Print magazine nameplate, 1955–1960
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Aug 27th, 2015. Artwork published in
circa 1955
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2 Comments on “Print magazine nameplate, 1955–1960”
Ian Jack’s loving profile of Harling, who lived until 2008, comments that Harling’s few fonts “created a jollier version of the Victorian age and helped shape the postwar fashion for Victoriana.” It’s certainly a fairly direct line from his and his friends’ fascination with the more garish aspects of Victorian applied art to the cover of Sergeant Pepper. But it’s hard to call any of his published designs masterpieces.
Unfortunately, perhaps the prime of his career as a commentator on typography in the late 1930s apparently wasn’t a great time for new display fonts in Britain (he more focused on interior design writing after the war). Although he publicly advocated that his friends Ravilious, Bawden and Freedman move from lettering to font design, in which any of them could have excelled, as far as I’m aware none of them ever made any serious effort to.
Although that might be changing.