Eurostile

Category Sans-serif
Designer(s) Aldo Novarese
Foundry Nebiolo
Date released 1962
Re-issuing foundries Linotype, URW, Monotype Imaging,
Design based on Microgramma
Variations Microgramma
Microstyle

The Eurostile type font style is a geometric sans-serif typeface designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962. Novarese originally made Eurostile for one of the best-known Italian foundries, Nebiolo, in Turin.

Novarese developed Eurostile to succeed the similar Microgramma, which he had helped design. This came with a variety of weights, but had only upper-case letters. A decade after Microgramma, Novarese resolved this limitation with his design of Eurostile, which added lower-case letters, a bold condensed variant, and an ultra narrow design he called Eurostile Compact, for a total of seven fonts.

Eurostile is a popular display font, particularly suitable for headings and signs. Its linear nature suggests modern architecture, with an appeal both technical and functional. The squarish shapes with their rounded corners evoke the appearance of television screens of the 1950s and 1960s. It is particularly popular in science fiction artwork and media set or produced in the 1960s and 70s, alongside other graphic design use.

Foundry type

Introduced by Nebiolo in 1962.

Cold type copies

The popularity of Eurostile continued strong right into the cold type era, and it was offered by various manufacturers under the following names:[1]

Digital versions

URW version

In the URW version, there are also Greek, Cyrillic, subscript and superscript, box drawing characters. The family has 16 fonts in five weights and three widths, with condensed fonts on regular and heavy weights; extended fonts on regular and black weights; complementary oblique fonts on black, bold, heavy, heavy condensed, medium, regular, regular condensed.

Eurostile DisCaps

Eurostile DisCaps is a small caps version of the font. The family comes with one width in regular and bold weights, without obliques.

Eurostile Relief

Eurostile Relief is a shadowed version of the font designed by URW Studio.

Eurostile Stencil

Eurostile Stencil is a stencil font based on URW's Eurostile black extended (D), designed by Achaz Reuss.

Eurostile LT

Eurostile LT is a variant of Eurostile by Linotype. It uses squarer designs for non-letter characters like integral, infinity, pilcrow; letterlike symbols like @, the copyright mark, the registration mark; and accents such as cedilla and the tilde. However, the circle in circled letters (@, Ω) remained circular, which was not fixed until Eurostile Next. The asterisk was redesigned to use six points instead of five. Some numerals, such as "1", were redesigned with a straight tail instead of an angled tail for use in Japan.

In all, the family includes 11 fonts, adding an Outline Bold font to the original Eurostile family by Linotype. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets.

Square 721

The Square 721 font from Bitstream is very identical to Eurostile albeit with slightly-different proportions. Square 721 is available in 2 weights and 3 widths each.

Europe

Europe is a variant of Eurostile designed at TypeMarket in 1992–1993 by Alexey Kustov. The family includes 16 fonts, adding Shadow Demi, Shadow Oblique, and the missing oblique counterparts to the original Linotype family. It supports Cyrillic characters.

Eurostile Next (2008)

Eurostile Next is an optically-rescaled and redesigned version of the original font family, designed by Linotype Type Director Akira Kobayashi. The redesign was based on the specimens of the original metal fonts.[2][3]

Redesigned features include restoring the super curve lost in the previous film and digital versions, reduced stroke weight difference between the upper and lowercase letters, type-sensitive accents and letterlike symbols (ç, É, @, €). In addition, Kobayashi added new Light and Ultra Light weights to complement the Extended, Normal, and Condensed variations within the family, added small caps letters and figures.[4]

The family consists of 15 fonts in 5 weights and 3 widths each. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets. OpenType features include small caps, tabular and proportional figures, superior and inferior numerals, diagonal fractions, and ordinals. Kobayashi decided not to provide italics.

Eurostile Candy (2008)

Eurostile Candy is a variant of Eurostile Next with rounded corners. Extra strokes in letters such as a, s, or t, are removed. Joints in letters such as n and r have been simplified to create even more square shapes.

The family consists of three weights (regular, semi bold, bold) in extended width, without oblique fonts. It supports ISO Adobe 2,Adobe CE, Latin extended character sets. Extra OpenType features found in Eurostile Next are not supported.

Eurostile Unicase (2008)

Eurostile Unicase is a variant of Eurostile Next with unicase letters. The family consists of one font (Regular) in extended width, without oblique fonts, but it has heavier weight than Eurostile Next Extended Bold. It supports ISO Adobe 2, Adobe CE, and Latin extended character sets. Extra OpenType features found in Eurostile Next are not supported.

Monotype Imagine 2015

In the Monotype Imagine 2015, there are also Greek, Cyrillic, subscript and superscript, box drawing characters. The family has 10 fonts in five weights and three widths; complementary italic fonts on black, bold, extra black, medium, regular,

Variants

Francker is a variant based on Eurostile.[5]

Applications

Companies

Cookout

Music industry

Eurostile variants have been used extensively in the music industry, where it has featured in album cover artwork from U2, Ash, The Supernaturals, Eminem, Pendulum, Radiohead, and several dance compilations from Warner. Eurostile Extended 2 can also be seen in the cover artwork for Marilyn Manson's 1998 album Mechanical Animals, as well as the cover artwork and interior liner notes on ZZ Top's 1985 album Afterburner. It was used by Westlife on their first two albums, Westlife and Coast to Coast, and is currently used by Argentine Pop band Bandana & electrotango band Tanghetto as complementary typography to the band's logo. The band Information Society, heavily influenced by Star Trek which employed the predecessor typeface Microgramma heavily, used Eurostyle Bold for the logotype on multiple early releases.

Television

Variations of Eurostile are popular in television. The BBC One holding slides from 1976 to 1983 were in Eurostile. Eurostile Bold Condensed was used in the later logo of the TVS news programme Coast to Coast. It was also used for Tyne Tees Television's idents from 1969 to 1989. The short-lived digital television service ONdigital used Eurostile extensively in both its onscreen menus and its off-screen communications from launch in 1998 until its relaunch as ITV Digital in 2001.

Eurostile is one of the most popular fonts in science-fiction movies.[6] Doctor Who used the font for the credits during the Second Doctor era (1966 to 1969, with Patrick Troughton in the lead role), and again in cast and crew titles from 1987 to 1989. Eurostile—and the Microgramma Extended Bold font on which it is based—was the primary font used in the science fiction series UFO, created by Gerry Anderson in 1969. All of the vehicles and clothing bearing the logo of the series' secret organisation SHADO used the font, in addition to the main titles. Eurostile was also used in the title of television shows such as Ironside, Adam-12, Star Trek Enterprise, and The Amazing Race, and can be found in several video games such as Homeworld, Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Tekken, Splinter Cell, and Driv3r. The extended font was used in the logo of the 1999 Kids' Choice Awards. Eurostile Extended variant is used in the title of Nickelodeon's Drake & Josh. Type expert Dave Addey noted: "Indeed, Eurostile is such a quick way to establish a timeframe that whenever I see it in real life – which happens quite a lot in my adopted home of California – I assume I’ve been transported to some futuristic dystopia, where a local care center feels more like a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation."[7]

Sports television, in particular, has made significant use of Eurostile; Fox Sports, NFL Network, Comcast Sportsnet and Versus all use or have used the font for its on-screen information, with Comcast Sportsnet, Versus and Speed (a Fox Sports-owned channel) using it as recently as late 2011. As of fall 2011, Eurostile is not currently used by any nationwide sports broadcaster, having been superseded by other, narrower typefaces.

Other variations of Eurostile are usually seen on Japanese television stations. One variation makes the tail of the "1" straight to the border of the paper, and one variation also curves or shortens small sections of the numbers "1" (shortened tail), "2", "5", "6", and "9" slightly. These variations could be used interchangeably with each other.

Eurostile is also used by Rage, a music video show on the ABC Australia television network, as the song title and artist name information.

Eurostile is used on the logo of ABS-CBN S+A.

Eurostile Bold Extended is also Star Wars Rebels promo on Disney XD

Film

Eurostile, particularly Eurostile Bold Extended, is used extensively in science fiction movies, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (especially for HAL 9000)[8] and Moon.[9]

Automobiles

Eurostile is also used on most FIA GT cars for the car numbers. It is also often used on the sides of British police vehicles for signwriting. Eurostile Bold was the typeface of choice for the instruments in the majority of Volkswagen's passenger cars from the introduction of the mk2 Golf to approximately halfway through the production run of the mk3. This font has also been used by Lotus Cars as name decals on their range of 70s cars up to the mid 80s. Examples are the europa, elite, éclat and the esprit. The labels used both internally and externally used a tight outline font with the letters overlapping each other by approximately one fifth. The same overlapped outline style was also use by Matra Simca during the 70s on it bagheera model. Daihatsu also used the Eurostile branding font for its corporate logo from 1970s to 1990s.

Logos

Eurostile is a corporate branding font for Toshiba, Dimension Films, and Diadora. The retail version was authorized by Toshiba Europe GmbH to URW, where Eurostile Black OT was sold.[10] Eurostile Extended Bold is used in the New Flyer Industries, Casio and Roland Corporation JUNO logos, the Eurovision Song Contest also used the font from 2004 to 2014. Eurostile is also used for the logo of Rotarex, Colgan Air, Roadcycling.com, and Roadcycling.mobi. Halliburton uses Eurostyle Extended Two for its logo.[11] The NBA's San Antonio Spurs use Eurostile in their logos. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eurostile was the font for the Tandy Corporation. The Daihatsu corporate logo also used the Eurostile font. Dekoron Wire & Cable, LLC uses Eurostile for their company logo.[12]

Currency

Eurostile is used in Canadian Journey series of Canadian dollar bank notes.[13]

Video games

Eurostile Extended 2 is used as the cutscene subtitles in the Star Wars videogames, The Force Unleashed and The Force Unleashed 2. The condensed variant of Eurostile by URW is used in all interface texts of the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. Eurostile is also used in the title of the game Homeworld and Homeworld 2. The StarCraft series also use Eurostile.

Eurostile was used in Deus Ex: Human Revolution as the main font style of the game, including the Picus Network tablet papers.

The font is also used as the main style for Final Fantasy XIII and its sequel.

In recent installments of Ratchet & Clank, Eurostile is used for most of the text in the game.

One of the main fonts used in Halo: Reach.

Eurostile is also used in various Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six games, notably Vegas and Vegas 2.

Eurostile was used as one of the main interface fonts in Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories.

It was also used as the main font with a couple variations in the 2013 third-person shooter game Gears of War: Judgment.

Call of Duty: Ghosts uses Eurostile for the Multiplayer User interface.

Eurostile is used for most packagings to Japanese Sega Mega Drive video games.

Eurostile is also used in Mechwarrior Online - In the UI and elsewhere.

Eurostile Extended 2 is used for Philips Interactive Media Logo

References

  1. ↑ W.F. Wheatley, Typeface Analogue, National Composition Association, Arlington, Virginia, 1988, p. 8. pp. 34 - 35.
  2. ↑ Eurostile Next - Linotype Font Feature
  3. ↑ Piccinini, Claudio. "Eurostile Next". Typographica. Retrieved 11 July 2015.
  4. ↑ Eurostile Next
  5. ↑ Francker from Francker
  6. ↑ At 28% of all font types, the second-most used in the survey by Shedorff and Noessel (Nathan Sheadorff and Christopher Noessel, Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction, New York, NY: Rosenfeld Media, 2012, p. 37.).
  7. ↑ Addey, Dave. "Eurostile in science fiction". Typeset in the Future. Retrieved 9 July 2015.
  8. ↑ http://typesetinthefuture.com/2001-a-space-odyssey/ Typeset In the Future: 2001: A Space Odyssey
  9. ↑ http://typesetinthefuture.com/moon/ Typeset In the Future: Moon
  10. ↑ Fonts - IdentiType
  11. ↑
  12. ↑ http://dekoroncable.com/
  13. ↑ It's All About the Money
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Eurostile Next

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