Coyote Vs. Acme - August 28

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

A friend in the industry sent this to me the other day....

[Marcel Birgelen]

Looks like Ketchup Entertainment will be selling some hot sauce. But yeah, this is quite a funny letter.

What's interesting to see is, no matter what town in the U.S. you lookup, there still seem to be at least five companies operating under the "ACME" name everywhere. I thought the days of being listed "first" in the Yellow Pages were over.

[Bobby Henderson]

With me being a font nerd, I just had to offer this:

https://www.marksimonson.com/fonts/view/acme-gothic/

[Marcel Birgelen]

That's actually not a bad font, not cheap either though, although you'd probably not need all 25 styles. But it's both classic, age appropriate and not so sterile that it can't be used for some fun stuff.

I've also found this one, though that's more the Comic Sans of Acme fonts. Plus there are a few other private projects out there with fonts called "ACME".

Sorry for going off-topic and I probably posted this a half-dozen times already, but when talking about font-nerd-frustrations, this one still is comic... euhm... gold:

[Mike Blakesley]

Anybody notice the names of the "lawyers" on the letter posted by Mark? Avery, Jones & Maltese. Obviusly a tribute to director Tex Avery, and director Chuck Jones and writer Michael Maltese, who were responsible for most of the best Coyote/Road Runner films.

[Bobby Henderson]

That's actually not a bad font, not cheap either though, although you'd probably not need all 25 styles. But it's both classic, age appropriate and not so sterile that it can't be used for some fun stuff.

Mark Simonson has made some great typefaces. Proxima Nova is probably his most popular typeface; it has been high on the best sellers list at the MyFonts.com web site for years. He re-worked Ed Benguiat's classic ITC Bookman typeface into Bookmania. Each font in that type family has around 3000 glyphs; each letter has an exhaustive number of alternates.

FYI, anyone that has an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription can "sync" the Acme Gothic type family via Adobe Fonts. If you look at the promotional graphics for Acme Gothic either at Mark Simonson's web site or at Adobe Fonts it's obvious there is some Coyote vs Roadrunner inspiration at work.

Also, I like type "super families" that have dozens of styles or even over a hundred. With sign design I often have to deal with geometry constraints. A typeface that has a variety of widths and weights will be more naturally versatile. Variable Fonts can increase that flexibility if they have two or more variable axes built into the font. Typefaces that have many styles can be easier to combine together with other fonts.

I just can't stand it when people doing paid graphic design work style type in default Arial and then artificially squeeze and stretch the hell out of it to make it fit certain spaces. It's really bad in sign design since the shitty looking work can be visible on the outdoor landscape for years. With variable fonts being available (even for free via Google Fonts) no one has a good excuse to keep doing that lazy shit. Arial is always near the top of the font menu. It doesn't take all that much effort to choose something different.