@letterformarchive@typo.social
Post #1890678
2024-07-12 07:22 UTC
One surprise that first drew us to the catalogs: some of the faces shown are wood type conversions of designs originally made in film and rubdown formats of the 1960s–70s. Diamond shows loose interpretations of at least six late-20th-century typefaces. For example, Davida (https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/6793/davida) with shadow, and Spring (https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/31493/spring). They aren’t mere facsimiles of their sources; Diamond produced their own size-specific variants, redrawing smaller fonts to be broader and more open.
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@letterformarchive@typo.social 2024-07-12 07:36
Another surprise: how the type was made. @tanyatypes acquired a set of handcut rubber stamps from the company and interviewed former employees. Rather than using a pantograph to trace a pattern and cut type with a mechanical router, as was common in the West (https://printinghistory.org/virgin-demo/), workers would cut these stamps by hand, then use them to mark a mirrored letter on wood blocks that were then chiseled by hand to create the resulting type.