belwe?

nevermind
wrong@wrongid.com

not quite ... similar feel, but the g is closed in belwe ... in this mystery typeface, the g is open

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/belwe/

try again
CASTLE ?
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/castle/

hmm ... closer ... but still not quite it ... the tail on the g in castle narrows down to a point in all styles ... that is not exhibited by the g in the mystery typeface

yeah, I know. I won't clutter this up with any more guesses....my bad.

Castle was a fine, fine guess, BJ.

Obviously this must be hand-drawn.

hmm ... check this out

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/agenda/urw-t-light/charmap.html

all glyphs look damn near close to being "on" ... cept for the g ... perhaps there is an alt set of agenda floating around?

heres a little help ... some photoshopping

the urw++ website is a bit hard to find ...

http://www.urwpp.de/english/home.htm

getting closer ... but still no cigar

Except for the g, which I suspect is 'homemade', this looks to me like Clearface Gothic

that is a great suggestion! i agree that the g has to be homebrew

Mike that was my initial feeling the g is not in keeping with the rest of the font, but, I have a hard time imagining why you would want to change that one character?

In my view, g is one of the most distinctive 'earmark' characters of a font. If you are going to modify a font to make it seem to be something completely new, it would be best to change a letter that people would notice.

Here is a side-by-side comparison using MT Clearface Gothic Demi. I can see that a number of letters (C, c, M, and w) besides the g are not identical to Clearface Gothic (CG). However, the similarity is hard to escape, so I think we are looking at a customization that started with Clearface Gothic, and possibly 'borrowed' characters from other fonts, or made new/modified ones. It may be a 're-design' of CG, although the resemblance gets closer if you stretch the type wider, starting from a lighter weight (which I don't have).

I'm no font ID guru, but what's wrong with WIlliam T's self-ID of URW Agenda? It rectifies the differences between the C, c, M, and w, as well as providing a better a, T, s, and j.

That's the whole problem with URW fonts: URW Agenda
is a rip-off of Clearface Gothic, as is the sample. Back
in FontShop we bumped into those quick-steal-jobbies
all the time. As Mike explained so well, all they did was
change the most distinctive characters into something
else, slant the roman instead of providing true italics,
digitally extrapolate some extra weights, maybe add
an outline or rounded version, and bingo: 1000 fonts
for $24.95 whattadeal!

[edit]
I was a bit hasty in my phrasing: it should read "URW
Agenda is a version of Clearface Gothic". Sorry, my bad.
I was convinced that the sample was not URW Agenda
but one of "those quick-steal-jobbies". Excuse me for my
error of judgement of both URW and the ID.

Aaaahh. I see. I think. Is it a more a matter of Clearface being a better font - not necessarily a better match?

Indeed.

Well, maybe not. I admit I didn't look at URW Agenda, as I picked up this thread later on, and now that I have I can see that it's the the re-design of Clearface Gothic that I talked about in my previous post. I agree with you that it is a better match for the non-g letters, and I stick with my suggestion that the g was modified (from Cheltenham, which is another M.F. Benton typeface?) in order to make the typeface look 'new'. Now I'd say they started from the URW 'adapatation' of CG that they call 'Agenda'.

My 'Well, maybe not' was addressing Nathan's comment, not yours Yves.

Thanks Mike. I'm much less confused now. I thought I was going crazy. After all, it is Saturday and here I am at work... :-/

Get out, Nathan! Now! It's not too late yet! Saturday
night's for partying!

(Well, it's night HERE, you must just have had lunch
I guess...)

LOL, Yves. Yeah, it's post-lunch in the American midwest. Full-fledged partying starts in t minus 4 hours. My question is: if it's night in Belgium, what are you doing on Typophile? ;-)

Well, my lovely wife's having a night out at a concert
so I'm looking after the little ones. Eliza (almost 7)
and Randall (5) are snug in bed now.

Not Claude Coppens is it? Great poster BTW.

Hahaha, no, it's a concert of the Harmony band her
brother and his wife play in. We're all musicians:
a little over 10 years ago my sister started playing
clarinet in the local Harmony band. My brother, who
didn't play any instrument back then, met his wife
there, a multi-instrumentalist (clarinet, keyboards
and now bass tuba). After a couple of years he picked
up the trombone. They asked me to join as percussionist.
My wife's brother -trombone too- was next, and he
brought my then future wife in, who plays keyboards
and saxophone. My wife's brother started playing in
a second Harmony band, where he met his wife, a
flute player. Confusing, innit?

The Claude Coppens concert is Thursday. We'll have a
baby sitter for that one.

THX for the compliment, Everybody at the music ensemble
and the composer were very enthousiastic about the poster.
I just did a programme for another concert, but I had to
rush and didn't have time to post it in the Critiques. I was
very pleased how that one turned out, but the printer
botched it up unfortunately.

Yves, I warned you about the timing with the poster, you should have pulled it sooner from the forum. Next I didn't realizise how the type crooks work, thanks for the info. Could this site create a list of sites that regularly rip off type foundries? If I know who they are I would never deal with them and hopefully they would go out of business.

URW wasn't exactly an outfit of type crooks though, were they? I was under the impression they were more or less the opposite.

Yves: Need there be that many Harmony bands? :-)

Tell me about it, there's tons of them in Belgium.
Amateur ensembles, not really my taste, though I played
for a decade in one (yep, that was my logo... once).

And I still help them out once in a while when they're
short of a percussionist. Don't I look dandy playing the
congas wearing a white shirt with bow tie?

The score is in the way, can't see the bow tie!

Such poise. Such concentration. Now I can imagine what you look like identifying all those fonts.

Oh, I usually fool around when playing music, but that
was a very tricky solo. This is more like my usual self.
(Check the other two trying to keep up).

First of all, I found your g William! Read on ... forgive the rant.

I've got to speak up here. If somebody who knew no better were to
read this thread as it stands, they'd leave thinking that URW is a
scumbag font pirate company. I'm really not trying to be contentious
here, but I'd like to clarify some things.

Yves, you lumped URW into the same paragraph (next sentence,
in fact) with "those quick-steal-jobbies" and then "all they did was
change the most distinctive characters into something else, slant
the roman instead of providing true italics, digitally extrapolate some
extra weights, maybe add an outline or rounded version, and bingo:
1000 fonts for $24.95 whattadeal!". This effectively equates them
with Southern Software or Bay Animation or any of those other crooks
who renamed fonts and sold CD's full of them at a pittance.

Now surely you weren't speaking of URW here. If so, I'd honestly
like to learn what it's based upon. Specifically, URW Agenda has no
italic, much less a false one or outline or rounded variants. I'm not
aware of them doing this with other typefaces either.

Secondly, Clearface Gothic is attributed to Morris Fuller Benton. URW
also offers Clearface Gothic and gives proper attribution to Benton,
1906. So why offer Agenda as well, if it's meant as a thinly veiled clone?
Agenda is attributed to Phil Martin, who, prior reading has led me to
believe, was no slouch when it came to designing at least a few well
known and well used fonts in an earlier era. See here especially. First
hit the Font History button and be ready to hold your cursor over the
Stop button in this awkward presentation (at least Agenda is the 2nd
font shown). Mr. Martin makes a statement much like Mike's about the
letter 'g'. Now hit the Font Graphic button and behold the very 'g' thought
to be "homemade".

So, Martin takes a 1906 typeface and, in 1976, makes several significant
modifications to it. Absolutely he ought to have credited Benton. Two years
later, Victor Caruso takes that same old typeface and digitizes it.

My beef here is that, while I detest the folks like Southern Software who
steal, rename and sell, there are so many gray areas to this topic. What
occurred with Agenda has occurred to varying degrees with many, many
font foundries, some of them large and well respected. An existing typeface
was modified, sometimes precious little and called something new. Even
worse, in my opinion, has been perpetrated: 1 & 2 (Thanks for these articles,
Mark. I'm sorry if you didn't intend them to be used this way).

My intent is definitely not to paint Monotype black, but to show lurkers who
don't know better that ethical gray appears in lots of type foundries and to
call, say, ITC and Monotype the good guys and, say, URW and Bitstream
the bad doesn't do justice to any of them. I've seen, recently, Bitstream,
Corel and, now, URW labelled flatly as fiends, as if it's a known fact

Mike, you're absolutely right, I shouldn't have mentioned
URW and "those quick-steal-jobbies" in the same paragraph.
Now that I reread my entry, I noticed that indeed I might
have created the wrong impression that they were in the
same category. I totally agree with your gray area definition.
As we didn't sell URW but Bitstream in FontShop, I only
know the background history of the latter, not the former,
so I am in no position to pass judgement as to their ethics.
My apologies for this inacurate rendering of facts.

Yves, I love ya and respect you immensely. I hated that you were the initial
subject of my post. I greatly appreciate your moderation of this forum!

It's just that I've seen BT, Corel and URW labeled recently as bad guys by
several posters as if they couldn't be "legitimate" resources. I had to voice
a dissenting opinion.

My understanding of a substantial part of the BT and, especially, Corel, font
libraries is that these companies made incredibly sweet licensing deals with
major foundries

Wow! Mike Freiman aka "The Columbo Of Type Identification"! Thanks a ton for clearing this up. Sounds like a fun task to digitize the alternate lowercase g. Oh, anyways, in case anyone could not get to the sample on the slide show, I have included some screenshots.

Thanks again!

fun times indeed

> I hated that you were the initial subject of my post.

Hey Mike, no need, I didn't feel personally attacked at all.
We're just exchanging information and opinions here, and
when things are not clear it should be pointed out. Anyway,
I'm changing the ID to Agenda as the elusive alternate 'g'
has been nailed at last. Another happy "customer" it seems...

THX for registering straight away, William! It costs nothing,
and it's far more pleasant to us when we know who we're
talking to.

Mike,
Thanks for uncovering that story. Mr Martin seems like a bit of an eccentric, but aren't we all?

My understanding of many of the URW fonts was that when they had one of the few (along with Bitstream) places where foundries could get typefaces digitized (with their tool Ikarus), they made a deal that they could sell every font they digitized as long as they changes the name (hence all the Latin-sounding names for familiar-looking fonts).

So Bitstream and URW truly do not belong in the bucket with other 'cloners'. I don't know what the Corel story is, although you say they made a deal to allow them to sell all these fonts re-named? Can you point to anywhere that this is documented just so I can clear up my own impression of them?

As for the other foundries imitating the fonts of others, this is a practice that goes back to early type history. I would love it if a type historian could unravel some of the 'genealogy' of many of these fonts. Linotype's "Memphis" is an example of a metal type they created in the 30's to compete with Monotype's "Rockwell", so that they could offer the same kind of typefaces to their customers (I think I named the right fonts with their foundries, but apologies if I got it mixed up). The point being, just as in Marks tale of the Arial's of Monotype, that foundries are just as determined to keep abreast of their competition as any other business is. Still, these are newly designed, if not original, and not literally copied from each other's masters, and I think our intent in slamming certain suppliers (I can't call them foundries) is that they have no skill to design anything. They just copy the work of others and market it at prices that devalue all the other fonts, and give an excuse to folks who think if font companies can be corrupt, why is it wrong to steal fonts. Aaarghhh!

This has been an interesting thread, and again, Mike I think you were right to make your points and it was great work to find out the story of that 'g'. Now I wonder how it survived to be in the sample that William posted?

Mike Y.,
   

---

quote:

... bit of an eccentric, but aren't we all?

---

Nope. Not me. Not a bit. 

Thanks for the Bitstream and URW history info, Mike, as well as the rest of your input on the "font imitation" theme.

---

quote:

I don't know what the Corel story is, although you say they made a deal to allow them to sell all these fonts re-named? Can you point to anywhere that this is documented just so I can clear up my own impression of them?

---

First off, I didn't say anything linking the licensing and renaming. Sorry if I somehow inferred that.

My recollection has its source from years back when I monitored the two fonts newsgroups

I thought it might be one of Phil's. There was something of
his style to it and I knew that he sometimes did derivitive
designs such as this. Unfortunately, I didn't dig deep
enough on his site (can you blame me? :-) ) to find it. The
tiny sample on his big font list threw me off the track.

As for the mysterious g, could it be the initial sample
was set back in the phototype days?

The sample came from a book that was originally published in the early 80s. The book is of a set of translations of Platonic dialogues. One of the books in the set has a photo online in the amazon bookstore.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0915145227/002-0393319-4305661?v=glance

The larger detail shot is attached below, just in case someone happens to stumble on this thread after the link becomes broken

Mike is right, this has been an interesting thread

Oh, and reading the Hippias Major is highly recommended. It is one of the earliest writings on Aesthetics. And don't worry, it's very brief, lighthearted and fun. It is even more fun after you read it more than once because the jokes that Socrates throws at Hippias start to present themselves.

After staring at the cover more, I am surprised that it appeals to me. I am normally not a big fan of right justification. But I suppose, in titling, almost anything goes.