Extension 765: A Marketplace from Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh’s retail site and blog has a cinematic air. It’s not a glamourous Hollywood look, but dark and raw, like film noir — a natural fit for the director’s ouvre. The design, by online studio Launchjam, doesn’t go overboard with the theming. The site is spare, with the feel achieved primarily through the type.
The main text is set in a typewriter font, emulating an old-school film script. The typeface, named MENCKEN, appears to be a proprietary design by Nuncle who has done title sequence work for Soderbergh (including the custom fonts and titles for The Informant! and CHE). Hundreds of weathered and worn typewriter fonts already exist (including the meticulously produced FF Trixie which offers a more realistic analog simulation), but I can understand why someone — especially an exacting director like Soderbergh — would want their own typeface that meets their own particular requirements for typewriter model and level of wear.
MENCKEN is paired with Joachim Müller-Lancé’s Flood which delivers short words like hand-scribbled notes on the screenplay. At this small size, Flood does a surprisingly good impression of a quick-jotting Sharpie, despite lacking any alternate glyphs to prevent repeating lettershapes, or ligatures for a more realistic flow. Of course, it could be even better with these features. Adobe, hire Müller-Lancé to expand the font!
Alternate Gothic No. 2 (used for product names) and the showy numbers from Normande round out the type palette, keeping within the retro-industrial theme.
