Typophile

Mauer Sans

jonathanhughes

There's a building at the end of my street that has some really nice steel letters on it. The business no longer exists, but I'm guessing from the building itself and the style of type (and my knowledge of the area), that it's from the 50s or 60s. I thought it would be fun to extrapolate an entire character set from the limited characters on the sign (see attached). The typeface is definitely in the Neutra/Avenir/Futura/Gotham area, but it's the ampersand that really sets it apart. I wasn't able to identify the original typeface, and the ampersand isn't like anything I've seen.

So here's my first attempt. To me, the uppercase looks pretty cohesive, and the lowercase is getting there. As far as the numbers go, I know my 5 and 8 still need a lot of work.

Let me know what you think.

thanks!

Jonathan

AttachmentSize
mauer sans 2 sample.pdf232 KB
mauer.jpg92.73 KB
mauer sans 4 sample.pdf248.45 KB
Nymus

Looking at the mauer.jpg that you posted, it looks like Neuzeit Grotesk Black

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/neuzeit-grotesk/t-black/

http://www.identifont.com/list?3+Neuzeit%20Grotesk+0+64F+7+SC+4+274+4+2T...

M espeially, R is a bit different but not a lot.

The upperase letters are coming out quite well, if Mauer Sans oould be onidered a close relative of Neuzeit Grotesk then 1, 3, u and y should be designed differently.

jonathanhughes

Yeah, the uppercase is definitely similar to Neuzeit.

I wasn't planning this to be a relative, so I'd rather it be judged as its own thing. I'll be posting an update soon, but in the meantime, any critiques are greatly appreciated.

thanks!

omega

Hi Jonathan,

The Mauer Sans capital ‘O’ looks as if the top and bottom curves are squashed towards the center, maybe make it more Evenly Circular like O 1, O 2 or O 3. Similar treatment should be done on B, C, D, G, J, P, Q, S and U.

It is going to become quite nice after some fine tuning.

Boris

jonathanhughes

I may run into some of the same issues you ran into with your Doric font -- the original design that's the basis for the new font may have some issues that need to be addressed (I've already made the M narrower. The original looked great as signage with lots of space around it, but seemed too wide when other letters were nearby.

I'll hopefully have an updated version up soon.

thanks!

jonathanhughes

I've made a lot of refinements to various characters, and have also completely redesigned the following characters:

S, s, j, y, 2, 3, 6, 8, 9

There's a new PDF (mauer sans 4 sample.pdf) in the original post.

Let me know what you think.

thanks!

Jonathan

Captured from web.archive.org on 20 Apr 2015. view this capture