Hello,
I am working on a small project that involves many graphic aspect of the music business. This, of course, includes logotypes and the letters that form them.
Sadly, I am stuck with an earlier iteration of the Rough Trade logo. There have been several of them, and most of them share a common ancestor, the DIN typeface, which is currently distorted to achieve that grungy, distressed look which I supposse is what passes for rebellion these days. (I love Rough Trade, by the way)
I tried to recreate the old logo through several visits to the most famous websites specializing in typography, but I cannot find any DIN Bold Condensed or a typeface that matches the logo I have in a faithful manner.
My question is: Does this DIN weight actually exist or is the logo just a custom job?
Thank you.
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Comments
https://www.leofield.co.uk/Rough-Trade-Books
"Designed with Craig Oldham, based upon original and historic DIY source material."
I am certainly not a professional typographer, but I reckon this image proves that DIN was at some point part of their graphic chart, no matter how distorted -or perhaps just swapped by another font- it may have become during the years. By the way, the attached image is sourced from the labels of several official singles published by Rough Trade in the early Eighties.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettering_guide to get a feeling why it must be that simple.
Thus the bowl of R is a circle, the leg of R is straight and the G has no leg in DIN.
Even variations by designers follow these principles:
Much of Rough Trade's output seems to have been designed by Barney Bubbles. I enjoyed working alongside Colin Fulcher (AKA Barney Bubbles) for a year or so during the mid 1960s at Conran Design Group in London. During that time we celebrated the recent availability of Neue Haas Grotesque (Helevetica) as dry transfer lettering (Letraset). In fact we rarely used anything else. Colin was a great fan, once waxing lyrical over the perfection of Helevetica Light. I am sure that Helvetica would have been his first choice of lettering for any project - he probably just had it to hand. Being something of an anarchist, he had his own way of roughening things up and breaking the rules - but that came later.
I just read your post after many months without entering this web site.
Thank you so much for all the insights and the priceless information.
I really, truly love some of Barney Bubbles' work.
Best regards,
Fiz