I’m interested in getting a sample of the type used by Olivetti typewriters in the late 50’s. I’m writing a story about a friend who owned one. I had a Smith Corona at the time and I always thought hers was so cool, so moderne. Any ideas?
Typophile
Type used by Olivetti typewriters in the late 50s
A sample might help.. Until then, take a look at some of these, from Vintage Type.:
> www.vintagetype.com/screenwriters/
> www.vintagetype.com/vintagetypewriter/
Dav, formlos
Is this what you are looking for?
Eben, that's not quite 50s. Interesting tho'.
("Influenced by the characters drawn by Wim Crouwel in 1976 for Olivetti’s typewriter font")
Doh!
Do you have any samples of the way the 50's type looked?
I really like Wim Crouwel's work. I am sure that blinded me.
Hi there,
This is a related question. I recently saw an Olivetti Lettera 35 manual typewriter up for auction on e-bay. The seller included a photo of something typed on the machine. The lettering was something I've never seen before. It looked very "mod" and somewhat thick. I've been looking and looking but can't seem to find the font. Does anyone know what typeface this is?
Do you have an example of the typeface somewhere that you can show?
Jens
You have to understand -- Jens flunked his mind-reading exams… :^P ;^) :^D
Shh, Yves, don't tell anyone ;)
Hrm… I wrote a comment earlier about Lekton, a typeface that comes from Olivetti sources to which I contributed, but it got deleted. It’s monospaced and tri-spaced: Olivetti used to do quadri-spaced typefaces too, I’m told.
Lekton is very interesting, thanks for posting!
Jens
Another Olivetti typewriter face has been digitised and published recently by Lineto: Lettera, inspired by Candia, designed by Joseph Müller-Brockmann.
Hey Antonio - What is the difference mono and tri-spaced? Is there 3 widths to fit a letter into?
BTW related to the thread: Candia is c.1975
Michael: yes, instead of just having slots of the same widths, you settle on two (bispaced), three (trispaced), four– and so on. In a bi-spaced system for example you could imagine most letters having the same widths and then have a half-width for letters like i, l, etc. It seems to me like it has a lot of educational value for newcomers to type design: they could start out with a monospaced font which is easier to draw because you don’t have to think about spacing much, and then they could move on bi-spacing it, trispacing it, etc. until they have something that actually works.
A decent mono/bi/tri-space font requires a lot of optical work to get the spacing right. I’m thinking perhaps it’s better to go for the proportional ones at once.
Having made a mono, I have to agree with Frode. You are better off making a proportional width first. Monos look easy and are actually quite hard.
Why make life easy?
I never understand why these idiots do this - it just seems so pointless. Can anybody enlighten me?
[Nick’s comment above referred to a spam post that has been eliminated now.]
Here is a first look at Ivrea: set with a stylistic set feature 'NaturalWidth" which offers some multi width variations
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