for a long time there has been an ongoing misconception that Paul Rand's NeXT logo was constructed purely by hand without use of a typeface
i decided to reconstruct the logo with the assumption that Rand was a designer not a fontographer, and probably used off-the-shelf typefaces in all of his work
thanks to a 35 year old tip from user "will" on usenet group gnu.gnustep.discuss, who pointed out that the logo probably was constructed from Futura Light, i was able to reconstruct the logo to most of rand's specifications
this was a quick first-pass at replicating the logo, and it could most certainly be reworked to be 100% accurate.*
Rand did a few things to make it work:
- N and T were probably from Futura Standard Book
- e is probably from Futura Light
- X is the trickiest one. i spent so much time trying to figure out which font it might be, because Futura's X does not have angled tips. It turns out that the X is a plus sign, rotated 45 degrees! Again, Futura Light.
So yes - the entire logo is constructed from Futura - a 100 year old typeface, and a personal favourite of Rand's.
research credit for NeXTStep typefaces:
https://groups.google.com/u/1/g/gnu.gnustep.discuss/c/ReaB8vOfAU4/m/OV46KAk31BIJ?hl=en
* for example, you'll notice that the stem on the T is too thick, due to my lazy use of character scaling in Affinity.
#fonts #typefaces #design #apple #retroComputing
Holly Sullo
vga256
Utku Demir