Eurostile

Eurostile is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962. Novarese created Eurostile for one of the best-known Italian foundries, Nebiolo, in Turin.

CategorySans-serif
Designer(s)Aldo Novarese
FoundryNebiolo
Date released1962
Re-issuing foundriesLinotype, URW, Monotype Imaging
Design based onMicrogramma
VariationsMicrogramma
Microstyle Square 721

Novarese developed Eurostile to succeed the similar Microgramma, which he had helped design. Microgramma was a titling font with only uppercase letters, which came with a variety of weights. A decade after Microgramma, Novarese resolved this limitation with his design of Eurostile, which added lowercase letters, a bold condensed variant, and an ultra narrow design he called Eurostile Compact, for a total of seven fonts.

Eurostile is a popular display font, particularly suitable for headings and signs. Its linear nature suggests modern architecture, with an appeal both technical and functional. The squarish shapes with their rounded corners evoke the appearance of television screens of the 1950s and 1960s. It is particularly popular in science fiction artwork and media set or produced in the 1960s and 70s, alongside other graphic design use. Eurostile and its antecedent Microgramma had a near-monopoly on science fiction typefaces through the end of the 20th century, before Ray Larabie, seeing an opening in the market, began designing more modern computer fonts for the genre and distributed them through freeware.[1]

Foundry type

Introduced by Nebiolo in 1962.

Cold type copies

The popularity of Eurostile continued strong right into the cold type era, and it was offered by various manufacturers under the following names:[2]

Digital versions

Europe

Europe is a variant of Eurostile designed at TypeMarket in 1992–1993 by Alexey Kustov. The family includes 16 fonts, adding Shadow Demi, Shadow Oblique, and the missing oblique counterparts to the original Linotype family. It supports Cyrillic characters.

Eurostile DisCaps

Eurostile DisCaps is a small caps version of the font. The family comes with one width in regular and bold weights, without obliques.

Eurostile LT

Eurostile LT is a variant of Eurostile by Linotype. It uses squarer designs for non-letter characters like integral, infinity, pilcrow; letterlike symbols like @, the copyright mark, the registration mark; and accents such as cedilla and the tilde. However, the circle in circled letters (@, Ω) remained circular, which was not fixed until Eurostile Next. The asterisk was redesigned to use six points instead of five. Some numerals, such as "1", were redesigned with a straight tail instead of an angled tail for use in Japan.

In all, the family includes 11 fonts, adding an Outline Bold font to the original Eurostile family by Linotype. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets.

Eurostile Next (2008)

Eurostile Next is an optically-rescaled and redesigned version of the original font family, designed by Linotype Type Director Akira Kobayashi. The redesign was based on the specimens of the original metal fonts.[3][4][5]

Redesigned features include restoring the super curve lost in the previous film and digital versions, reduced stroke weight difference between the upper and lowercase letters, type-sensitive accents and letterlike symbols (ç, É, @, €). In addition, Kobayashi added new Light and Ultra Light weights to complement the Extended, Normal, and Condensed variations within the family, added small caps letters and figures.[6]

The family consists of 15 fonts in 5 weights and 3 widths each. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets. OpenType features include small caps, tabular and proportional figures, superior and inferior numerals, diagonal fractions, and ordinals. Kobayashi decided not to provide italics.

Eurostile Candy (2008)

Eurostile Candy is a variant of Eurostile Next with rounded corners. Extra strokes in letters such as a, s, or t, are removed. Joints in letters such as n and r have been simplified to create even more square shapes.

The family consists of three weights (regular, semi bold, bold) in extended width, without oblique fonts. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets. Extra OpenType features found in Eurostile Next are not supported.

Eurostile Unicase (2008)

Eurostile Unicase is a variant of Eurostile Next with unicase letters. The family consists of one font (Regular) in extended width, without oblique fonts, but it has heavier weight than Eurostile Next Extended Bold. It supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, and Latin extended character sets. Extra OpenType features found in Eurostile Next are not supported.

Eurostile Relief

Eurostile Relief is a shadowed version of the font designed by URW Studio.

Eurostile Stencil

Eurostile Stencil is a stencil font based on URW's Eurostile black extended (D), designed by Achaz Reuss.

Square 721

The Square 721 font from Bitstream is very nearly identical to Eurostile albeit with slightly-different proportions. Square 721 is available in 2 weights and 3 widths each.

URW version

In the URW version, there are also Greek, Cyrillic, subscript and superscript, box drawing characters. The family has 16 fonts in five weights and three widths, with condensed fonts on regular and heavy weights; extended fonts on regular and black weights; complementary oblique fonts on black, bold, heavy, heavy condensed, medium, regular, regular condensed.

Variants

Francker is a variant based on Eurostile.[7]

Michroma is a free and open source digital adaptation created by Vernon Adams, based on the extended forms of Eurostile and its predecessor Microgramma. Only one weight was released before Adams suffered injuries in 2014 that were ultimately fatal.[8]

Applications

Eurostile is one of the most popular fonts in science-fiction movies.[9] Doctor Who used the font for the credits during the Second Doctor era (1966 to 1969, with Patrick Troughton in the lead role), and again in cast and crew titles from 1987 to 1989. Eurostile—and the Microgramma Extended Bold font on which it is based—was the primary font used in the science fiction series UFO, created by Gerry Anderson in 1969. All of the vehicles and clothing bearing the logo of the series' secret organisation SHADO used the font, in addition to the main titles. Eurostile was also used in the title of television shows such as Ironside, Adam-12, Star Trek Enterprise, Deal or No Deal, and The Amazing Race, and can be found in several video games such as Homeworld, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Tekken, Splinter Cell, Driv3r, and the Starcraft series. The extended font was used in the logo of the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards. Eurostile Extended variant is used in the title of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh, whilst the Bold form of Eurostile Extended was used in titles and set backdrops for Channel 4's early 90s comedy series Vic Reeves Big Night Out. Type expert Dave Addey noted: "Indeed, Eurostile is such a quick way to establish a timeframe that whenever I see it in real life – which happens quite a lot in my adopted home of California – I assume I’ve been transported to some futuristic dystopia, where a local care center feels more like a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation."[10][11] Eurostile is also featured in many games on The Price is Right, as well as the logo for the Sunday night newsmagazine 60 Minutes.

Film

Eurostile, particularly Eurostile Bold Extended, is used extensively in science fiction movies, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (especially for HAL 9000)[12] Jetsons: The Movie, and Moon (film).[13]

Logos

Eurostile is a corporate branding font for Toshiba, Dimension Films, and Diadora. The retail version was authorized by Toshiba Europe GmbH to URW, where Eurostile Black OT was sold.[14] Eurostile Extended Bold is used in the New Flyer Industries, Casio and Roland Corporation JUNO logos, the Eurovision Song Contest also used the font from 2004 to 2014. Eurostile is also used for the logo of Rotarex, Colgan Air, Roadcycling.com, and Roadcycling.mobi. Halliburton uses Eurostyle Extended Two for its logo.[15] The NBA's San Antonio Spurs use Eurostile in their logos. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eurostile was the font for the Tandy Corporation. The Daihatsu corporate logo also used the Eurostile font. Dekoron Wire & Cable, LLC uses Eurostile for their company logo.[16]

Currency

Eurostile is used in Canadian Journey series of Canadian dollar bank notes.[17]

References
  1. Tselentis, Jason (August 28, 2017). "Typodermic's Raymond Larabie Talks Type, Technology & Science Fiction". How. Retrieved October 29, 2017.
  2. W.F. Wheatley, Typeface Analogue, National Composition Association, Arlington, Virginia, 1988, p. 8. pp. 34 - 35.
  3. "Eurostile Next - Font News". Linotype.com. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  4. "Die Eurostile Next". issuu. Linotype GmbH. Retrieved 17 May 2018.
  5. Piccinini, Claudio. "Eurostile Next". Typographica.org. Retrieved 11 July 2015.
  6. "Eurostile® Next Font Family - Fonts.com". Fonts.com. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  7. "Francker - Font News". Linotype.com. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  8. https://www.1001fonts.com/michroma-font.html
  9. At 28% of all font types, the second-most used in the survey by Shedorff and Noessel (Nathan Sheadorff and Christopher Noessel, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, New York, NY: Rosenfeld Media, 2012, p. 37.).
  10. Addey, Dave. "Eurostile in science fiction". Typeset in the Future. Retrieved 9 July 2015.
  11. Addey, Dave (11 December 2018). Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies. ABRAMS. pp. 46–51. ISBN 978-1-68335-334-8.
  12. says, James Arboghast (31 January 2014). "2001: A Space Odyssey". Typesetinthefuture.com. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  13. Addey, Dave (11 February 2014). "Moon". Typesetinthefuture.com. Retrieved 28 August 2017.
  14. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2012-07-22. Retrieved 2008-12-16.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  16. "Dekoron Wire & Cable, LLC". Dekoroncable.com. Retrieved 2017-08-27.
  17. Vit, Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin. "Speak Up Archive: It's All About the Money". Underconsideration.com. Retrieved 2017-08-27.

Eurostile Next
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