What Font is this?

July 13, 2019 12:59 AM

I'm trying to figure what font this is, it's a Willys Jeepster hood plate.

The closest I got on the font id sites was Claire News Bold, but it's not quite right. The "s," "t," and "e" are wrong.

posted by Marky to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Best answer: Commercial logos, particularly car brands are almost always hand drawn, sometimes based on a standard font to a greater or lesser extent but always with some differences. Partly this is to ensure the kerning etc are absolutely perfect but also partly to make counterfeit merchandise more difficult to design.

The Willys Jeepster dates from late 40, early 50s when font technology was still vastly inferior to just having a skilled draftsman draw something out by hand.
posted by Lanark at 4:37 AM on July 13, 2019 [11 favorites]

Best answer: Seconding that it's a hand-drawn font; my grandfather was a commercial artist in advertising and that's exactly the sort of thing he used to draw. It's hard for us to grasp today that lots and lots of logos with which we are very familiar were indeed drawn, perfectly, by hand for years and years.
posted by DarlingBri at 6:08 AM on July 13, 2019 [1 favorite]

Best answer: To gently clarify what DarlingBri wrote, it's not a hand-drawn font, but a logotype. Font implies there's a full alphabet set somewhere, but in the case of old custom work like this, there never was.

That said, this logotype is roughly based around something Clarendon-ish. You could approximate it with something like the free font Litoland if you have a vector editing program like Illustrator handy.
posted by zadcat at 7:53 AM on July 13, 2019 [5 favorites]

The Jeepster name was brought back for a few years around 1970, and applied to a particularly badly-designed car. My father had both types. The OP's example looks to be from the older car.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 1:58 PM on July 13, 2019

Response by poster: I think I'll just do a better scan and vector trace it.

I want to use it on an embroidery machine, this will be good enough.
posted by Marky at 4:34 PM on July 22, 2019