TypeOff.

Fixing Eurostile’s time–space continuum

Written by

Dr. Dan Reynolds

in

We need to talk about Eurostile. This typeface does not get a lot of love. I think this may have to do with its overuse during the 1980s and 1980s. Popular throughout the phototype-era, it was quickly digitized, and must have become part of the first wave of font families available to graphic designers after DTP began to kick-in at full swing. Not really the typeface’s fault!

Eurostile’s digitization could have been handled with more finesse. But so many of the early digital types were just quickly converted from earlier formats. Who can blame the font distributors from that time? The market had a need, and they filled it as best they could. Now we have more of a luxury of time, and Akira Kobayashi has revisited, digitally corrected, and expanded Eurostile. Learn all about Linotype’s new Eurostile Next right here.

Comments

2 responses to “Fixing Eurostile’s time–space continuum”

  1. Euler

    Despite the attentions taken in the redesign, some letters are still NOT type-sensitive (eg: Omega, estimated, partialdiff), which had been fixed by the URW Eurostile years ago. Also, some of the letters that I can find in the URW fonts are still aren’t available in the Linotype update, especially the all-important WGL4 support. As for the lack of italic/obligue because it was an unintended design by the original creator, that’s just an excuse for laziness. After all, when Aldo Novasse and Nebiolo made the font back in 1960s, there was no Euro currency, and yet Eurostile Next has this ‘unintended’ letter!

  2. Dan Reynolds

    Thanks for your comments Euler!

    WGL4 would be nice, but most Linotype OpenType fonts get by just fine with the “Com” character set, so I don’t know if the missing WGL4 glyphs would really be seen as a loss by many customers.

    As to italics, I think this is an issue for a typeface’s designer to decide. Novarese didn’t see a need, and I guess that Kobayashi didn’t either. The many weights offer enough typographic differentiation to create good hierarchies, I think. I don’t believe that every family should have italics… this is a style dependency issue, isn’t it?

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