Blessings Thanksgiving Eve ’95 flyer
Front side. Notice the incorrect spacing with large gaps around some letters and punctuation marks.
Promotional flyer for the 1995 edition of Blessings (est. in 1992), a Thanksgiving Eve event by Incredibeets and Mushgroove, the two electronic music promotion companies situated in the heart of Chicago’s underground rave scene. Chances are that the history of these two promoters of this event is virtually unknown or not seen on the internet.
This flyer was printed in two spot colours (medium blue and silver). The graphic design is credited to GCG. Inc./Nadisco and design studio Third Eye Innovations on the back side.
On the front, Vellvé (a Neufville typeface by Tomás Mengual named after the designer’s middle name, first released in 1971 and digitized in 1996, a year after this flyer was printed, and expanded into ITC Vellvé with additional styles) is used in two weights behind the Incredibeets mascot – on the top is a bold weight, shown curved with a shiny metallic 3D effect; on the bottom is the light (as a feather) weight for the text information.
The copy and guest names on the rear side are set in what appears to be FontBank’s Brandish (1990–1993, with the curved h), an unauthorized digitization of Blippo Bold, for all aspects except Handel Gothic for the credits. Other fonts include Univers 58 Condensed Italic for the Incredibeets logo (before 1997) and Enigma (see glyph set below) for the Mushgroove logo (before 1996).
Rear side
Full set of Enigma from a 1976 VGC Alphabet Library specimen, with alternate glyphs that were never digitized. These alts include the lowercase (f, double-story g, i, and j with some ink trap corners, x, and z), uppercase (I, straight J, L with curly end, N, T, X, and Z), and numerals (3, 5 and 7 [in which the first and fourth variations shows a middle bar as in z/Z). The design of this typeface has a round and smooth feel and is distinguished by the internal decoration (A, B, H, K, M, N, R, U, V, W, alternate g, h, i, j, k, m, n, u, v, w, y, 8, and also the exclamation and question marks).
4 Comments on “Blessings Thanksgiving Eve ’95 flyer”
Good sleuthing, Jay! And thanks for sharing a glyph set of Enigma.
Chances are that Brandish is not the only FontBank digitization featured on his flyer. This company from Evanston, Illinois also made a digitization of Vellvé, under the alias Velveteen. An ad the September 1992 issue of PC World shows the letter A from 263 display typefaces from their library, offered for $99.95. The second to last glyph is from Velveteen. FontBank also digitized Enigma, as Enliven, see the middle of the seventh line in the image below.
According to founder Jerry Saperstein (via Luc Devroye), “those fonts were hand-rendered in a totally legal manner from photographic enlargements of analog type specimens.” I highly doubt, though, that many (if any) of them were authorized by the designers and original publishers, or that FontBank paid any royalties for them. A good chunk of the designs weren’t that old in the early 1990s. This outfit took advantage of the fact that font providers weren’t quick enough to convert their libraries to digital form, or had gone out of business when analog typesetting came to an end, and that American copyright law made it nearly impossible to protect the visual design of a typeface. (It’s different for digital data – which wasn’t a concern at the time – and for names, which could be registered as trademarks. That’s why FontBank used aliases.)
Apart from the moral issues, the technical quality of their fonts “was horrible” [Fred Showker]. Devroye has a list of font names. FontBank’s pre-OpenType fonts were still being sold in 2018, from Xara Group Ltd’s BuyFonts.com.
Mostly some are from the VGC collection like Agraphicus, Accant, Shotgun, etc.
And even albeit the first in the fourth row, does it possibly look like Blippo Bold? I don’t know what this means 🤔
Yes, that appears to be Brandish, i.e. Blippo Bold. It looks like the A’s in the graphic are shown more or less in alphabetical order, with Acclamation (Accolade), Abbess (Abbott Oldstyle), Accord (Accant), Addled (Ad Lib), Acropolis (Agraphicus), Acappella (Acapulco), Acme (Aachen) all in the first line; and Wisten (Windsor), Valken (VAG Rounded), Template (Tea Chest), Worda (Wichita), Velveteen (Vellvé), and Watson (Worcester Round) all in the last one.