Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Font of the Week #38: Event Horizon

   Hello! I hope you’ve had a great week and enjoyed your work holiday yesterday. This week’s font of the week is a fun one! So grab your astronaut helmet and let’s go!

Event Horizon

   The featured font for this week is a playful and retro Space Age design called “Event Horizon”. The font was inspired by a hand lettered advertisement from the 1960s. I took the few letters that appeared in the original sample and designed a full typeface from it.



   
   The font evokes the fun and innocent view that decades past had about the space age and the excitement surrounding it. With its “yesterday’s version of tomorrow” feeling it has more of Flash Gordon about it than Nasa. But that is exactly why I loved designing this font! As I’m sure you can tell, I’m a big fan of retro design. 

   The name comes from the theoretical horizon that forms around a black hole. Technically, it is the point where the escape velocity of the gravitional pull of the black hole becomes greater than the speed of light. It is the point of no return…the edge of the cliff so to speak. It’s not an actual physical surface, merely a point at which we can no longer see past. Once anything goes past that point it is forever cut off from our Universe. 



   The font was designed natively in OpenType in 2011, and includes an entire set of letters that have “speed lines” cut into them, under the Stylistic Alternates feature. This offers the user a fun and playful increase in functionality for the typeface. It gives that perfect high speed look!

   These speed lines are designed to alternately line up or not line up between letters which gives them a more dynamic appearance. As though the characters are speeding past a beam of light! This is also enhanced by the forward slant of the letters.

   Event Horizon is part of the Jukebox library sold exclusively through Veer. 


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