Tonibral ad
Contributed by Florian Hardwig on Aug 26th, 2020. Artwork published in
circa 1979
.
Ad for Tonibral, a brand name for memantine, which is a medication used to treat Alzheimer’s disease. Argentinian graphic designer Eduardo A. Cánovas (Estudio Cánovas) used the Stripes typeface not just for the name. He also composed the illustration with it, depicting a brain with convolutions. See especially the 8 and O glyphs in the multiline typeface.
The image was scanned from the Graphis annual 1979/80 by dispokino. Estudio Cánovas was established in 1958 and has worked for several clients in the pharmaceutical sector, including Distripharm and Laboratorios Bagó.
2 Comments on “Tonibral ad”
They used the letter B and its only alternate, the & and the Q as well as the O and 8 rotated 90 or at 180° for the right hemisphere of the brain. The left side is a mirror image of the composition. Here is a reconstruction showing some of the letters that were used. Even just to reproduce digitally it was a lot of precision required. I can’t imagine what it was to compose it all with dry-transfer lettering. The original is a great example of use, it sure required both sides of the brain to be made:
Wow, that’s fantastic, Iván! It’s an awesome piece of Letraset tinkering indeed. Not to mention the fact that Stripes came in a single 8-line style only, which had to be turned into the 4-line variant used for the brain illustration by manually eliminating/merging lines. Thank you for making this detailed visual analysis and sharing it here.
Iván is too modest to plug his own work, but do check out Octothorpe, which is his digital recreation and expansion of the Stripes typeface. It was recently released with PampaType and can also be rented from Fontstand.