Opening Credits from 1990s Production

Ashura29 May 2014 · 03:07

So whatever this is, it's very close to Helvetica Bold or Arial Bold, but some of the glyphs are different. You can see the A, M, K, and S are all a bit different. This was not done on a computer, but probably some other kind of titling system in the analogue days, so a more direct match might not exist?

In the picture, the top (the yellow) is the original, the bottom are my approximations using Helvetica and Arial. Overall, the original looks thicker...

I'm working on restoring these credits, so any help in getting this closer to the original would be, well, helpful. :)

Attachment	Size
cagliostro_opcredits.png	324.56 KB

fvilanakis29 May 2014 · 04:55

The longer I'm looking at your sample, the more I'm convinced this is not a special font, but the thickness is the side effect of a bad quality rendering on a low resolution device (or bad quality image capture from a low res video sample).

Donald H. Tucker29 May 2014 · 08:55

In a case like this its worth asking whether the film-maker wanted a special effect for the titles or merely wanted to inform.
If the latter then you could examine what the film-maker and his production people would probably consider as appropriate font options.
Helvetica would definitely have been familiar to a film maker in the 1990s.
As for Arial I am not certain precisely when it became widely known. It was designed in the 1980s for a laser printer and promoted as a font for IBM/Microsoft computers from the early 1990s onward.
BTW your film may predate the use of digital fonts for film titles.
In these circumstances I would go with Helvetica.
Don

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 26 Apr 2015. original URL