A Hard Day's Font?

April 30, 2006 6:04 PM

FontFilter. Identify the font used in this Beatles movie poster, please.

Ignore the "Starring ..." bit and concentrate on the actual film title. And if you can find a cheap to free means of acquiring it, all the better.

posted by grabbingsand to media & arts (10 comments total)

jumping the gun, but just in case:

try looking through rian hughes' device collections. he's got a stranglehold on retro.

i say this because a lot of odd display faces and custom typographic pieces done pre-digital didn't make the transition.
posted by patricking at 6:17 PM on April 30, 2006

There's no guarantee that there is a font that matches that title- it's possible that the title was hand-drawn, they liked to do that back in the 60's yknow.

But there's always identifont to try.
posted by jeremias at 6:18 PM on April 30, 2006

... they liked to do that back in the 60's yknow.

Quite true. But I am well aware that we are surrounded by digitally-inclined Beatle-philes.
posted by grabbingsand at 6:25 PM on April 30, 2006

I just used What The Font and supplied an edited version of your poster. The best they offer is Nimbus Sans P Condensed Bold. Maybe if you edit it a little bit. I didn't think identifont did as well.
posted by gearspring at 7:28 PM on April 30, 2006

Pretty sure that would be hand lettered. My submission to What the Font suggested Gothic RR Bold Condensed, another starting point if you're going to modify.
posted by tellurian at 8:11 PM on April 30, 2006

If it were hand-lettered I doubt the artist would have been lazy enough to reuse characters. I think it's a phototype face that was just never digitized. There are many hundreds of these, lost forever.
posted by luriete at 10:30 PM on April 30, 2006

no, it's almost definitely hand done. look at the difference in the lower case "g" in "starring" and "full-length," and in the lower case "a" in "starring" and "hilarious."
posted by cathodeheart at 11:03 PM on April 30, 2006

Let me be wildly presumptious and rephrase the question so that grabbingsand will get the answer he seems to actually want:

Though this poster was undoubtedly hand-lettered, does anyone know of a free or cheap font that a digitally-inclined Beatle-phile created, based on the lettering used in the title?
posted by Ian A.T. at 11:25 PM on April 30, 2006

look at the difference in the lower case "g" in "starring" and "full-length," and in the lower case "a" in "starring" and "hilarious."

From the question:

Ignore the "Starring ..." bit and concentrate on the actual film title.
posted by ludwig_van at 6:19 AM on May 1, 2006

Check out www.1001freefonts.com
They have a lot of wacky fonts that are similar. It'll take some lookin', but they're all FREE!
posted by spakto at 10:32 AM on May 1, 2006