated, eclectic, and irreverent eye, shaped by a unique style that blends retro influences, surrealist elements, bold textures, and strong contrasts—always with an elegant and unmistakable touch.

She partnered with DilloStudio who designed the new identity directly from this coexistence of opposites: a vibrant and varied palette creates unexpected and lively combinations; geometric patterns echo the aesthetics of the 1970s, while surreal compositions mix illustrations, classical busts, animals, and natural stones in a dreamlike, personal language.

The logo features Blackest by Zetafonts, a typeface that merge radical design references with nods to Turkish visual culture. GT Alpina Condensed by Grilli Type and Fragment Mono by Wei Huang are used respectively for headlines and paragraphs.

Design by Mattia Finardi with direction from Marco Fogaccia. Web design and development by Daniele Capelli.

The Book of the Film* is a publishing project made at isdaT, presenting initial research on books in film openings. I first collected appearances of these generic books in films, which I then supplemented with theoretical texts. Finally, a typology based on the images in the collection concludes this edition.

*The title is a reference to a parody scene featuring generic books in the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Ultramorbidi is a Bremen-based duo that –

“one, i like it like FLOSS”

“two, free libre open source”

“three, and it’s got no boss”

“WE DE-CEN-TRA-LIZE, fedilike that!”

Forma DJR is featured in the music video to “r u ok?” by K-pop group Ifeye. It appears on a truck at 0:53 minutes. Other fonts include all-caps Myriad on the doors of a container and on a wooden booth, as well as Helvetica on T-shirts.

Host Sam Reich jumping joyously on the Game Changer set

Game Changer is a comedy panel game show produced and broadcast on the streaming service Dropout TV hosted by Sam Reich. The premise of the game show is that “the game changes every show,” so the reoccurring panel of comedian contestants have no idea what game they are playing until they start playing it.

Game Changer’s logo uses the fonts FF Prater Script for the word “Game” and Trade Gothic Next Heavy Compressed for the word “Changer”. In Season 5, much of the advertising used a hand painted style of Sam Reich as a magician, and used the font Sign Lettering JNL for the title on those advertisements instead.

Game Changer also displays the prompts for the contestants, and the info card of each contestant in Trade Gothic Next. The font used for the credit roll is Proxima Nova.

The strangest font among Game Changer’s history has to be All P Keyboard. This comedic font is entirely composed of the lowercase letter p, mapped to all other characters. The p glyph in this font is the same as the one from the Helvetica typeface.

This odd font choice comes from Game Changer season 2, episode 4, “A Sponsored Episode”, where the contestants are tasked with pitching random products they have never seen before. Contestant Mike Trapp receives a normal keyboard, except that all the letters have been replaced with the letter p. His hilarious yet surprisingly convincing presentation gained lots of views online, which gave Dropout the idea to make this an actual font you could use and released it in 2021 with the premiere of season 4 of the show.

This is the only font that Dropout has ever released themselves, and is available to download for users who have a subscription.

Game Changer Season 7 poster

Game Changer Season 6 poster

Game Changer Season 5 poster, with the title displayed in Sign Lettering JNL

Game Changer Season 4 poster

Game Changer Season 3 poster

Game Changer Season 1 promotional material

Sam Reich gleefully holding three large rubber ducks behind his podium, with the question prompt displayed on the monitor beside him reading “Gimme a Duck” in Trade Gothic Next

Screencap of Rekha Shankar’s entrance on S6EP7 Beat the Buzzer.
Rekha’s name, pronouns, and Instagram handle are all displayed in Trade Gothic Next.

Mike Trapp’s torso presenting an all-p keyboard

In the 1988 film Big, thirteen-year-old Josh Baskin, played by Tom Hanks, makes a wish in front of a fortune teller machine called Zoltar. Frustrated at his age, he wishes to be “big”. The card dispensed by the machine had a front side with an illustration and hand lettering spelling, “Zoltar Speaks”. On the reverse side is “Your Wish is Granted” in an art-nouveau style. The typeface is Artistik, a late-19th-century design that was revived in the 1970s by Letraset, which is likely how the type was applied for this prop.

Production Designer: Santo Loquasto
Art Directors: Speed Hopkins, Tom Warren

In the fall of 2024, the film The Substance premiered worldwide, marking a significant milestone in the formation of feminist body horror as an independent genre. At the heart of the plot is Elizabeth Sparkle, a once-successful Hollywood actress. Pressured by societal expectations and unrealistic beauty standards, she turns to a dubious serum sourced from the black market, with catastrophic consequences. This Cronenberg-esque tale raises timeless questions about the perception of a woman while exposing the ills of a toxic system, reimagined for new times, with new “solutions”.

To create her show Sparkle Your Life with Elizabeth, the filmmakers selected Bee Four, URW’s digital version of Filmotype Gamma, and Flash Back by BLKBK, mimicking the 1980s VHS tape fitness aesthetic when shows like this were at their peak. Notably, the font used for the phrase “With Elizabeth” feels like an autograph, to show a personal touch to the branding. She is the host, the star of the show, and she invites the audience to the glamorous and dynamic world of aerobics.

The Panic Table is a dynamic tabletop roleplaying game show produced by Failure Island, a NYC-based creative agency and production company. The futuristic branding is anchored by a space-age wordmark and symbol, designed by Natalie Saldivar, using a modified version of Nguyen Gobber’s expressive and geometric Monopol. Supporting text is rendered in the science fiction-inspired Zen Dots by Yoshimichi Ohira and Space Grotesk by Florian Karsten, with the show’s theme, “Unaccompanied Miners,” styled in Game of Squids by Darrell Flood.

The Panic Table is New York City’s most electrifying blend of comedy, sci-fi, and horror, presented as a dynamic tabletop roleplaying game show. Featuring five talented actors, each episode immerses viewers in kooky, spooky, edge-of-your-seat storytelling and spontaneous humour. In its first season, The Panic Table explores the tense, cosmic depths of Mothership, a sci-fi horror RPG that challenges the cast to survive in an unforgiving universe filled with danger and mystery. It’s a must-watch for fans of tabletop games and gripping, genre-blurring entertainment.

For a full list of credits, see the show on YouTube.

HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

Industry, season 1 (2020)

Mickey Down and Konrad Kay’s HBO series Industry makes use of a semibold style of Tusker Grotesk by the British graphic and type designer Lewis McGuffie. The title sequence of the drama series that premiered in 2020 has been created by Peter Anderson. Alternately, the title sequence is replaced during the opening or closing of the episodes by a “distorted” version of the title, which is either superimposed on sequences or plain black background.

The logo of the fictional London investment bank Pierpoint & Co. is set in Century Schoolbook (with a slightly titled e). A purple hoodie bearing the company name became so popular that HBO ended up marketing it, along with other fictive corporate merchandise.

HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

Industry, season 2 (2022)

HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

Industry, season 3 (2024)

Source: www.peterandersonstudio.co.uk HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.peterandersonstudio.co.uk HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

Source: www.peterandersonstudio.co.uk HBO. License: All Rights Reserved.

During a brand activation, Nubank brought Leslie David Baker to Brazil to star in an advertising film. In the story line, he moves to the country for retirement but ends up diving into entrepreneurship. That's how the “Planos no Papel” stationery came to life, later materializing into a pop-up store. Influenced by the character’s life, including jazz and bossa nova, the visual identity took shape. The event’s giveaways featured illustrations highlighting the balance between relaxation and work.

As Leslie himself would say: “a bit of work and a bit of rest.” To reflect this balance, we chose two main typefaces for the project: Ferpa, from the Brazilian foundry Typeoca, with its sharp edges and serious serif representing the work ethic, and Minute from PintassilgoPrints, mimicking a handwritten note, capturing the relaxed vibe of vacation.

In Backstreet Boys’ “Larger than Life” music video from 1999, all the text that appears before the music begins – date, title and band name – is set in Atmosphere (1997) by Jay Vidheecharoen, a font inspired by Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet (1967).

Later in the video, Glaser Stencil (1969) by Milton Glaser can be seen in a holographic UI.

There is also an unidentified techno font used in the year counter present in one of the first scenes in the video, see the last image.

From Wikipedia:

The music video for “Larger than Life” was a big-budget production directed by Joseph Kahn, who also directed “Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)” video in June 1997. The video was shot on a soundstage at Universal Studios on August 12–14, 1999, in Orlando, Florida. The video takes place in a futuristic space setting and includes elaborate special effects and animation, as well as a breakdown with a dance number. It was inspired by the movies Blade Runner and the Star Wars saga.

An extensive and eclectic range of typeface was selected in designing the film props used on the set of Una Navidad con Samantha Hudson, directed by Alejandro Marín and produced by Suma Content.

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From around 1970, the logo of Romper Room was based on the Condensed style of Benguiat Newlock.

From Wikipedia:

Romper Room is an American children's television series that was franchised and syndicated from 1953 to 1994. The program targeted preschoolers (children five years of age or younger), and was created and produced by Bert Claster and his presenter wife, Nancy, of Claster Television. The national version was presented by Nancy Terrell. Romper Room was also franchised internationally at various times in Canada, the United Kingdom, Japan, Finland, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Paraguay, Argentina, and Australia.

Source: www.flickr.com Detail of a scan by Stephen Coles. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

One-line sample of Benguiat Newlock Condensed in Photo-Lettering’s 1971 catalog

The words are placed inside a TV screen-like shape. Together with a triangular roof, the superellipse formed a stylized house. The wordmark featured in the opening titles as well in other graphics in the show. It was also applied on record covers and packaging for toys and other products related to the franchise. Over the years, the letterforms were redrawn more than once. Not all applications hence are a perfect match for the original design by Ed Benguiat.

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1972 title card

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Studio graphic

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Source: www.flickr.com Loïc Boyer. License: CC BY-NC.

Source: www.flickr.com ablekay47. License: All Rights Reserved.

Front cover of a Romper Room album released by Music for Pleasure, Australia [More info on Discogs]

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1970s commercial for Romper Room Toys

Source: vintagetoyarchive.tumblr.com Vintage Toy Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Scoop-A-Loop action game, USA, 1970. See also the Fun Time Puzzle Clock and Mr. Magnet Man from the same series.

Source: vintagetoyarchive.tumblr.com Vintage Toy Archive. License: All Rights Reserved.

Roundabouts building set, USA, 1970

Prop license plate 3M1

Prop license plates designed by Tom Southwell for the 1982 science fiction film Blade Runner, directed by Ridley Scott. Although hard to spot in the film, many different versions of these futuristic license plates were produced.

The alphanumeric codes placed above the barcode on each plate are set in Earth. The single letter Z in the top right corner is from Futura Black. The Japanese markings are either custom lettering or based on a currently unidentified font.

Prop license plate 6Y5

Prop license plate 4R4.

A replica of Deckard’s retrofit Sedan featuring license plate 7H5, as seen briefly in the film

Prop license plate 3E5

Original pencil sketch and color version of the futuristic license plate design drawn by Tom Southwell. Image from the documentary Signs of the Times: Graphic Design, found on the Blade Runner Five-Disc Complete Collector’s Edition.

Join Us is the fifteenth record album by indie pop band They Might Be Giants. Founded in 1982, the group has released well over 40 albums (as of September 2023).

On this 2011 record, the typography is dynamic with the artwork, as the “They” is lowered due to it being run over. Design by Paul Sahre, who created multiple covers for They Might Be Giants in later years. All info is set in a single weight of Neue Helvetica – and not Neue Haas Grotesk which was released the same year as this artwork.

[More info on Discogs]

The image of the huge-wheeled hearse from the album artwork was brought to life as a giant 12 ft DIY cut-out paper model. Printed at full size (to do that, scale the pdf up to 3400%), cut out and assembled, the funeral wagon was the star of the music video for “When will you die?”.