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Samantha Pleet

Contributed by Elizabeth Goodspeed on Jun 16th, 2020. Artwork published in
circa 2017
.
Samantha Pleet 1
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.

Brand identity and web design for Brooklyn-based clothing designer Samantha Pleet, created by Other Means.

The primary typeface is a custom digitization of Baldur. The font as used on the website is simply named Samantha. Baldur was originally issued by the Julius Klinkhardt foundry in Leipzig, Germany in 1901. Its Art Nouveau curves are a good match for Pleet’s fantastical and feminine clothing. Generally available digitizations of Baldur include a freebie by Dieter Steffmann and Ralph Unger’s Reznicek.

Samantha Pleet 2
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Samantha Pleet 3
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Samantha Pleet 4
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Samantha Pleet 5
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Samantha Pleet 6
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.
Samantha Pleet 7
Source: samanthapleet.com License: All Rights Reserved.

8 Comments on “Samantha Pleet”

  1. Interesting to see the renewed interest in these odd painterly faces from the German Jugendstil era! Ryan Waller of Other Means kindly let me know that it was Dinamo who created the custom digitization. Samantha was made for the exclusive use in the identity.

    The image below shows Baldur (top) compared to Samantha (bottom). The reinterpretation generally is, as one would expect, a bit more streamlined, with less complex forms and larger apertures, see especially lowercase letters like a c g o p but also 4. For some other glyphs, however, Dinamo went for a more ornamental form (O) or replaced rounds with corners (H U). The latter was probably done to achieve greater homogeneity across the capitals, cf. M or N. The left-leaning S now looks right-leaning to me, but your mileage may vary. ;)

  2. Thank you Florian for all this additional information! So interesting.

  3. Emma Livingston says:
    Oct 21st, 2020 11:33 pm

    This is one of my fave fonts I’ve ever seen! Is there a way I can download it to use it?

  4. Hi Emma,

    Samantha (the version shown at the bottom of my previous comment) is not freely available. You may inquire at Dinamo about availability, but chances are that it’s exclusive to Samantha Pleet.

    For Baldur, the typeface on which Samantha is based on, there are at least two digital versions. One is called Reznicek and can be purchased from MyFonts. The other one by Dieter Steffmann has the original name and can be downloaded for free from Moorstation. There are conflicting statements about the terms of use for Steffmann’s fonts. On his homepage, he writes that they “are free for private use only”.

  5. So guys:

    There is BN Breezy, (another) digital typeface based on Baldur, but with modified and refined characters.

  6. Thanks, Jay. I’ve made an entry for BN Breezy and linked it from our Baldur page.

  7. So that Baldur appeared in Dan X. Solo’s book Art Nouveau Display Alphabets.

    And I have to say, on the Freddy in-use page, the year appears to be 1976, not 2012! It could be an error I see.

  8. That was indeed an incorrect date. Fixed now, thanks!

    By the way, I’ve renamed the entry for Freddy to Chianti. I don’t know what the original name was, but the earliest showing (known to me) is as Chianti in a catalog by Lettergraphics.

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