Typophile

John Craven's Newsround sans-serif

unloveablesteve

Hi all

I'm a newbie so I hope this doesn't seem impolite for a first post. I am trying to recreate the John Craven's Newsround logo from the 1970s era and I'm struggling with the typeface used.

Please see the attachment. I know that the words "John Craven's" are pretty much a version of Flash Bold but I am really foxed by the large rounded sans serif used for the main font: "NEWSROUND".

The closest I can match it to is Houschka Rounded Extra Bold (very similar W and O glyphs) but the R and the D don't match. Also, this font wasn't created until the 1990s so it can't have been used in the 1970s. Have I stumbled across something that was likely hand-drawn? It seems unlikely, as the backdrop for each episode of Newsround had the days of the week recreated in the same font (and/or font outline).

Any ideas/pointers would be gratefully received.

Cheerio

Steve

AttachmentSize
newsr-logo.jpg163.05 KB
Nick Cooke

Yes, it's long before my time as a designer, but it's funny you should think of Houschka as I also did the updated JCNR logo. That itself is not so recent.

Newsround

Edit. It's probably a messed-around-with Frankfurter.

piccic

How cool is that to have the designer reply to you? ;-)
Things like this can happen on Typophile.

unloveablesteve

Hi

Thanks, Nick! In the end I used a messed-around-with version of Houschka combined with elements of Frankfurter Inline. I spotted that the daily backdrops were the latter:

Wednesday (note the standard Frankfurter Inline glyph for "W")

I expect that the logo, being animated in a pre-computer era, was designed for a single on-screen purpose rather than to be easily reproduced elsewhere.

Cheerio

Steve

Captured from commoncrawl.org on 28 Mar 2015. original URL