Typophile

Quirky 1970's inline display face

osamu

I am looking to identify the original name/designer of the font used in the uppermost catch-line of this advertisment from 1977 ("It's syn-ful!") ... and also in the company name seen on the cover of their 1977 catalogue.

A digital version of this face called "Upperville" was published by Bay Fonts in the early 90's, but this was an absolute travesty of digitzation, mostly likely an autotrace and with many forms different to the few printed samples I've seen. I am looking for more original printed samples, preferably the full set of glyphs, and the only way I will be able to do this is to know the original typface name. Knowing the designer/foundry will also help me to track down the copyright holder and to understand if that is still current.

Font: 
ITC Uptight Regular
Solved By: 
donshottype
fvilanakis

I can't find this /R/S or /c in a digital font, but look at the following travesties(?), matching "Upperville" to help with your inquiry:

Xippy (no more info),
Tatum (Freeware! from A. Carr),
Tolum (Freeware! from A. Carr)
Tahitelbait (no more info),
Oneil (no more info),
Daubler (1994, by CompuWorks)
Core 1, Core 3, Core 5, Core 7 (Cambridge Fontworks)
Uptown (Copyright (c) 1992 Corel Corporation)
Uptight Neon (Copyright (c) 1992 Corel Corporation)
Uptight (Copr.1992 Image Club Graphics, Inc)
URSULINE (1997, ARC MEDIA INC)
Downtown (©1995-2001 Arts & Letters Corporation)

Donald H. Tucker

Original might be an ITC font under the name of Uptight. Luc Devroye's list of Corel font name equivalences matches this with Corel's Uptown, which is far better made than an autotrace.
http://luc.devroye.org/corelequivalences.html
At least it's somewhere to start your search for originals.
Don

Donald H. Tucker

Note in "ARIES MUSIC" that S in MUSIC matches Uptight/Uptown while S in ARIES is different. This suggests to me that R, M and C may also be modifications. The font has the elements for the R. Merely mirror the 9 and do a little editing for the leg.


M, C and S are even easier to modify.
Don

Donald H. Tucker

For M rotate the bowl of p 90 degrees, extend the vertical strokes, clip the inner stroke into a taper to match the other letters, mirror and use both original and mirror and this is what you get:


As I mentioned in an earlier post, I suspect that these letters are not in the original font.
Don

osamu

With the assistance of fvilanakis's list, and Don's identification of ITC Uptight I've managed to locate some possible print sources of the original.

I also now see that this request has been posted here before: http://typophile.com/node/47014

I doubt whether a synthesizer company would be creating their own custom letters for a few print ads, and indeed the previous identifier, Mark Simonson, states that ITC Uptight Regular (as opposed to Neon) did indeed have several alternate letterforms which have been used in the samples I have posted here. Most modern sources such as Rookledge's Classic International Typefinder list only ITC Uptight Neon, not Uptight Regular. But at least now I have what I need. Thanks all!

Donald H. Tucker

Here is the character set of the variation known as Uptight Neon displayed in the 1985 "Letraset Product Manual," which should be easy to obtain if you wish to make a more detailed scan:


I have rearranged the characters to fit the Typophile image format.
Don

Stephen Coles

Here is a Berthold Fototypes specimen of ITC Uptight and and ITC Uptight Neon. The Neon doesn’t have the alts from Don’s sample above, though.

Captured from web.archive.org on 22 Apr 2015. view this capture