Old School Fonts

Old-school fonts: two different kinds of past

Here we’ve got two nostalgias that have almost nothing in common to look at. One side is analog trade lettering: tattoo flash, beer labels, the names painted on the sides of machine shops. The other is early digital: bitmap faces built on a grid, and the monospaced type of terminals and office equipment. What connects them is that neither was drawn for beauty. Both are shapes a technology forced into existence, and both outlived the technology that forced them.

On the analog side, the tool is a brush with a chisel edge, and it explains everything. A stroke is thick when the brush moves across its width and thin when it turns, so every swell and taper in that tradition is a record of a wrist rotating. It was a trade with textbooks and apprenticeships, which is why shop lettering across an entire continent looks related. On the digital side, the constraint is the opposite kind of brutal: a letter drawn into a grid of a few dozen pixels, where a designer decides which single pixel is the difference between an "e" and a "c". Nothing is expressive.

That shared logic is why neither look can be faked by adding wear to a modern font. It's also why the two halves don't mix: a brush-lettered beer label and a bitmap face are both old, but they're old in different decades and different rooms, and putting them in one layout is a mistake.

Old-school fonts by which past they come from

• Sign and shop lettering: brush-drawn trade work, thick where the brush moved across its width and thin where it turned.
• Tattoo and Americana display: bold outlined forms off flash sheets and workshop walls.
• Bitmap and pixel faces: letters built inside a grid of a few dozen pixels, where one square is the difference between two letters.
• Terminal and monospace: fixed-width type from early computing and office equipment.
• Retro sports and automotive: mid-century lettering from teams, garages and racing.

Setting old-school fonts without breaking them

Start with the pixel half, because the mistakes are automatic there. These fonts are drawn on a grid. A letter is a specific arrangement of squares, and the whole thing only works when those squares land exactly on the screen's own pixels.

Which means the size is not a matter of taste. Find the size the font was drawn at, usually somewhere between 8 and 16, and use it or double it. 8, 16, 24, 32. Something like 14 or 19 will not sit on the grid; the software will try to help by blurring the edges, and you'll get a soft, slightly dirty letter instead of a sharp one. While you're in there, turn anti-aliasing off in the type panel. And check your export, because plenty of tools resample on the way out and undo everything you just did.

Now the brush and sign half, where the trap is different. You'll want to add texture. Drop a grunge overlay on top, rough up the edges, make it look like it's been out in the weather. This is supposed to read as more authentic, but it doesn't. It reads as a clean font with a texture on top of it, which is what it is. And it's backward anyway: a sign painter was working with fresh enamel on a fresh board, and he was being paid to make it look sharp. If you want age, put it in the photograph, the paper, the color.

Jobs for an old-school font

• Barbershop, garage and workshop identities.
• Craft beer and small-batch spirits labels.
• Retro game art, title screens and store pages.
• Developer tools and terminal-styled product branding.
• Motorsport, hot rod and motorcycle graphics.
• Zines and short-run print.
• Music packaging for anything referencing a specific decade.