According to Herb Lubalin in the 1975 Second edition of U&lc (Upper and Lowercase magazine), which can now be downloaded as great hi res PDFs from the fonts.com blog. They're up to six issues in what must be a time-consuming endeavor. It's such a great idea and I hope they continue to upload what was a great example of Herb Lubalin's love of typography and contains many gems that don't feature in the book.
The numerals are shown in Stilla, designed by French type designer, François Boltana in 1973. A perfect example of the 'Fat Face' type style. The commercial face differs slightly from the above version which surely must have been hand drawn by Lubalin.
3 comments:
Thank you for sharing this. I love the Stilla numbers. They are very cute and are interesting to look at. Herb Lubalin and Lou Dorfsman are all very talented designers. I admire them a lot.
The version of Stilla that Letraset released (for transfer lettering) in 1973 matches the version shown in U&lc. I think it's way more likely that the digital version you have is not very faithful to Boltana's original design, not that Lubalin redrew it. Why would he do that anyway, if his purpose was to praise its beauty?
Mark, it's a good point. I need to dig out my Letraset catalogue and overlay the numbers against the drawing. Sometimes I think that Herb was such a perfectionist that he drew everything by hand to fit the size of display back in the days when there was a different 'cut' of the face depending on its size of use.
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