This little bit of typographic nerdery is from my office. I really miss these old beveled letters from every single movie theatre of my youth. I was really surprised to discover no one has made a font from them (at least my hours of searching revealed nothing). I bought the letters to scan in for a future Glarkware shirt but bought all the necessary extras to do this in ye olde real life. I think it is the beesknees!
Before I do the final shirt design I’ll have to get a red “3″ and use it backwards for one of the “E”s for full marquee effect.
This entry was posted on October 7, 2008 and tagged bevels, movies, nerds, signs, sympathy, typography.
How about 3D Fantablock Beveled? Not exactly the same, but similar.
http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/okaycat/3d-fantablock-beveled/
I asked for wine and you just poured grape juice. :)
I searched for about 2 hours one night and didn’t find anything — which was fine because these letters are 1) awesome and 2) cheap. Do other people recognize this lettering as the letters of the cinemas of the 70s and 80s or is this just an Ontario thing?
It’s not just an Ontario thing. I’m a Jersey girl, and my local live theatre uses them even now. (As does the grocery store, actually, which leads to a lot of the reverse of your 3 in place of E issues – who DOESN’T want milk that’s Backward-E.49 a gallon?)
Bevels would be do-it-yourself, but otherwise the CAPS in Interstate Mono Black come close…
http://www.fontfactory.com/font_info.php/font_id/22987/
Similar flavor (but not fixed width)…
http://www.identifont.com/similar?BR8
And no, it’s not just you…
http://www.says-it.com/marquee/
My dad used to own a business that rented out those big mobile signs with the arrow with light bulbs on the top and the board for letters on the bottom. We had boxes of those letters around the house when I was a kid.
I’d order the rest of the alphabet, scan them in and make a real font but 1) I don’t know how and 2) I’m very lazy.
So excellent.
I will buy this shirt, and I know about four font-nerds for whom it would make a great present.
Bevelicious!
It’s too late to be useful to you, but I made the sign letter fonts that I used in the marquee generator and other sign generators, because I couldn’t find them anywhere either. You can download them here. They’re free to use and copy.
Cool! Thanks Ryland.
Have you tried the font nerds at Veer.com? They’ll find anything for you.
Also, the backward “e” being a 3 made me think of the movie The Fall. If you haven’t seen it, do! It had a lame-ass marquee with no bevels and so nobody saw it and it is simply gorgeous.
I don’t think they have anything but I don’t shop at Veer anymore because they seriously destroy about 18 trees a year sending me their excessive promotional materials via snail mail for their online operation. Took me about 4 attempts to get off their mailing list.
It’s a good thing I noticed the similar shapes.
Ha ha, those exact words may have been spoken when I was putting it up. :)
Oh BTW, the first E in bevel is now a red 3 as threatened in the post.