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Neon Genesis Evangelion

Graphic designer Peiran Tan plumbs the typographic psyche of the celebrated anime franchise.

Contributed by Peiran Tan on Oct 17th, 2019. Artwork published in
circa 1995
.

21 Comments on “Neon Genesis Evangelion

  1. Men’s shirt from Radio EVA, Evangelion’s official fashion label. The fact that “Summer” is the only season not crossed out is an oblique reference to the earth having stopped spinning in the series, leaving Tokyo-3 in a permanent summer

    For what it’s worth, this isn’t quite what happened—the Earth not spinning would roast one side of the planet and freeze the other. The actual situation in the show is that in the wake of the world-spanning disaster known as Second Impact, the tilt of the planet’s axis has been reduced, the results being the permanent summer you mentioned as well as the near-total melting of the polar icecaps.

  2. Fuero Dandy says:
    Oct 17th, 2019 8:41 pm

    I know Evangelion for more than 10 years now – and still I learn new things about it, it’s amazing when you think about it, haha.

    Your article provided a lot of insight into things I did register but didn’t consider until now. Thank you for the writeup!

  3. It’s refreshing to see such a well-researched, complete and carefully-crafted blog – I’m new to this website but I’ll be sticking around! Thanks.

  4. Been fascinated by Evangelion’s aesthetics since 15 years ago, work as a graphic designer now, saw your post, can’t describe how satisfying it is!

  5. Andrea A. says:
    Oct 25th, 2019 3:56 pm

    Amazing work! It’s been a pleasure to read it and learn from it.

  6. Great article! I was obsessing over this topic when I rewatched the series on Netflix. It was good to see someone going so deep into this awesome typographic rabbit hole.

    A couple of things:

    • Throughout the series, you can sometimes catch those control panels with a grotesque other than Helvetica or any of the fonts you listed i think – as seen in one of the gifs in the post, the one with the big countdown “ACTIVE TIME REMAINING/INTERNAL”. There’s a softer R like that of Arial (rounded light) but idk.
    • Hey, you forgot to mention what in my opinion is the craziest Evangelion type of all! The high-contrast serif spelling “EVANGELION” behind katakana in the intro logo, like some mecha-didone or mecha-art-deco weirdness.
      It was recreated by Icelar in Fontstruct as Evangelion.
  7. Here’s the intro logo mentioned by Diego. Chances are it’s lettering (i.e. custom drawn) and not type (i.e. a font in use), and hence wasn’t discussed by Peiran, but I don’t know for sure. If it’s based on a font, it probably was customized, see the flopped V and the barless A.

  8. This article was linked by Hacker News and received a number of interesting comments. A few selected ones are quoted below.

    “…there’s the wonderful observation that ‘the artifacts of your medium will become its defining and desired characteristic’. See how we have systems trying to emulate CRT scanlines, or Synthwave style of music that not only reproduces the limitations of early synths but applies those limitations to newer sounds.” — AceJohnny

    “I suppose that mechanical compression faithfully evokes what condensed fonts actively try to mitigate: the squeezing and stretching itself, which lends it a sense of emotional stress and tension.
    Also, with digital fonts as new as they were when NGE was released, it’s likely that compression seems more like a novel way to establish identity, rather than the now ubiquitous ignorant rescaling of fonts.” — jhanschoo

    “Regarding mechanical compression: it’s probably not 100% so, but afaik in kanji/hanzi and likely many other SEA scripts [SEA = South East Asian? Chinese or Japanese should be East Asian, not South East Asian — ed.], proportions of a character don’t matter much―they’re just strokes in a grid that you can squish without harm to legibility. That’s why labels on cheap Chinese goods often had deformed quasi-monospace Latin type: the author just had no idea anything is wrong.” — aasas

    Peiran notes that he contests the statement that Hanzi’s proportions don’t matter much – “they matter a lot from a stylistic signifiers standpoint – but this commenter does have a point that legibility deteriorates slow for Chinese characters under mechanical compression.”

    “Yes, U+FF01–U+FF5E is a ‘full width’ copy of printable ASCII (U+0021–U+007E).
    Yes, U+FF01-U+FF5E is a `full width' copy of printable ASCII (U+0021-U+007E).” — kps

    According to Peiran, that’s a “brilliant mention of fullwidth ideographic characters in Unicode, which are devised precisely to accommodate metal-era Japanese type founding practices, just like the aggressively shortening of descenders.”

    “There is one more anime that comes to mind if we’re talking about typography – Bakemonogatari. Throughout the series still images are shown containing vital information about the thoughts of characters, events’ second meaning, puns, etc. Sometimes split second only, sometimes in a fast slides. Really novel and interesting take on animation.
    Example: https://youtu.be/-jm-xrO2c_0 (first 30 seconds shows one of the still images and there’s much more)” — wst_

    Peiran agrees that the Monogatari series is another example of integrating typography into animated storytelling. He add that “it’s also using typography as the series’s graphic identity – the FangSong style, faux-italicized, then individually rotated back to upright position.”

  9. You’re an absolute legend for cataloguing this, thank you. That font compression is nothing short of haunting!

  10. The article has been republished in Chinese titled on The Type.

    Translation by Skye Mok and editing by The Type’s editor, Mira Ying.

  11. Outstanding! Congrats, Peiran, and thanks to all who have been involved!

  12. Steven Larkin says:
    Aug 6th, 2020 7:30 am

    I’m a freelance graphic designer, and EVA is my hands-down favourite anime title — thank you so much for this fantastic article, and the research you put into it!

  13. Marc McCoy says:
    Mar 22nd, 2021 12:45 am

    What font is used to spell “SELEE” in that logo?

  14. Marc: I think that’s just lettering, probably drawn in the same program as the rest of the logo—Adobe Illustrator or whatever they used.

  15. Carter says:
    Jun 8th, 2021 1:46 am

    Amazing article. I’ve referenced this many times, which makes me wish it were a book or zine of some sort. Thank you for this!

  16. I trying to create the iconic “SOUND ONLY” monolith. in this article, it says that they used Chicago for the numeral part. but when I checked, it doesn’t have a diagonal line on the 0. That makes me think that the numerals don’t use Chicago as a typeface. Do you have any suggestions for the alternatives?

  17. Hi John, I’m not sure which version of Chicago you’re looking at. Note that there are several unrelated typefaces under the same name, and that the Chicago in question is no longer available for licensing, at least not from distributors like MyFonts.

    The Chicago I’m looking at (version 3.5a3, © 1990–98 Apple Computer Inc. © 1990–97 Type Solutions Inc. © 1990–97 The Font Bureau Inc.; included in Mac OS9) does have a slashed zero.

  18. Awesome article! Tokyo-2 was not destroyed, though. The government of Japan is in Tokyo-2 after the destruction of “old” Tokyo.  The government planned to relocate to Tokyo-3 but that never happened.

  19. In the end frame of 3.0+1.01, the words “end of story” is not horizontally compressed (like all previous treatments), but horizontally expanded, just like the way Matisse EB used to be set in the 1997 film – an obviously self-referential graphic design decision. (After all, the film itself is also self-referential, if gratuitously so)

    3.0+1.01 End Frame

  20. WY Tsai says:
    Mar 30th, 2023 10:03 am

    the countdown sceneWhat is the English sans-serif font used in this scene? I tried Helvetica, but the letters 'R’ and 'G’ don’t seem to match the original.

  21. Twitter user zetadzn has identified the font used for the words “Neon Genesis Evangelion”: JTC Win M9, the 9th weight (a heavy weight) of JTC Win M, the minchōtai series of the JTC Win superfamily.

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