Sign welcoming passengers to the first class compartment in a train by the Dutch Railways (Nederlandse Spoorwegen, NS).

I wonder if this radiates first class – it’s chilly.

Hardback cover

Alexandra Harris' collection of British nature-writing was published in an interesting mixture of fonts that refers to the past without quite reusing it.

The hardback edition (September 2015) uses P22 Cézanne Pro for the title, and the rest of the cover in caps and small capitals of English Grotesque, an industrial-style sans based on the many pieces of sans-serif lettering around the UK similar to (or preceding?) Johnston and Gill but not a direct copy (here’s a good example – sign painters in this style seem to have had a lot of fun with ampersands). The body text and a quote on the cover is in Carat, an Ungerish sharpened old-style from Dieter Hofrichter.

The same fonts are used throughout the book – rather neatly the numbers referring to endnotes are also English Grotesque, making them noticeably more solid than the text and easy to spot. It’s a well laid-out book, although perhaps Carat gets a little fragile when used for the blockquotes in a smaller size. Cézanne also recurs in the text – it's the font used for ornaments. The paperback (July 2016) uses a title in Perpetua (quite appropriately, as both Harris and Gill are from Sussex) and small text in Brandon Grotesque. The cover of the Australian edition uses English Grotesque and Carat.

I think the logo of publisher Thames & Hudson is based on Bliss but with the capitals and ascenders cropped a little.

Paperback cover

Detail from the interior, in Carat

Cover of the Australian edition

Re:publica is an annual conference that deals with web-related topics like blogging, social media, digital society, and web politics. On the occasion of re:publica 13 which opened its doors in Berlin today, Wortfeld has published a series of historic conference posters, claiming that they were discovered “in the attic of the state archives in Berlin-Dahlem”. The posters purportedly prove that the roots of re:publica go back not only to 2007, but actually a full hundred years, when “engineers, artists, painters and musicians first met in a Berlin machine factory in 1913, under the wary eyes of the Prussian secret police”.

Although there are a couple of details that challenge their authenticity, the posters do a remarkable job at emulating the various historic styles of graphic design. It’s obvious that the designer(s) had lots of fun with these.
The images were published under a CC-by license.

While all genres here are more or less historically accurate, this spoof is easily detectable: The Art Nouveau letterforms by Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) were not made into a typeface before 1996, when Phil Grimshaw digitized them as ITC Rennie Mackintosh. Also, such a combination of Jugendstil and blackletter was rather unusual.

Bonus points for correctly using the two forms of ‘s’ in ‘Diskuſſion’! (However, ‘Maſchinenfabrik’ would have needed a ‘long s’, too.)

Berthold Block is a very plausible choice for a German interwar poster. The condensed weights were not released before 1920, though.

Constructivist typography similar to the works of El Lissitzky or Jan Tschichold, featuring the rarely seen P22 DeStijl Stencil. Erbar-Grotesk schmalhalbfett was not available before 1929, but this still feels pretty correct.

The 1928 poster is a nod to Kurt Schwitters and his MERZ collages, with a mix of Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch, Akzidenz-Grotesk, some more Rennie Mackintosh, Block, Futura – and Adobe Garamond (1989).

This one is great! Every design that uses Reporter is great. The secondary typeface is Alternate Gothic No. 2.

Roger Excoffon’s Banco (1951) and Hermann Zapf’s Optima Bold (1968) – almost. Fun fact: A specimen for Optima showed an airplane, too.

This poster feels the least authentic to me. Yes, Helvetica was already released in 1958 (at least the regular weight). Yes, multi-color photographic reproduction was possible, theoretically. The devil is in the details: the spacing – word spaces in particular – is way too wide for a pre-digital poster design.

The 1963 edition is more credible: an economical one-color print with a coarse half tone image.

Helvetica again, now paired with Times Extra Bold – looks quite authentic. But would they really have used the term ‘Westberlin’?

ITC Lubalin Graph was released in 1974, but apart from that, this is another good one. ITC Avant Garde Gothic really shines with that rainbow. Minor quibble: It looks more like a paperback cover than a poster.

Futura Extra Bold Condensed, tightly spaced and with heavy underlines – spot on for Germany anno 1978, cf. this poster by Klaus Staeck.

More Futura Condensed, now in several weights and all caps. Complete with a reference to the “Btx-Leitseite” – hilarious!

The 1988 poster features various styles of ITC Franklin Gothic. With the contrasty color blocks and the pipes as date separators, it successfully establishes a late eighties/early nineties atmosphere.

Props for using the actual Lucky Strike typeface here: This is Concorde, not Times New Roman.

Emigre’s Mrs Eaves indeed was an ubiquitous typeface in the late 1990s. Here it is paired with Akzidenz-Grotesk.

Last but not least, this is FF DIN Alternate (featuring the narrow C), with roughened contours.

The cover of the Association for Computing Machinery’s magazine reads between (or within) the lines of a Turing-themed cover using the handwriting script by Michael Want and James Grieshaber.

Cezanne Pro on Celtic Honey Liqueur

via P22

Lowercase script is P22 Cezanne Pro, a digital interpretation of Paul Cézanne’s handwriting. The logo uses various OpenType alternates. Can’t find a match for the uppercase ‘A’ and ‘L’. Could be custom.