Alexia's homework

EUROSTILE

Why do you like it?

I think that the primary reason why I like it is that there is a nice blocky-ness to it. There is a definite squareness to it, but it is softened ever so subtly by the curves. It’s an old font, but I believe that Eurostile isn’t used that much because people tend to opt more for the gentler fonts like Helvetica, Gills Sans and perhaps even Futura to a degree. Eurostile has a particular strength and sense of dimension to it.

What characters work best?

For me I think that the K, B, G, S, O, a, e, k, m, t and o work the best because they have that balance between the rigid box and the subtle curve.
Those that could work better
I think that M, W, X and Z could work better if they were slightly more condensed because they feel wider than the rest of the Cap fonts.

How often do you use it?

Admittedly, I don’t use the font that often because a majority of the projects I work on are community and cultural based so it’s a tad inappropriate.
Where and why you use
I think that it works more as a title/subheading font to illustrate the strength of modernity or something along those lines – instead of body text.

What might you be able to learn from this as an exemplary font design?

It is ‘distinctive without being flamboyant’.

Historical Information:

Originally the type was created as an uppercase font and was drawn by Alessandro Butti (1893 - 1959, type designer and teacher. Art director of the Nebiolo type foundry in Turin), with help from his assistant Aldo Novarese (who later became one of Italy’s premier typeface designers). It was first called Microgramma.

Released in 1952 it was popular for the next 10 years, but proved difficult because it didn’t have lower case letters. In 1962 it was released with the lowercase letters and renamed Eurostile.
Linotype began distributing Eurostile decades ago, and during the early 1980s, it worked together with Adobe to bring Novarese’s creation into the digital age as PostScript fonts.

The most obvious attribute of Eurostile, other than its lack of serifs, is the squared quality of its design. Many of the letters look as if they began life by tracing the frames of old television screens. There is a symmetry and implied mathematical quality to the design. Hermann Zapf dubbed this the “super curve,” and worked with it himself in his serif newspaper face Melior®. The geometricity of Eurostile also puts it together with types like Avenir®, Futura®, and ITC Avant Garde Gothic®, even though Eurostile looks quite different at first glance.
Eurostile has a large x-height and is distinctive without being flamboyant. In plain text, this means that it is not a replacement for sans serif text faces like Univers® or Franklin Gothic™. Nevertheless, Eurostile is easy to use well, and it has the added benefit of standing out from the crowd of other typefaces in the sans serif genre.

http://www.linotype.com/5324/eurostilenext.html

RESEARCH QUESTIONS
What is my motivation for this font?
Who will I want using it?
Can it be have a multifaceted use?
What is the experience of this font?
How does the font affect the message I want to create?
Can it involve the ‘reader’ in producing it?
Can it be a learning tool?

I think I might extend my research from the publication. Tactile typography and the experience as opposed to just the look of a font.


Highlighter on lined paper. I then used a scalpel to lift the letters from the page.

Ripped up strips of paper and the folded them to create letter forms.

Yoghurt letter forms. Yum!