deco train station font — Typophile archive

Russell McGorman30 November 2007 · 23:15

in brief: Deco style train station, built in 1933, abandoned for many years and refurbished in 1996. The original hand-painted signage was still there in the interior. it could not be preserved, but we opted to recreate the typeface. We re-drew the letters as vectors for our plotters, but they were just shapes. Not a font.

My question is, can anyone here identify this as a font, or was it a lettering style of the sign painter who painted the signs? (ignore the numerals, they are Helvetica. The letters here are dimensional so there's a shadow cast, which is most apparent on the top two lines.

Thanks

Michael Yanega1 December 2007 · 08:32

I started with a search through Mac McGrew's book of American Metal Typefaces, on the hope that your lettering was modeled after a metal type. Bernhard Gothic, designed before 1930, was a rather similar, but the G was much rounder and had a horizontal 'jaw'. Eagle, which was designed in 1933, has some of the Deco earmarks, but was much heavier and pointed. Most of the other geometric sans faces had splayed M's and rounded G's. The closest I could find was Tempo Medium, designed by R. H. Middleton and introduced in 1930 by Ludlow. It is less exaggerated in the off-center horizontal elements, and it has the pointed vertices on the A, M, N, V & W, and the M is splayed, but at least the G and C are similar (re-reading this makes me wonder why I say this is the 'closest', although the M in Tempo Medium Condensed has parallel legs).

The book 'Deco Type' by Heller & Fili, didn't show any American styles that looked like this. In fact, even the other international Deco faces didn't match it.

The off-center arm on the E (high in this case), and crossbars on the A & H (low in this case), and the high 'crotch' on the M, are all earmarks we associate with this era -- although I think they echo much earlier styles, just in a more mechanical way -- and I see many samples with them in some of the Dover books on Moderne or Art Deco typefaces, but they are not the dominant look, in my judgment. Geometric (mostly round) or ornate, multi-line, or high contrast styles are more common in my estimation.

I guess where this is leading me is to say that I think it is an original letter design inspired by other geometric monotone sans lettering of the period.

- Mike Yanega