Löwen-Apotheke
Photo(s) by Florian Fecher. Imported from Flickr on Jun 5, 2015.
Source: www.flickr.com Uploaded to Flickr by Florian Fecher and tagged with “weisinitialen”. License: All Rights Reserved.
License: All Rights Reserved.
For comparison: Dieter Steffmann’s largely faithful freebie digitization Weiss Initialen Alternates, respaced and with a customized umlaut made from the colon.
1 Comment on “Löwen-Apotheke”
These letterforms on the facade of a pharmacy in Rothenburg, Germany are loosley yet unmistakably modeled after Weiß-Initialen, more precisely Magere Weiß-Lapidar AKA Weiss Initials II, with its Romanesque alternates for ‘A’ and ‘E’.
This typeface was originally designed by Emil Rudolf Weiß in 1930. There are various digitizations, including Quadrivium (Nick’s Fonts, 2002, with a number of unsuccessful deviations most notably in ‘A G J P W’ and the numerals), several freebies by Dieter Steffmann (2002), and the commercial Wellsbrook (Spiece Graphics).
The visual comparison reveals that in the painted rendering, widths, weights (‘A’), proportions (‘K’), contrast (‘W’) and terminal details (‘L’) are all off. The umlaut is particularly poor. The original had diamond-shaped umlauts.