LEGO Typographic Study – 13/13 – 1934 – LEGO

So this is it. This is the first outright attempt from LEGO to garner the attention of Danish citizens from 1934 onward. We’ve arrived at the beginning of the journey LEGO has taken through time in hopes to create a lasting connection with its customers.

At the time, the company had a mere six employees, multi-skilled in draughtsmanship, carpentry and book-keeping. Ole Kirk Christiansen and his team were producing simple wooden toys to supplement a struggling furniture and fine carpentry business. What Billund parents wanted was trust in the brand; quality, price, and safety.

The chosen type for this assurance was Bravour. This steadfast typeface was the highlighted entry in the Bravour family. It stood resolute with a bold, serifed form and striking shapes, designed in 1926, fourteen years after the original typefaces release in 1912! Ole likely contacted the closest major type foundry D. Stempel AG, asking for something bold, probably used for monograms and the like.

For the finale in this series, I wanted to do something special. I wanted to go for accuracy in the execution. This typeface proved easy to find copies of, but difficult to find the original. The digitised modern fonts also don’t follow the original forms of this typeface. Of course in the only way I know how, I ended up finding every specimen on the internet of this typeface, the original and its derivatives, and creating my own glyphs instead!

I contacted three letter press and print-making facilities around the world to get some more information on the type and its availability, and it sounds like it was one of the rarest to come by from that foundry, so I knew procuring my own metal type would come at a significant cost. These conversations also led me to discover that the largest size this type was made in was 60pt.

In the end, with the hi-res vectors of these four glyphs based on original 30s and 40s specimens, I got a pine-backed traditional rubber stamp produced in exactly 60pt size. A nice tactile end, bringing it back to basics.

[Original posts and comments on Flickr: font, image.]

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