I finally(!) got a copy of the printed poster last week while another copy has been sent to Colby Sawyer for the upcoming exhibition "unassigned: independent works by designers." The exhibition opens later this week and I'm hoping to see photographs once it's hung.
Now on to the nerd stuff. As I mentioned in my previous post, I found some weirdness going on in the title cards of the actual film while I was setting the type on my poster. For reference, I used a screenshot of the title as it appears in the film:
As you can see, this is not Futura Bold—easily a favorite if not the favorite font of Kubrick's—but rather Gill Sans Light. Futura Bold was used extensively both in official posters as well as on sets and props within the film itself. A superb catalog of the type used in 2001 (and several other sci-fi films) can be found over at Dave Addey's Typeset In The Future.
I really like the elegance of Gill Sans in this title card and wanted to get similar result for my poster. I always like to see how other people design and so I decided to set my title on top of the actual one from the film. Addey notes:
“This title card is set in Gill Sans, one of the all-time classic sans-serif fonts. Perhaps surprisingly, the zeroes in ‘2001’ appear to be set with the Gill Sans capital letter O (shown on the left), rather than its zero character (shown on the right):
”
Luckily I'd read Addey's blog entry long before starting this project and was well aware of this unique issue. However, even knowing that didn't prepare me for other surprises, namely that I couldn't find an "O" or "2" identical to the ones used in the title card.
After much research, I discovered that this was a typical case of a font being redrawn and rereleased so many times that it almost drifts from the original. I suppose you could categorize this as the evolution of type design, but there also have to be cases where the redrawing is itself unnecessary or redundant. How many iterations of a typeface are needed and is there any benefit to using the original over the latest and greatest? Is there any point in being a purist? If I was a purist, wouldn't I go find a printing press and set actual metal type by hand?
Recently, Monotype released the Eric Gill Series, which includes Gill Sans Nova (an expansion of 18 to 43 fonts), Gill Display, Joanna Sans, and Joanna Sans Nova. The release helps to bring Gill's work into the 21st century, modernizing the typeface in a way that's not been done yet. You can read more about the Eric Gill Series' development here.
In the end I used Gill Sans MT (Monotype), which is distributed with iOS and Mac OS X and with some Microsoft software. I chose it primarily because of the price (free). I am a proponent of purchasing fonts and try as hard as possible to avoid stealing the hard work of others. After designing a letter a day for the past month, I can tell you that it's a real beast of a project. That said, it may be time to add this family to the, ahem, family.